Andreas Kluth - Hannibal and Me: What Historys Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure

HANNIBAL AND ME

What Historys Greatest Military Strategist

Can Teach Us About Success and Failure

A NDREAS K LUTH

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

New York

2011

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright 2011 by Andreas Kluth

Map copyright 2011 by David Lindroth

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed

in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate

in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights.

Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

The epigraph on p. 92 is taken from A Life in Aikido by

Kisshomaru Ueshiba. Published by Kodansha International Ltd.

Copyright 2008 by Moriteru Ueshiba. English translation copyright 2008

by Kei Izawa and Mary Fuller. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kluth, Andreas.

Hannibal and me : what historys greatest military strategist can teach as about success and

failure / Andreas Kluth.

p. cm.

EISBN: 9781101554197

1. Hannibal 247182 b.c. 2. Punic War, 2nd, 218201 b.c. 3. GeneralsTunisiaCarthage (Extinct city)Biography. 4. RomeHistoryRepublic, 26530 b.c.

5. Success. 6. Self-realization. I. Title.

DG249.K58 2011 2011027818

937.03072dc23

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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To SAS and S

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same

Rudyard Kipling, If

S hivering but rapturous, the warrior stood in the snow on a wind-beaten pass in the Alps. His olive skin was chapped and his eyes were watery from the icy wind. But he felt no discomfort. As he looked across the white peaks, he saw faint green plains in the distance. Those plains were Italy, and the twenty-nine-year-old warrior, named Hannibal, had been dreaming about this moment since he was nine years old.

That was when, in his home city of Carthage in northern Africa, todays Tunisia, Hannibal had gone with his father to a temple and sworn an oath to conquer Carthages enemy, Rome. Now, twenty years later, in the early winter of 218 BCE, Hannibal was commander in chief of the armies of Carthage, one of the great powers of the ancient world. As he stood on the Alpine pass, the young man felt that he was physically and symbolically at the threshold of his life dream, of an adventure that would change world history. For he knew that down there, on those green plains, he would find and fight the legions of Rome.

Behind Hannibal, on the long and winding slopes ascending to the pass, was an army of tens of thousands of soldiers, mules, horses, and even twenty-seven elephants. These men and beasts looked otherworldly in the snow and hoof-trodden, excrement-brown slush.

Their faces, weapons, and armor, their animals and languageeverything about them looked alien in this place. The officers were Carthaginian, like Hannibal. Carthage had once been a colony of the Phoenicians, a people from what is today Lebanon. The rest of the army was a motley and Babel-tongued amalgam of tribes. Many of the horsemen, riding without stirrups, saddles, or even reins, as though they were fused with their mounts, were Numidians from northwestern Africa, the ancestors of the Berbers, with leathery skin, aquiline noses, and bright green eyes. On foot were masses of Iberians and Celtiberians from the land now called Spain, each band speaking its own tribal tongue. There were Gauls, somewhat paler and with brown or reddish hair, wrapped in thick, checkered wool scarves. There were Greeks, Libyans, and others from the Mediterranean world. All were now mercenaries of the richest city in the western Mediterranean, Carthage. But none had ever expected to stand on the white roof of the world.

As these soldiers paused in their climb to look up to their young general on the ridge, the collective raising of heads traveling back down the long line like a wave, they presented a surreal spectacle, one that would have been pitiable but for the pride on their faces. This army had been twice as large only a fortnight earlier: about half of the men had already died during just the previous two weeks of climbing to this lonely pass. Even the survivors looked frail. They had slipped and fallen, fought and bled, starved and frozen. They were haggard, emaciated, and frostbitten. Many had festering wounds, fevers, or dysentery. Men and elephants that were fearsome war wagers on hot, dry African or Spanish battlefields now appeared lost on this treeless, frozen mountaintop.

But the soldiers adored their general, and as they had followed Hannibal up to this pass, they would now follow him down the other side and into Italy. In that descent, many more would skid off the ice sheets and plunge to their deaths. But the toughest warriors and their mangy war elephants made it to the bottom.

That they did sothat they survived at all and appeared out of the mountainscame as a shock to the Romans. They had last sighted Hannibals army several months earlier on the French side of the Alps, where it had suddenly disappeared. Hannibal had, in that year of 218 BCE, surprised the Romans by marching his huge land army from Iberia, where his military base was, across the Pyrenees and into Gaul, todays France, apparently in order to attack Italy by land. A Roman army had tried to intercept the Carthaginians near the Rhne, but then Hannibal unexpectedly turned and marched straight toward the highest part of the Alps, just as fall was turning into the Alpine winter.

The Romans were sure that Hannibals army would perish in these mountains. They themselves were afraid of the Alps and, for that very reason, regarded the mountains as an insurmountable barrier to other armies and thus as Italys ultimate fortification against any land invasion. As far as the Romans knew, only the mythic hero Hercules and perhaps some barbarian Gallic tribesmen had ever crossed the Alps. And yet, suddenly, Hannibal, this young and mysterious Carthaginian, this new enemy about whom the Romans knew nothing except that he was the son of their greatest enemy in the previous war against Carthage, was now aiming the army of Carthage at Rome itself.