Book 2
41
When he had gone a considerable distance from this place, his army being now worn out by toil, he halted after covering twelve miles. Saburra gives his men the signal, draws up his line of battle, and starts going up and down the ranks and exhorting the men. But he uses his infantry merely to make a show a little way off and hurls his horse on the line. Curio is equal to the emergency and encourages his men, bidding them place all their hopes on valour. Nor did zeal for the fight or valour fail either the infantry, weary as they were, or the cavalry, though they were few and exhausted by toil. But these were only two hundred in number; the rest had stopped on the route. They compelled the enemy to give way at whatever point they charged, but they could neither follow them when they fled to a distance nor urge their horses to more strenuous effort. But the enemy’s cavalry begins to surround our force on either wing and to trample them down from the rear. Whenever cohorts left the main body and charged, the Numidians by their swiftness fled unscathed from the assault of our men, and, betaking themselves to their own ranks again, began to surround them and to cut them off from the main body. Thus it seemed unsafe either to keep their ground and maintain their ranks or to charge and risk the chance of conflict. As the king sent up reinforcements the forces of the enemy were constantly increasing, while fatigue kept diminishing the strength of our men, and those who had received wounds could neither quit the line nor be carried to a safe place because the whole force was surrounded and closed in by the enemy’s horse. These men, despairing of their safety, after the manner of men in the extreme crisis of life, were either bewailing their own death or commending their parents to such as fortune might he able to rescue from the peril. The whole place was full of terror and lamentation.
