Great captains keep a favourite book. Alexander had Homer, Scipio had Xenophon, Brutus had Polybius, Charles V had Philippe de Comines. Marshal Strozzi took Caesar, and Montaigne calls those commentaries the breviary of every soldier, the sovereign pattern of the military art. He sets down the passages that stay in his memory. When rumour of King Juba's forces rattled the camp, Caesar did not shrink the threat. He called the army together and told them a number much larger than both the truth and the report, following Cyrus in Xenophon: it is worse to meet a strong enemy after being told he is weak. He trained men to obey without discussing his designs, never spoke the plan until the point of execution, and if they guessed it he changed the orders, often lengthening a march in rain. The Swiss asked a free passage through Roman ground. He spoke kindly to the messengers and used the delay to assemble. He was a good husband of time. He required valour more than polish, punished mutiny and little else, and after victories turned the men loose to licence. He liked them richly armed so that care of the metal would make them fight harder. He called them fellow-soldiers. Augustus later dropped the familiarity as too low for an emperor. Courtesy sat beside severity: the ninth legion mutinied near Placentia, and he cashiered them while Pompey was still in the field.
He would not waft an army over the Rhine in boats. He built the famous bridge so they could cross dry-foot, and he dwells on the invention as readily as on the fight. He prized a harangue before battle. When he was surprised he records that he had not even leisure to speak. Before Tournay he reached the tenth legion with time only to tell them to remember their valour, then found the rest already engaged. Soldiers copied the speeches, and Augustus could pick out a phrase that was not Caesar's. Speed is the other signature. He reached the Rhone in eight days with secretaries writing in the coach, then Italy, Spain, Marseilles, Pharsalia, Egypt, Syria, Pontus, Africa, and Pompey's sons. At Avaricum he stayed night and day with the pioneers. He reconnoitred in person, and Suetonius says he was first to sound the passage into England. He valued a victory by counsel above one by force, and against Petreius and Afranius he declined a clear advantage to wait for less hazard. Alexander rushes like a torrent in the heat of youth and wine. Caesar took up the trade later, drank little, and still, when the hour required it, charged at Tournay without a shield, crossed the enemy in disguise to hearten a besieged force, and in Egypt swam two hundred paces holding his tablets and drawing his coat-armour in his teeth. Men must embark, he said, and not deliberate, upon high enterprises.
At Alesia eighty thousand sat inside the town, and Gaul raised a hundred and nine thousand horse and two hundred and forty thousand foot to lift the siege. Caesar would not give over. He beat the army without and then reduced the army within. Two odd notes sit on that siege: the Gauls dismissed part of their own multitude for fear of being too many, and Vercingetorix, commander of a whole country, shut himself in the town, which Montaigne thinks a general should do only in last extremity. Later Caesar grew slower, Oppius says, unwilling to hazard the glory of so many wins on one blow. Youth hungry for honour the Italians call necessitous of it. A man who already has a name can afford satiety. He would not use a commotion in Ariovistus's horse during a parley, lest the win look like treachery. After a reverse at Dyrrachium his soldiers came to be punished. One cohort held four of Pompey's legions for four hours. Scaeva kept an avenue though he had lost an eye, with shoulder and thigh shot through and a shield hit in two hundred and thirty places. Granius Petronius, offered his life by Scipio, said Caesar's soldiers were wont to give life, not to receive it, and killed himself. At Salona the besieged freed their slaves, cut the women's hair for engine-ropes, set the women and children on the walls at noon, and routed Octavius all the way to the ships. Montaigne does not remember another sortie that won a field outright. The comfortable siege still has that noon to meet.
Coming Up in Chapter 91
Good wives, Montaigne says, are not found by the dozen. The true test of marriage is years of gentle, loyal companionship, not the tears that wait until a husband is dead. He asks a waiting-woman how the pair actually lived together, then sets three austere women against the widow who only learns courtesy at the funeral.
