# 14. What Effects are produced by the Appearance of New Inventions in the course of a Battle and by the hearing of Unfamiliar Cries

Of what importance in strife and battle may be an unprecedented incident due to something seen or heard for the first time can be shown by numerous incidents and especially by that which occurred during the battle the Romans fought with the Volsci, when Quintius, seeing that one wing of his army was giving way, began to call to it in a loud voice to stand firm since the other wing was winning; for by these words he put courage into his own men and alarmed the enemy, and so won the day. And if on a well-disciplined army such remarks have a great effect, on a disorderly and ill-disciplined army they have a still greater effect, for the whole is swayed, as it were, by a wind.

Let me give you a remarkable instance which occurred in our own times. A few years ago, the city of Perugia was divided between two factions, the Oddi and the Baglioni. The latter were in power, the former having been banished. But, with the help of their friends, they got together an army and assembled it in one of their towns close to Perugia. Then, with the connivance of their partisans they got one night into the city and were on their way to take the piazza without having been discovered. Since at every street corner in the city chains had been placed to block the way, the troops of the Oddi put at their head a man with an iron mace to break the locks fastening the chains so that the cavalry could get through. It remained for him to break only that which barred the way into the piazza when the cry ‘To arms!’ was raised, and on the fellow who was doing the breaking the crowd pressed so hard that he could not raise his arm to strike, so, in order to manage it, he called out ‘Get back there!’, words which, as they passed from rank to rank, became ‘Get back!’. Whereupon those in the rear began to run away, and one after another, the rest followed suit with such frenzy that their own men were thrown into confusion. So that the plans of the Oddi came to nought owing to this insignificant incident.

This leads me to observe that good discipline is needed in an army not merely to enable it to fight in orderly fashion, but also that you may not be perturbed should some tiny misadventure befall. For this reason alone the masses are useless in war, since any rumour, any cry, any commotion may change their mood and make them run away. Hence it is essential to discipline that a good general should depute men to take note of his verbal instructions and to pass them on to others; that he should accustom his troops to pay no heed to anyone else, and his officers not to depart from what they have been commissioned by him to say; for we find that failure to observe these points carefully has often led to the greatest confusion.

In regard to strange sights, every general should try to present something of the sort while his army is in action so as to give courage to his own men and to dispel that of the enemy; for among the events which are incidental to victory this is especially effective. In illustration of this the case of Gaius Sulpicius, the Roman dictator, may be adduced, who, when engaged in battle with the Gauls, armed all his baggage-men and a low lot of camp-followers, put them on mules and other mounts so that with their arms and standards they looked like a troop of horse, and stationed them with Sags flying behind a hill, with orders that, at a given signal when the fighting grew hotter, they should appear and show themselves to the enemy. This being done, as arranged, it so terrified the Gauls that they lost the day. There are two things, then, that a good general should do: first, he should see whether by employing some such novel device he can scare the enemy; and, secondly, he should be on the look-out so that, should the same trick be played on him by the enemy, he may discover it and nullify its effect.

It was thus that the King of India acted when Semiramis, noticing that the king had a good number of elephants, in the hope of intimidating him and showing him that she, too, had plenty of them, constructed a number of them out of the hides of buffaloes and cows and put them on camels which she sent ahead; but, the trick having been discovered by the king, her plan not only proved useless but turned out to her disadvantage. So, too, when the dictator, Mamercus, was at war with the Fidenates, to frighten the Roman army they ordered that in the heat of battle a number of troops should sally forth from Fidenae with torches on their lances in the hope that, distracted by the novelty of the thing, the Romans would break their ranks.

It should be noted here that, when such devices involve more truth than fiction, they can in that case be used on men with advantage, for if they have sufficient boldness, their weakness cannot be discovered so quickly. But when they involve more fiction than truth it is well either not to use them at all, or, if employed, to hold the performance some way off so that the fraud cannot be so quickly detected, as Gaius Sulpicius did with his muleteers. For if fraught with internal weakness, and they be near, they will soon be seen through, and will do you harm instead of good; as the elephants did to Semiramis and the torches to the Fidenates; for, though at the start they upset the army a little, yet, when the dictator came along and began to shout at the men, telling them not to be such cowards as to run away from the smoke like bees but to turn back and go for them, crying: ‘Use the flames to destroy Fidenae since you have failed to pacify them with kindness’, the device proved of no avail to the Fidenates, who were left the losers of the battle.