# 37. Whether Skirmishes are Necessary before a Battle, and how, if one decides to do without them, the Presence of Fresh Enemy Troops is to be discovered

It would appear that in human affairs, as we have remarked in other discourses, there is, in addition to others, this difficulty: that, when one wants to bring things to the pitch of perfection, one always finds that, bound up with what is good, there is some evil which is so easily brought about in doing good that it would seem to be impossible to have the one without the other. This is the case in everything that man does. And it is because of it that the good is with difficulty attained unless you are so aided by fortune that fortune itself eliminates this normal and natural inconvenience. What moves me to say this is the fight Manlius had with the Gaul, of which Titus Livy says: ‘This conflict was of great moment to the outcome of the whole war, for the army of the Gauls in trepidation deserted their camp and moved first into Tiburtine territory, and then into Campania’; for I hold, on the one hand, that a good general ought to avoid at all costs doing anything which, though in itself of small moment, can produce a bad effect on his army; because to engage in a battle in which all one’s forces are not employed and thereby to risk one’s whole fortune, is extremely rash, as I said above when I was talking about guarding passes.

On the other hand, I hold that when wise generals find they are up against a new enemy who has acquired a reputation, it is essential that, before engaging in a pitched battle, they let their troops find out by means of skirmishes what he is worth; so that, having acquired some knowledge of him and of how to deal with him, it may dispel the fears to which rumour and his standing had given rise. For a general to do this is of the utmost importance; for there is in this course a quasi-necessity that constrains you to adopt it, since you can scarce fail to see that you are plainly exposing yourself to disaster if you engage the enemy without having first provided your troops with some little experiment whereby to rid them of that fear which the enemy’s reputation had aroused in their minds.

Valerius Corvinus was in command of the armies which the Romans had dispatched to deal with the Samnites, new enemies, of whose fighting capacities the Romans had thus far had no experience in actual combat one with the other. Hence Titus Livy says that Valerius caused the Romans to engage in some skirmishes with the Samnites ‘so that they might be afraid neither of the new war nor of the new enemy’. None the less, there is a very great danger that, if your soldiers get the worst of the skirmishing it will increase their fear and their cowardice, and so will produce the opposite effect to that you had in mind; i.e. you will have alarmed them, whereas you wanted to make them feel safe. So that this is just one of those things in which evil is so closely associated with good, and so bound up are they one with the other, that it may easily happen that he who thinks he will get one, gets the other.

In regard, then, to this, I maintain that a good general should take every precaution to prevent the occurrence of any untoward event likely to diminish the courage of his army. But to begin by losing is just the thing that is likely to diminish its courage. Hence he should act cautiously in regard to skirmishes, and should not permit them unless he has a great advantage and he feels sure he will be victorious. Nor should he attempt to guard passes where he cannot bring the whole of his army into operation. Nor yet should he defend towns unless their loss will inevitably entail his ruin. And, if he does defend them, he should arrange for his army to cooperate with the garrison in repelling an attack, so that in dealing with the siege all his forces may be brought into play; otherwise he should leave the town undefended. For in losing what may be abandoned, provided his army is still intact, he will not in such a case lose either his reputation in the war or the hope of winning it; but when you lose what you have planned to defend and everybody knows that you were defending it, the loss is serious and may be disastrous; in fact, you may, like the Gauls, on account of something of small moment have lost the war.

Philip of Macedon, the father of Perseus, a soldier of high standing in his day, when attacked by the Romans, abandoned and laid waste a large part of his country which he judged it impossible to defend, for, being a prudent man, he thought it more disastrous to lose his reputation by failing to defend what he had set out to defend, than to let it fall into the hands of the enemy as if it were a thing he did not mind losing. When after the defeat at Cannae the affairs of the Romans were in a bad way, they declined to help many of their dependents and subjects, bidding them defend themselves as best they could. Such courses are much better than taking up the defence of allies and then letting them down, for in that case one loses both one’s allies and one’s forces; but in the other the allies alone are lost.

But to return to skirmishing, I maintain that if a general is absolutely compelled to have recourse to skirmishes because his enemy is a new one, he should only undertake them when he has so considerable an advantage that there will be no danger of his losing thereby. He should, otherwise, – and it is the better course – do as Marius did when he went to fight the Cimbri, a fierce tribe which had come to prey upon Italy and which he was approaching with considerable trepidation owing to their ferocity and their numbers, and because they had already defeated a Roman army. Judging it necessary before engaging in battle to do something which would dispel the panic into which fear of the enemy had thrown his army, like a prudent general, he more than once stationed his army in a position near to which the army of the Cimbri must pass, with the intention that from behind the fortifications of their camp, his troops should look at and accustom their eyes to the enemy’s appearance, so that when they saw what a disorderly crowd they were, encumbered with baggage, their arms useless and some without arms, they might be reassured and become eager for the fight. This course so wisely adopted by Marius, others should diligently imitate, so as not to incur the dangers I have described above, and not to have to act as the Gauls did, ‘who, in trepidation on account of an event of small moment, moved first into Tiburtine territory and then into Campania’.

Since we have in this discourse mentioned Valerius Corvinus, I propose in the next chapter to use his speech to show how a general should behave.