# CHAPTER 14 — What Effects Are Produced by the Strange Contrivances that Appear and the Strange Sounds that Are Heard in the Midst of a Battle

The importance in conflicts and battles of a strange event that arises by means of something unexpectedly seen or heard is demonstrated in many passages, and especially in an example that occurred in the battle the Romans waged against the Volscians: Quinctius, seeing one of the wings of his army giving way, began to shout loudly that they should stand firm, since the other wing of the army was winning: encouraging his men and frightening the enemy with these words, he was victorious. * If such cries produce a strong effect in a well-organized army, in an unruly and badly organized army they produce an even stronger one, because the entire group is swayed by like winds. I want to cite a noteworthy example of this which occurred in our own times. A few years ago, the city of Perugia was divided into two factions, the Oddi and the Baglioni families. The latter were in power; the former were in exile. With the assistance of their friends, the Oddi family raised an army and assembled it in one of their towns near Perugia, and with help of their allies they entered Perugia one night, and without being discovered, they came to take the main square. Since that city had chains at all its street-corners to keep the streets blocked, the Oddi troops put at their head a man holding an iron mace to break the locks on the chains, so that the horses could pass through; only the chain that blocked the street into the main square remained to be broken when the call to arms was raised, but since the man who was breaking the chains was hampered by the crowd coming up behind him, so that he was unable to raise his arms properly to break the chain, in order to be able to move he cried: ‘Move back!’; his cry, passing from rank to rank, became ‘Retreat!’, so that the last ranks began to flee first, then one by one the others, with such haste that they broke up their own ranks; and thus the plan of the Oddi family came to nothing because of such an insignificant event. *

There still remains to be considered the fact that good battle formations in an army are necessary in order to be able to fight in an orderly fashion, so that every little incident does not throw you into confusion. For this reason, if for no other, the popular multitude is useless in war because every noise, every cry, every uproar upsets them and causes them to flee. Still, every good commander among his other dispositions must appoint those who are to take his spoken commands and pass them to others, and he must accustom his troops to pay attention to these men alone and his captains to say nothing but what he has commissioned them to say, because if this practice is not well observed, it has frequently been seen to have created serious disorders.

With respect to seeing strange sights, every commander should strive to make something appear while his armies are engaged in hand-to-hand combat that gives his soldiers courage and takes it away from the enemy, because among the incidents that give you the victory, this is most efficacious. As evidence of this it is possible to cite the case of Caius Sulpicius, * the Roman dictator, who while engaging the Gauls in battle armed all his support troops and others in the field lacking their own arms, and after he had mounted them on mules and other pack-animals with arms and banners to make them appear to be cavalry, he placed them under his banners behind a hill and ordered that, on a given signal, when the battle was at its fiercest pitch, they should appear and show themselves to the enemy. This stratagem organized and executed in this way terrorized the Gauls to such an extent that they lost the battle. A good commander must, however, do two things: the first is to see if he can frighten the enemy with some of these strange inventions; the second is to be prepared, so that if they are used against him he will detect them and make them of no avail against him. This is what the king of India did to Semiramis who, upon noticing that the king had a large number of elephants, constructed a number of them with buffalo and cow hides placed over camels and sent them forward, in order to frighten him and to demonstrate to him that she too had many of them, but since the king recognized her trick, he made her plan not only useless but even harmful. * Mamercus, the dictator, was waging war upon the people of Fidenae, who, in order to frighten the Roman army, planned that at the height of the battle a number of soldiers would march out of Fidenae with torches on their lances, so that the Romans, distracted by the novelty of the thing, would break ranks. * On this subject, it should be noted that when such inventions contain more truth than fiction, they can then certainly be staged for men, because they are so bold that their weakness cannot quickly be discovered, but when they are more fictitious than true, it is best either not to stage them or, if you must do so, to keep them at a distance so that they cannot be so quickly discovered, as Caius Sulpicius did with his muleteers. Thus, when such deceptions are weak, drawing near to them will quickly expose them, and this will do you harm instead of good, as the elephants did to Semiramis and the torches to the people of Fidenae. Although these torches disturbed the army slightly at the beginning, none the less, when the dictator arrived, he began to shout out to his men that they should be ashamed to flee from smoke like bees and that they should turn around and face the enemy, declaring: ‘Destroy Fidenae with her own flames, since generous kindness could not make her your friend!’ * This contrivance proved useless to the people of Fidenae, and they were left the losers in that battle.