Count Belisarius

The pursuit could not be safely trusted to any officer that remained. King Khosrou, aware that he was no longer being followed, continued to the city of Callinicum and captured it without difficulty. As it unluckily happened, Justinian had ordered the defences to be repaired, and the masons had just torn down the half of one wall in order to build it more securely; so the garrison, unable to close the breach, had fled. Khosrou, determined to have something to show for his invasion, disregarded his promise, and carried the entire population of Callinicum into captivity, having levelled the city with the ground. Thus the White Huns gained their expected plunder.

Palestine, however, was saved. Belisarius admitted afterwards that only 40,000 men could have engaged the Persian armies at Carchemish with any confidence of success; and he had had no more than 12,000. Carchemish, he said, was the sweetest of all his victories. He had routed 200,000 Persians with his unarmed Household alone, and not lost a single man. He said too: 'The Persians were like locusts, but we frightened them from our fields with the clash of steel and the sound of trumpets.'

CHAPTER 20

DISGRACE

Let no one think that Belisarius was summoned from the East to receive some great reward from his Emperor for this bloodless and glorious victory at Carchemish. The circumstances that led to his recall were far from pleasant ones. I shall relate them without delay.

Now, this was the year of the plague, which was of the sort called bubonic. It had not caused such extensive havoc since a thousand years before, when the historian Thucydides described its occurrence at Athens. Between war and disease there is a close connexion. In my opinion it is not merely that the pollution caused by fighting – corpses unburied, aqueducts broken, public sanitation neglected – breeds disease, but that the emotions which war excites weaken the mind and make bodies susceptible to every evil physical influence. The plague is a disease which baffles doctors, strikes and spares indiscriminately, is horrible in its symptoms.

The infection had originally been carried from China towards the end of the previous year in a bale of carpets consigned to a merchant of Pelusium in Egypt. He sickened; but the nature of the disease was not recognized, for the first symptoms are always slight and accompanied by no fever. He had infected his fellow-merchants and his family before the characteristic tumours appeared which give their name to the disease. Soon there were a thousand cases in Pelusium; from where it spread westward to Alexandria and beyond, and northward to Palestine. In the spring the grain-ships carried the plague to Constantinople, where my mistress was, and I with her. For grain-ships are always full of rats, and rats are subject to the infection and carry the seeds of it about in their furs. These grain-ship rats communicated the plague to the dock-rats of the Golden Horn, a very numerous colony, and they to the sewer-rats, and thus the infection spread throughout the city. At first there were no more than ten cases a day, but soon there were a hundred and then a thousand, and then, in the height of the summer, ten and twenty thousand a day.

The tumours formed usually on the groin, but also under the armpits, and in some cases behind the cars. In the later stages of the disease there was a great variation of symptoms. Some sufferers fell into a deep coma. They would consent to cat and drink and perform other habitual actions indicated for them to do – if they had friends or slaves faithful enough to nurse them – but behaved like sleep-walkers, not recognizing anyone, not noticing anything, remaining passive and perfectly unaware of the passage of time. Others, however, were seized with a violent delirium; these had to be strapped to their beds, or they would run off down the streets bawling or shrieking that the Devil was in their house, or the Bulgarian Huns perhaps – and many who had nobody to restrain them rushed to the harbour or the straits and plunged in and were drowned. In some cases, again, there was neither coma nor delirium: the sufferers remained clear-minded until the tumour mortified, and they died screaming for pain. In still other cases no pain was felt at all, and death came as peacefully as in old age. Often the whole body broke out in black pustules of the size of a pea, or there was a vomiting of blood; when either of these things happened death always ensued.

Many were utterly immune from the disease, even physicians and undertakers who handled the sick or dead by the thousand; while others who had fled away to the hills of Thrace at the first alarm, and lived there in the pure air remote from all contact with their fellow men, died nevertheless. Neither degree of susceptibility nor peculiarity of symptoms could be foretold according to sex, age, class, profession, faith, or race.