The Tide of Victory

Sittas lifted his great bulk up on the stirrups for a moment, his eyes scanning the huge army. "Where is the old grouch, anyway?"

After a moment, he eased back in the saddle. The task of spotting a single man in that great horde of soldiers and moving equipment, even a top officer with his banners and entourage, was essentially hopeless.

"Of course he's grumbling," grumbled Sittas. "What would life be for the morose old bastard, without the pleasure of grousing to fill it up? But the fact is—this time—he's just plain wrong."

Almost angrily, Sittas gestured at the arid landscape ahead of them. "That's what it's going to be like, Belisarius, from here on. I'm not even sure the Malwa will bother to contest the delta, when we finally arrive at Barbaricum. Just cede it and let us get well established. Then, when the monsoon shifts, watch us starve beneath the walls of their fortifications upstream. By the time we get there, you know they'll have stripped the delta clean."

"Easier said than done."

Sittas shrugged. "Sure, I know." He barked a little laugh. "Easy for historians to say: `they ravaged the countryside.' Never catch one of those languid fellows trying to destroy croplands. Hard work, that is—harder than growing stuff, that's for sure. Wouldn't wish it on a peasant."

Belisarius smiled. He doubted if Sittas had actually ever read any of those historians he was denouncing. But Belisarius knew that Sittas had once gotten embroiled in a loud argument with three historians at an imperial feast. In the end, Theodora had sent her personal guards to quell the large and outraged general.

Belisarius had read many of those historians, on the other hand. And while he felt none of Sittas' sputtering fury at the stupidities of over-educated and over-sheltered intellectuals, he understood it perfectly well. Aristocratic scribblers suffered from the inevitable habit of turning prosaic and complex reality into simple metaphors. Almost poetry, really, which they blithely assumed was an accurate representation of reality.

Destroy the countryside. Ravage the land.

As it happened, Belisarius had given those very orders himself over the years. Especially in his earliest years as an officer, campaigning against barbarians in the trans-Danube and Persians in the Mesopotamian borderlands. But both he and his men had understood the prose between the poetry, the unspoken qualifiers attached to the muscular verbs and nouns:

As best you can—in the time allowed. To the extent possible—given the number of men available. Whatever you can do—with military equipment instead of agricultural implements, and teams of mules instead of oxen.

He could remember hearing his men cursing bitterly, wrestling with the endless and exhausting work of trying to destroy the tough vines and wood of grape fields and olive groves. Or the backbreaking work of cutting and assembling grain in piles suitable for burning. Not to mention the well-nigh hopeless task of finding all the food caches hidden away, by peasants who were far more experienced than soldiers at hiding such things—and had a far greater incentive to do the job properly.

It could almost never be done really successfully. Time after time, throughout the future history which Aide had shown him, Belisarius recognized the same pattern. An army marching through a region, "devastating the land," and then—not a year later—everything was back again. Half of it, at least. "Mother Nature," especially when assisted by poor and industrious peasants, was far tougher than any army of soldiers.

In truth, the most successful method was the most ruthless. The method the Mongols would use in Central Asia: kill everyone. Don't just destroy the irrigation works and the infrastructure, but kill all the people living there as well. Eliminate the labor force which could rebuild what was destroyed.

Those were methods Belisarius would never use. Precious few armies in history ever had. But he had no doubt at all the Malwa would use them in the delta of the Indus. The last order Link would give, after its soldiery destroyed everything they could, was to kill all the peasants living there. The multitude of that poor and humble folk, whose calloused hands were so much better at rebuilding than the sinewy hands of soldiers ever were at destroying. And then heap their corpses atop their own ravaged land, so that their putrefaction could finish the work of destruction.

Malwa's own peasants. Who would not even be given the one mercy which peasants throughout time had usually been able to expect from their rulers, no matter how tyrannical: to be left alive, that they might be exploited further.