Hannibal was never a forgiving enemy. He hauled away more than a few Celts in chains as a harsh lesson, but his army did not stay long in the Allobroges area. Picking up the pace again after a day of counting forces, tending the wounded, reorganizing scattered supplies, and reconnoitering the way ahead, Hannibal relentlessly marched his army onward along the Arc River Valley for four consecutive days. At first, the going was relatively easy, as the wide valley was still sufficiently flat for a few ranks of soldiers and pack animals to walk side by side. The elephants still had plenty of fodder and enough plants alongside the river even in late autumn, but early winter would strain the fodder resource.
Reflecting on what Hannibal knew in advance of his long, intrepid march to Italy and why he would attack it in the first place, Polybius makes it abundantly clear that Hannibal had long studied this problem while still in Spain, seeking added wise counsel of allied tribes such as the Boii in Italy:
“He had informed himself accurately about the fertility of the land at the foot of the Alps and near the river Po, the denseness of its population, the bravery of the men in war, and above all their hatred of Rome ever since that former war with the Romans.”1
Polybius, too, scoffed at those who said Hannibal was unprepared for the daunting Alpine journey, saying that the general knew about earlier Alpine passages by Celtic armies and had good intelligence about possible routes.2 Polybius also maintained that Hannibal knew it was “toilsome and difficult but not at all impossible.”3 Hannibal trusted the hatred of Rome by the Boii Celts and others like them on the other side of the Alps to make the mountain crossing worthwhile. He anticipated their assistance when he emerged from the mountains. It was the Romans who were surprised, partly because they were mainly flatlanders and a farming culture less inclined to mountains, hoping in vain that the Alps would shield them like a wall. But by now, the Romans knew Hannibal was coming and futilely tried to anticipate where he would exit from the Alps.
The Romans’ general lack of knowledge of the Alps was exacerbated by the fact they had almost no discernible allies in the mountains who could report back to them. The Romans deployed mainly around Placentia in the Po Valley, far enough from the Alps to wait for Hannibal to reappear from the west.
Where exactly Hannibal crossed the Alps remains unknown in the absence of sufficient archaeological evidence.4 Regardless of which pass Hannibal ultimately used on the alpine approach, the nights grew colder and colder for Hannibal’s army as the valley narrowed and their gradient changed. The army had to cover itself with warmer clothes and leathers or skins of whatever they could find. Feet had to be wrapped in thicker skins to keep out the seeping frigid dampness of the ground.
The most likely Celtic tribes in the Arc River Valley area were the Medulli, a fiercely territorial people probably headquartered in the Maurienne region near the modern town of St.-Jean-de-Maurienne, near where at least four vital montane passes debouched into the same Arc Valley.
As the tribal lands changed and became unfamiliar to Celts allied with Hannibal, the danger grew that he could be led into a trap. Here Hannibal exerted great discipline over his army and his scouts. He sent reconnoitering guides a day ahead in small groups, likely pairing Celts with his trusted scouts in order to verify information and topographic detail. If he suspected any danger or duplicity in their reports, he would grill the Celts face-to-face, closely watching their eyes and body language.
There is little doubt that Hannibal would have quickly punished false information with death, likely preceded by torture, both as a warning and to elicit further information that could be tested. An experienced military leader like Hannibal had little tolerance for anything but straightforward answers or honest uncertainty. Much has been made of Hannibal’s psychological probity in reading people, especially enemies, and he certainly would have also relied on wise counsel as well as the most trusted translators in planning each day’s journey in terms of where to stop at night, as well as allocating supplies and acquiring food for an army, always a demanding task, made even more complicated by voracious elephants.
Unless quartermasters (supply officers) and pursers (accounts officers) are buying food from locals, and unless active hunters and foragers are constantly reserving food supplies and rations dispersal is well organized, an army on the move is a logistical supply nightmare. It can consume far more than the pack animals can carry from considerable distances. This is ultimately a daily battle of a totally different nature. That Hannibal faced this worrisome conundrum on a daily basis through the Alpine passage was compounded by the fact that winter was fast approaching and food sources were diminishing. Only the most farsighted leader can pull off what Hannibal must have accomplished. And even then, his army suffered devastating losses that would be unacceptable in modern warfare.
Along the way upriver early on the fourth day since the first ambush, according to Polybius,5 one group of treacherous mountain Celts pretended to bring Hannibal gifts and wreaths as a signal of peace. They claimed to know about the recent Allobroges humiliation. Their chiefs even offered cattle and hostages, but they may have been just as easily counting spears and mules and opportunities. Polybius says it was clearly a Celtic conspiracy but that Hannibal was also more than a little suspicious of their intentions. Ultimately, he trusted his honed military instincts and wasn’t fooled by their sycophantic behavior. From years of experience in Spanish Celtiberian cultures, Hannibal knew that an attack could come during the day any time now. He set out his sentries and pickets at night, sure that the cover of darkness would nonetheless be too difficult even for the local Celts, who were almost certainly looking at the hundreds of campfires of the army as they waited for just the right place to attack.
If Hannibal’s route was through the Arc Valley, he would have to cross the Arc River somewhere soon. Wary watchers and scouts in the hill forts of the Medulli above the valley had perfect views of the army now beginning to struggle much more slowly, as the ascent grew steep. It is likely that the army moved along the northern plateau along the valley toward Aussois,6 which was the Celtic pathway and afforded a wider column until one had to descend to cross the Arc River at the shallowest fording. Celtic sentries would have seen the army coming, and there are several isolated rocky buttes that have yielded Iron Age finds, most likely from Medulli Celts.7
Even if substantial reports had reached the Medulli of how Hannibal had punished the Allobroges, the temptation of so many pack animals laden with food plodding along in single file must have promised easy pickings for these mountain Celts, whose own food resources and animals would be challenged by the coming winter.
Hannibal himself would not have missed seeing the occasional stubble of long-harvested fields in the narrow valleys as they passed a few rustic and small mountain hamlets. He would have seen occasional thin columns of smoke rising over the forest from cooking fires in higher hamlets. He knew there was a sizable highland population living here—large enough to amass a fierce battle force—and if few locals came out to greet him, Hannibal knew it was because of hostility among the mountain Celts.
Infrequent sounds of crashing branches at the margin of the forest heard by the passing army would have been animals such as foraging wild boars, not frightened Celts. Livy, more interested in color than Polybius, gives just the sort of expected cinematic embellishment to this part of the ascent from the point of view of the army: “The dreadful vision was now before their eyes: the towering peaks, the snowclad pinnacles soaring to the sky, the rude huts clinging to the rocks, the people with their wild and ragged hair, stiff with frost.”8
Hannibal was duly apprehensive, according to Polybius, sensing the danger and the sudden absence of genuine friendly Celtic contact. He carefully separated his forces, especially placing his pack animal train and cavalry at the front of the long column and his heavy infantry at the rear. Polybius claims the army would have been destroyed completely if Hannibal had not done exactly as he did.
Two days later, the attack struck just as the army was preparing for the hardest ascent yet on the following day near the Arc River crossing. The army was slowly traversing the base of a steep, rocky canyon that Polybius calls leukopetron, or the “white rock place.”9 This stunning white gorge of the modern-day French village of Bramans stands out dramatically against the trees around it, its exfoliating dolomite and gypsum anticline (a geologic arch bending upward in mountains) a major landmark for thousands of years.10 While “white rock” places above tree lines are too numerous in the Alps to count, this location commends itself highly because it is framed by dark forest and lies only one day from a summit connecting a major alpine route between Gaul and Italia.
Here at Bramans—if this is the right place—the knots of invisible Celts hidden just at the tree line suddenly unleashed their ambush from above, rolling boulders down or hurling rocks. Volleys of arrows rained down as well. Pandemonium took over amid the clamor from animals and shouts of Hannibal’s army trying to bring order in this tight place where echoes magnified the din of screams and crashing rocks.
When the Celts, who knew this terrain well, assembled quickly from the nearby forest, attacking Hannibal’s rear in a bristling wave of force, the trained heavy infantry placed there by Hannibal mostly met this immediate challenge. But nearest to the front, a majority of the pack animals and many men were crushed by rocks, and their mangled supplies were scattered or damaged. They became useless except to scavengers. Terrified horses reared and threw their riders as the rocks and boulders fell around them. The screams of maimed men and dying animals reverberated across the gorge. Perhaps only the elephants seemed relatively unscathed, as the Celts were afraid of these strange animals and may have stayed as far as possible from them.
With so many broken men dying, Hannibal’s army appeared doomed. The Celts were sure they had bottled up the intruders when darkness fell and much of the battered army had to spend a most uncomfortable night in this gorge, the darkness punctuated by moans of wounded and dying men and animals. The rest of the army may have retreated back down the valley away from the gorge. Whether or not Hannibal was led into a trap here at Bramans by duplicitous guides is not known, and Polybius does not confirm it, but it is not unlikely. Livy claims that there was “deliberate deception” among some of the guides.11
But the Celts who staged the ambush, however fierce, were unaware of how quickly a trained army can respond. They made a grave mistake, similar to the Allobroges before them, completely underestimating this wily general with an uncanny ability to outsmart his enemies. Thinking Hannibal was trapped and immobilized in the gorge, the Celts apparently went home for the night to rest, relishing the fruit of their ambush waiting for daylight.
But the fast-thinking Hannibal had already planned his next move. The most likely scenario is that after sending trained stealthy assassins to circle around in the dark and slit the throats of the few guards left at the valley mouth, Hannibal waited only for the earliest light of dawn and moved his men as fast as possible over the rocks until they slipped away and the rest of the army rejoined him. If the ambush indeed took place at the Bramans Gorge, the most logical escape route would have been to ascend eastward out of the gorge rather than continuing north along the Arc Valley—occupied by the Celtic villagers, who could be mobilized to block an army’s progress in such increasingly narrow places.
Imagine the shock of the Celts who returned excitedly early the next morning only to find the trapped army had escaped. They saw with acute disappointment the stripped bodies of the dead left behind along with the dead pack animals and useless food supplies scattered about the rocks and the streambed. The largest prize they had ever witnessed had slipped through their fingers, and they returned glumly to their villages after salvaging what they could of the supplies.
These Celts realized the element of surprise was gone and knew the rest of Hannibal’s army had caught up. Hannibal was not yet out of danger, however, as he now had to confront the steepest part of the ascent. The spectacular alpine peaks towered above his men as they slowly climbed up a path alongside rushing streams and crashing waterfalls over huge rocks, and hemmed in by pine and larch trees. The newly wounded began to drop back behind the main body, gasping for breath as they climbed. Everyone in the shattered army could now see fresh snow on the heights above them, with huge expanses of ice on the highest peaks.
But the greatest burden Hannibal now faced was how to feed his army after having lost almost all his food train and with so few pack animals left. Many of the remaining animals would probably have to be slaughtered soon, since they now carried next to nothing except firewood picked up through the forest along the way. Even the three dozen or so lumbering elephants would have voiced their hunger; their occasional trumpeting echoing in the ascending valley when they couldn’t find much grass between the rocks—what little that could grow in this cold place. Other historians have also posed the difficulty of elephants foraging in higher montane elevations, especially since they would need to consume a minimum of a hundred pounds per day to stay alive, a huge problem near an alpine summit if this sojourn took several days.12
A gruesome tale fueled by some later Romans, although much debated and mostly dismissed, is that even before his alpine march, Hannibal was purportedly told to consider cannibalism of his soldiers who would die of starvation. This possibility was supposedly presented by a counselor named Hannibal Monomachos in the Carthaginian war council. The fact that Polybius discusses it13 gave it added credibility, but it seems almost certain that Hannibal never actually resorted to it, because Polybius never comments on its implementation, instead stating that Hannibal could never persuade himself to practice cannibalism. Given the later exaggerated reputation of Hannibal for cruelty, such Roman propaganda is not surprising.14
Once Hannibal’s army hit the wind-swept tree line, where only a few blizzard-blasted scrub trees clung to the rocks, only thin air and the jagged stone of surrounding cliffs met the eye. The cold valley trail wound higher and higher. The tiring army gasped for breath, and the elephants, surely, nervous at such a different, barren landscape, could be answered by a different chilling sound: gathering Alpine wolves howling to one another as they sensed death coming for some of the falling stragglers being left farther behind. Everyone would soon know deep and debilitating hunger. Aware that his battered army could not last long in these circumstances, Hannibal pushed onward at the front of the beleaguered army as fast as possible to the snow-whitened summit ahead.