Carthage must stand

Zama, in the African interior, October 202 BC. Sixteen years after Cannae, the war has come home to Carthage. Scipio has invaded Africa and turned Carthage's own ally, the Numidian king Masinissa and his matchless cavalry, to Rome's side. Hannibal, recalled from Italy, opens the battle with eighty war elephants. Scipio has prepared for exactly this: his maniples stand with lanes deliberately opened between them, and when the elephants come, trumpets and javelins panic the beasts down the empty corridors and away, some turning back through Carthage's own cavalry. The Roman and Numidian horse rout their counterparts, ride off in pursuit, and return at the crisis to strike Hannibal's veterans from behind. By evening Carthage's last army is gone.

In the timeline recorded here, the morning wind turns and the trick dies in the dust. The elephants come on inside a rolling wall of powdered earth kicked up by their own advance. The drivers, veterans of the Italian years, hold the line of bronze bells straight. The lanes are invisible until the beasts are through them, and the trumpets that should have turned the charge arrive as noise inside a noise. Eighty elephants strike the maniples of the second line like a falling cliff. The Roman center does not break; it bends, and bleeds. It is still bleeding an hour later when Hannibal's Italian veterans, the men of Cannae grown grey, walk into it.