Chapter Twenty-Four
Once Hannibal’s army was in motion, it took almost two days for it to pass any given point. They would have no more huge camps like the one on the Rhone River. After sundown, the soldiers and followers would stop wherever they happened to be, build cooking fires, and rest for the night. Before dawn of the next day, the column would rise like a ten-mile-long serpent, shake off its sleep, and begin crawling its way on toward the east of north.
None of the foot soldiers knew where they were going. Every day, a new rumor would spread along the column of marchers: ‘We’re going back to Iberia;’ ‘We’re headed north;’ ‘We’re going over mountains so high that they touch the sky,’ and so on–for soldiers love gossip, and each tale grew in the telling.
Every night, hundreds of s
