d to those who fall will belong the
crown of a painless death while fighting for their country. Let every
man come to the battlefield resolved, if he can, to conquer, and if not
to die.'

* * * * *

It was in this spirit that Hannibal trained his troops and led them to
battle. He never made light of the difficulties that lay before him, or
the dogged courage of the Romans, who rose up from every defeat with
a fresh determination to be victorious. One advantage they had over
Hannibal, and it could hardly be valued too highly. Though the councils
of the senate who sent forth the troops might be divided, though the
consuls who commanded them might be jealous of each other, yet the great
mass of the army consisted of one nation, who together had fought for
years under the eagles of Rome.

Hannibal, on the other hand, had to deal with soldiers of a number of
different races, and his latest recruits, the Gauls, though eager and
courageous, could not be depended upon in battle. When to this is added
the fact that Hannibal was in a country which he did not know, among a
people who feared Rome even while they hated her, and would desert him
at the first sign of defeat; that he had to provide daily for the wants
of both men and animals, and that for sixteen years he remained in Italy
with a dwindling army, striking terror into the hearts of the bravest of
the Romans, you may have some little idea of the sort of man he was.

Well may an historian say that the second Punic war was the struggle of
a great man against a great nation. Take away Hannibal, and the
Carthaginian forces were at the mercy of Rome.

We have no space to describe the various battles in the valley of the
Po, in which Hannibal was always the victor. At the river Trebia he
defeated Scipio in December 218, by aid of the strategy which never
failed, till he taught his enemies how to employ it against himself.
Hannibal was a man who never left anything to chance, and whether his
generals were trusted to draw the enemy from a strong position into the
open field, or to decoy it into an ambuscade, everything was foreseen,
and as far as possible provided against. He took care that his troops
and his animals should go into action fresh, well-fed, and well-armed,
and more than once had the wounds of both horses and men washed with
old wine after a battle. That tired soldiers cannot fight was a truth he
never forgot or neglected.

Duri