streamed on, but no orders had come to the special
volunteers, and Sergius began to wonder whether they were to be left to
guard the camp, as an added indignity to their rank. He ascended the
rampart, with Manlius and Decius, and strove to pierce the distance in
the west. Now and then a broad flash of light seemed to shine before
his eyes, and ever there came to his ears the rumble of tramping
thousands; the dust, too, was thickening, to take the place of the
scattered mists, and the wind blew it up in blinding clouds into the
face of Rome's battle.

"Gods! what is Terrentius Varro doing!" cried Decius suddenly, and the
three turned at his voice. A nodding forest of crests, red and black,
rising a cubit above the uncovered helmets of the legionaries, seemed
to fill the eastern plain and extend almost to where the Adriatic beat
upon the shingle. "Look at his front! Look at how closely the
maniples are crushed together! Gods! they are almost 'within the
rails' already."

Sergius looked, and the frown upon his brow deepened.

"Eighty thousand men," he muttered; "and we shall scarce outflank their
forty thousand. Does Varro wish to cast aside every advantage! Gods!
what gain is there in such depth? and he might--"

"Evidently you do not understand the strategy of great commanders who
have studied war."

The voice that interrupted was cynical and scornful, to a degree that
men hated the speaker even before they saw him; and, when the three
wheeled quickly, his face gave nothing to dispel the bad impression. A
tall, gaunt man, in plain and somewhat battered armour; a face
sharp-featured, very dark, and deeply lined wherever the wrinkles lay
that expressed pride and contempt and violent passions; lowering brows
from beneath which shone little beady, cunning eyes that opponents
feared and distrusted: this was Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the conqueror
of Illyria, the man who had barely escaped conviction for his
peculations, the colleague of Varro the butcher, a patrician of the
bluest blood in Rome, a knave in pecuniary matters, selfish and
ungoverned, but a brave and wary soldier from cothurni to crest.

"You seem to be criticising a Roman consul: even my brother, Varro;" he
said again, for the three had only bowed in reply to his former speech.
"Are you not presumptuous?--you, Lucius Sergius; and you, Caius
Manlius--boys in war--and you, Decius, or whoever you may be--a man of
Varro's order, if I mistake not?"