Sittas was still scowling. “Too far to the north,” he grumbled again. “Both the town and the landing across the river. A good twenty or thirty miles past the fork of the Chenab and the Indus. Hell of a gamble.” He straightened up and looked at Belisarius. “Maybe we should stick to the original plan. Seize this side of the Indus and set up our lines right at the fork itself.”
Belisarius did not reply immediately. He understood Sittas’ reluctance, but . . .
What a coup if we could pull it off!
You’d have no line of retreat at all, said Aide.
“No line of retreat,” echoed Maurice. The chiliarch had no way of hearing Aide’s voice, of course, but the situation was so obvious that Belisarius was not surprised their thoughts had run in tandem. “If it goes sour, we’ll be trapped in the triangle, bottled up by the Malwa. The Chenab to our right and the Indus to our left.”
Sittas shook his head. “I can’t say I’m much concerned about that. Once we make the thrust into the Punjab—wherever we strike, and wherever we set up our fieldworks—’lines of retreat’ are pretty much a delusion anyway.”
He gestured toward the army camped just outside the tent, unseen behind its leather walls. “You know as well as I do, Maurice, that we’ll have no way to retreat across the country we just passed through. Even if we could break contact with the Malwa after the fighting starts. Which isn’t too likely, given how badly we’ll be outnumbered.”
“We’ve already foraged the area clean,” said Belisarius, agreeing with Sittas. “As it was, the thing was tight. If the peasants hadn’t been panicked by reports of Malwa massacres in the Sind and fled, we might not have had enough to get this far.”
Maurice winced a little, but didn’t argue the point. The stretch of territory which Belisarius’ army had marched through, with the Indus to one side and the Cholistan desert to the other, had been—just as Aide suspected—far less barren than future history would record. But it had still not been anything which could be called “fertile.” If the fleeing peasantry hadn’t left a good deal of already collected food behind them, the Roman army would have been forced to move very slowly due to the need for constant foraging.
As it was, they had been able to make the trek in sixteen days—better than Belisarius or his top subordinates had expected. But, in doing so, they had stripped the land clean of all easily collectable food. Trying to retreat through that territory, with much larger forces in pursuit, would be a nightmare. Most of the Roman soldiers would never make it back alive. And it was quite possible that the entire army would be forced to surrender.
“Surrender,” into Malwa hands, meant a rather short stint in labor battalions. The Malwa had the charming practice of working their prisoners to death.
“Do or die,” said Sittas calmly. “That’s just the way it is, regardless of where we hit the enemy in the Punjab.”
He leaned over the map, placing both large hands on the table it rested upon. “But I still think it’s too much of a risk to go for the inside of the big fork. The problem’s not retreat—it’s getting supplies from downriver.”
Belisarius understood full well the point Sittas was making. In order to reach a Roman army forted up in the fork itself, Roman supply vessels would have to run a gauntlet of enemy fire from the west bank of the Indus. Whereas if the Romans set up their fortifications on the opposite bank of the Indus just below the Chenab fork, the supply ships would be able to hug the eastern shore.
Still—
He scratched his chin. “The ships will still have to run the supplies in under fire, Sittas. Not as heavy, I grant you, but heavy enough. The Malwa have already built a major fortress on the west bank of the Indus, still further south, and you can be certain they’ve positioned big siege guns in it. The river’s a lot wider south of the Chenab fork, true enough, but not so wide that those big guns won’t be able to carry entirely across. So, no matter where we set up, the supply ships will be under fire trying to reach us.”