German Trenches and Parthian Shots

On July 1, 1916, one of the bloodiest chapters of the First World War began. The four-month struggle on the banks of the Somme between the Anglo-French armies and the forces of the German Empire left more than a million casualties in its wake. The British suffered a particularly brutal opening; on the first day alone, nearly twenty thousand soldiers fell. A lethal combination of faulty artillery shells that failed to clear the German wire, the crushing weight of the men's own equipment, and, above all, the devastating efficiency of German machine guns decimated battalions as they advanced in straight lines across open plains, fully exposed to the heights above.

The Battle of the Somme, 1916.

The poetry of Wilfred Owen, who served on the Western Front and witnessed the horrors of mustard gas, captures the jarring disconnect between the terror of the trenches and the lofty, militaristic rhetoric of the era's leaders. He ends his famous account of a gas victim—eyes white with blindness and lungs gargling blood—with a stinging rebuke:

“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.”

“My friend, you would not tell with such zest,

To children ardent for some desperate glory, the old lie: It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country."

*Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori* is a Latin phrase meaning “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country,” taken from an ode by the first-century BCE Roman poet Horace. Horace, naturally, intended to extol the virtues of self-sacrifice for the Empire in its struggle against its enemies—specifically one: the Parthians.

The Parthian Empire was Rome’s most formidable rival. It rose from the waning power of the Hellenistic Seleucids, the successors of Alexander the Great (a minor rebellion by a small Middle Eastern people against one of their kings, Antiochus Epiphanes, is better known to us as the Maccabean Revolt). The Parthians, an Eastern Iranian people, forged a vast empire stretching from the Oxus River in modern Uzbekistan to the Euphrates. Their expansion placed them on an inevitable collision course with the rising Roman Republic, particularly over the contested territories of eastern Anatolia and Armenia.

The Parthian Empire. Source: http://www.kavehfarrokh.com/category/parthians/

In 53 BCE, the Roman general and politician Marcus Licinius Crassus—remembered, among other things, for crushing the Spartacus revolt and crucifying six thousand slaves along the Via Appia—launched a campaign to the east.

This charming figure, one of the wealthiest men in Rome, sought a war against Parthia to cement his political standing, ignoring a Parthian offer to negotiate. After spurning the Armenian king’s suggestion of a protected mountain route, Crassus opted for a faster march through the Mesopotamian plains of modern-day northern Syria and Iraq.

Crassus.

It was a fatal choice. The Roman legions were lured into a trap by their own Arab auxiliary units, who were secretly in league with the enemy. After crossing the Balissos River near the city of Carrhae (modern Harran in southern Turkey), the Romans found themselves entirely surrounded by Parthian forces.

Statue of a Parthian nobleman, possibly Surena, the Parthian commander at the Battle of Carrhae. Source: www.livius.org

The Parthian army was built for the steppe, relying heavily on two types of cavalry. The heavy cavalry, or "cataphracts" (Greek for "fully covered"), were noblemen armored from head to toe and armed with long lances, swords, and maces. The light cavalry were quintessential steppe warriors: lightly clad and equipped with powerful composite bows.

Parthian cavalry: on the left, a cataphract; on the right, a mounted archer. Source: http://www.iranchamber.com

The composite bow was the "machine gun" of the ancient world. Though it looked simple, its construction required surgical precision. These relatively short bows were crafted from layers of wood, animal horn (usually ibex), and sinew. The tension of the sinew and the compression of the horn stored immense energy, giving the weapon its terrifying power.

Cross-sections of various composite bows. Source: recurve-bow.info

As a horseman’s weapon, its short frame allowed for easy maneuvering from the saddle. A skilled archer could loose about ten arrows per minute while at a full gallop. Multiply that rate by thousands of horsemen attacking in waves, and you have a Roman hell.

Composite bows.

The "Parthian shot" became particularly legendary—a classic steppe tactic of feigning retreat only to turn in the saddle and fire backward at the pursuing enemy.

A "Parthian shot," demonstrated by a Turkish-Ottoman horseman.

At the Battle of Carrhae, Rome suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in its history. The heavily armored legionaries tried in vain to hold their famous "testudo" (tortoise) formation, but the dense shield-wall was shattered by the charge of the cataphracts and the relentless, needle-like rain of arrows from the light cavalry.

Poor intelligence, mismatched weaponry, and rigid formations led to the near-total annihilation of seven Roman legions—roughly thirty thousand men. Legend has it that after Crassus was captured and killed, the Parthians poured molten gold down his throat, a symbolic punishment for his legendary greed.

I doubt his golden lungs bubbled: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”