The heat went out of the occasion and a chill set in. It was plain that this game of Trojan Crunch would be a fizzer. But nobody left the double ranks. They fell silent, and all we could hear was Myopic’s frantic sobs of terror and gasps for forgotten breath and he quailed before them. His energy sapped. He abandoned his attempts to escape, stopped moving altogether, wet his pants and stood, crying shamelessly.
Three abreast, the elephants moved, and truly there seemed no end of them. On the head of each, the driver sat, and behind him was a box of heavy wood, slit all over for archers. All naked were the drivers, thin brown men, who sat with crossed legs, dangling a long stick, pointed and with a hook just below the point, and occasionally they hooked and prodded the beast they drove. Adam ben Lazar was my lieutenant there, and I told him to kill the drivers first, but I wondered whether it would stop or divert the beasts. Now, more than a hundred of them were in sight, and we could see the gleaming spears of the mercenaries who marched behind them. The frightening rumble of their feet filled the whole valley and mixed itself with the shrill shouting of the drivers, while from beyond them the hoarse cries of the mercenaries sounded heady with triumph….
…our little cedar arrows that fell like rain only enraged the great beasts. We killed the drivers, but the elephants came on…
… I was close enough to hear Eleazar cry. “And are you afraid? Of what? Are beasts born that cannot be slain?”
In that mad rush of the elephants, the men behind Judas halted in fear and wonder; but Elaezar leaped ahead and alone he met one elephant that had outpaced the others. Such a sight was never seen before then or since, for Eleazar’s great body arched, the hammer swung back over his head, and then it met the elephant with a crushing thud that sounded above the screaming and shouting. And the elephant, skull crushed, went down on its knees, rolled over and died…
Prior to Spartacus, Howard Fast wrote My Glorious Brothers, a pretty good yarn about the Maccabees, a bunch of Jews who ran a guerrilla war against the occupying forces of Alexander the Great. This story is usually left out of most Bibles, or else relegated to the Apocryphilia, it might be the first truly great bad editing decision in literary history, for the Books of the Maccabees are the most historically accurate of all old testament books—maybe that was the problem—they put the rest in such bad light. They are also a fine example of how to conduct a war of resistance against the established forces, which was not quite the message that the Church nor State of any period wanted to generally get about. Furthermore, it told us how, not for the first time, the priesthood sold their people out to the wealthy invaders. So they simply edited it out. Fast’s retelling of the tale is lively, with terrific battle scenes of warriors bringing down war elephants, but it was really just a build-up for the master work to come.
