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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 319171" data-attributes="member: 1645">Chapter X -- A Taste of Defeat (continued)Pompey's attack overwhelms the men of the 9th, all veterans in their thirties, and most of the 9th's senior centurions fall.The 9th's fort had been taken and the double walls of the encirclement were breached in numerous places along the shoreline so that Pompey's cavalry could get out and seek fodder, and ships could land supplies.Then Pompey's troops occupy a deserted Caesarian camp near the sea, tenable now that the 9th has been pushed back.As they took up defensive positions on the ramparts of the camp, Caesar could see that these troops would be able to cover supplies coming to the beach.Pompey has outmaneuvered Caesar!Caesar personally leads an attack on the fort, and Pompey personally leads his own troops against Caesar.  Caesar's men become lost in the complex entrenchments.Encouraged by the sight of their commander in chief [Pompey] coming up with the experienced legions, Puleio and his troops fighting for their lives in the camp regained the initiative and charged Caesar's men, driving them back.  Seeing this sudden change of fortune, Caesar's cavalry panicked.  They tried to go back the way they had come, down the narrow alley.  The troops on the right wing, seeing the cavalry turning and fleeing, seeing Pompey coming with thousands of reinforcements, hearing their comrades inside the camp in trouble, and fearing that they were going to be cut off, jumped into a ten-foot trench that they thought would provide an escape route.  Hundreds of Caesar's men were trampled to death in this trench as their own desperate colleagues jumped in on top of them in an attempt to escape.Trampled by their own men jumping into the trench on top of them!  Here's how bad the panic gets:He [Caesar] grabbed standards to stem the flood, but the standard-bearers simply let go of them and kept going.  Appian even writes of a frantic standard-bearer trying to stab Caesar with the pointed bottom tip of his standard in his desperation to get away -- and being cut down by men of Caesar's bodyguard.</blockquote>

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