Every City Surrendered to Holofernes Until Judith Tricked the General

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The Same Words at Every Gate

The messengers came out to meet Holofernes before he was in sight of the walls, and in town after town along the coast they said the same thing, in the same order, the way men recite something they have rehearsed on the road.

"We have fallen before you to the ground. Do with us as you see fit. All that is ours is yours. Our farms and our cities, our cattle and our sheepfolds and our tents are in front of you. Come to us and go down with us as you please."

No one asked for terms. No elder came out to bargain for the young men or to ask which of the shrines would be left standing. The gates stood open before the column reached them, and the herds were already driven out onto the road as a gift.

He Took the Coast Without Breaking a Wall

He came down out of the highlands with the army behind him and went along the sea, and he put a garrison inside every fortified city that had opened itself to him. Then he went through the surrendered towns and took the best of their young men and put them in his own ranks, so that each city he swallowed made the column longer.

By the time he pitched his camp in the valley under Bethulia, nothing between the Euphrates and the sea had told him no.

The Order She Gave for Dawn

Judith came back through the gate of Bethulia in the dark, and what she carried in the food bag was the head of the man in the valley. She had been in his tent. She had eaten none of his food.

Before the town could finish shouting she gave it an order, and the order was strange enough that the elders made her say it twice.

"When the sun comes up, every fighting man takes his weapons and goes out of the city with a captain over him, as though you were going down into the valley against the Assyrian watch." She stopped there. "Do not go down."

They went out at first light and stood on the slope above the camp with their spears up, in plain sight, close enough to be counted from below, and then they did nothing at all.

The Captains Ran to a Tent

The watch below saw armed men coming out of a town that had been dying of thirst, and the alarm went through the lines. Men pulled on their armor. Officers ran for the center of the camp to get the order that would tell them where to stand, and the order had to come from one tent, and they pushed into that tent and found no one to give it.

What they found instead went out through the camp faster than any command. A body on the bed, and no head on it.

The officers came out of the tent and ran, and they ran first, in front of everyone, which is the one thing an army cannot survive watching.

The Hills Emptied Behind Them

The camp that had absorbed every army on the coast came apart in the time it took a rumor to cross it. Nobody blew a horn. Nobody formed a line. Men who had marched in step from the Euphrates threw down what they were carrying and went east and north across open country toward Damascus.

Then the men of Bethulia came down the slope they had been standing on, and the men of every village in those hills came out behind them, and the pursuit went on past the border of the country the army had thought it already owned.

Every city on that coast had sent messengers out with an offer of everything they had. The town that sent out one widow with a bag of her own food kept its walls.