It was a nasty shock when we woke up this morning and found them all dead.  Half of the day it took before we could make a reasonable estimate of the number of dead bodies and as the numbers mounted through the morning, they numbed my brain.  When the tally was complete, it took my breath away and a voice kept saying in my head, “This can’t be real!”

But it was real.  There was no doubt about it.  185,000 corpses, and I was the one who had to deal with them.  Why, you may ask?  Well, unfortunately, I am the chief undertaker in the Assyrian army.  They call me “Dumaya”[1].  My job is to make sure that any of our soldiers who die in battle receive a decent burial, with the correct jugs, dishes, food, tapers, and all the rest of it.  In short, we give “light to your departed” as tradition requires.  And I already knew that in this disaster, it just couldn’t be done.

On an ordinary day with no fighting, we have about four people die for each 100,000 men in the army and my staff can easily cope with that without needing my input.  Before today, our army here at Libnah[2] was about 200,000 men since we are seriously trying to expand the empire.  Battles can kill many more, and on disastrous days, we can have up to around two or three thousand soldiers killed.  This can require some really hard work and ingenuity in disposing of our dead sensitively.  Much more disastrous days happen to our enemies quite often, so I am quite proficient at swiftly disposing of large numbers of dead enemies – a task that requires no sensitivity at all.

But this time it was most of us who were dead.  By the middle of the day, no-one wanted to eat because of the smell.  I didn’t bother telling everyone that it would get much, much worse before it got any better.

If we have 15,000 men left, and no-one else dies, each of us will have to bury about twelve and one third men.  Our ordinary burial methods (when on active service) involve digging out 1.5 cubic metres of soil for each body.  For each of us to bury more than 12 people, each of us would need to move more than 18 cubic metres of soil.  Do you know how long that would take?  I do – it’s my job – it would take about 90 hours of work, given the soil we have here.  Half a day more than a week.  Oh, dear.

There’s nobody else I can ask.  The job is mine and so the ideas must also be mine.  I was given this job because when difficult problems arise, I can solve them.  An army needs that sort of man when unexpectedly high casualties occur, otherwise morale starts to slip.  Proper respect must always be shown to our Assyrian dead.  The dead of our enemies don’t matter, of course, but our own dead must be buried quickly and honourably.

So now everyone is waiting for my instructions.

Since burying them all wouldn’t work, what about cremation?  We don’t use cremation normally, but this was a special case and I was sure I could get the priests to agree without too much trouble.  I called my 2IC[3] and told him to take two thousand men and start collecting logs from the nearest stand of trees.

“Yes, sir,” he responded.  “How many do we need?”

Oh dear.  I needed more data.  At times we have had to destroy large numbers of enemy corpses, and fire has been found to be quite effective.  It cleans up the mess and generates fear amongst the surviving enemies.  But it also uses a lot of wood.  Think now, think.  I turned away from him and struggled to remember the details, and finally had enough to go on.  It takes about twice as much wood to burn as there is body to destroy.  So if each body weighs about 55kg on average, that makes 110kg of wood per man…20 million kilograms.

We each need to cut, carry and burn almost 140kg of wood.  Ah well, that should be easy enough, let’s get on with it.  I started to turn back to give the answer, but in the back of my mind, I had a niggling feeling that the answer didn’t make sense.  And then I saw the problem: I was wrong by a factor of ten.  Not 140kg but 1,400kg of wood each, or about two 15m high trees.  Each of us.  Cut down two trees almost half a metre in diameter and then chop each into pieces small enough to transport, bring it all back here, and burn it along with the rapidly decomposing bodies.  All within 24 hours or so.  We Assyrians may have been the first army to be fully equipped with iron weapons, but we certainly don’t carry around enough saws and axes for 15,000 of us to have one each.  So that wasn’t going to work either, but at least it would give the men something to do – at the moment, they were all stumbling around as if in shock.  They probably were in shock.  I certainly was.  185,000 corpses.

“Bring me 30,000 trees,” I said wearily, and dismissed him, without waiting to see his jaw drop, already having moved on to seeking the next possibility.

Maybe lime?  I didn’t really know much about this, but I had heard that powdered limestone could slow down the decomposition of bodies by drying them out.  How much?  No idea.  Where would we get it from?  No idea.  Not worth pursuing.

Just cover the whole area with dirt?  Not digging individual holes, just piling up some dirt over the entire area.  Unfortunately, the bodies were spread out all around the city, so that wasn’t really going to be any easier.  How about digging big pits, putting thousands of bodies in each and then filling each of them up with dirt?  By this time my mind should have been working smoothly like a well-oiled catapult, but it wasn’t.  185,000 corpses.  It slows down your ability to think clearly.  The one thing that was becoming clear was that – No!  Stop It!

Big pits, 12,000 men digging, while 3,000 brought the bodies to the pits.  500 diggers in each of 24 pits, and each pit would need to hold…er…7,700 bodies.  If we want them to be under the ground, that means we need to remove about 450 cubic metres of soil for each pit and then pile it back on again after we put the bodies in.  That’s about one cubic metre per digger which should take about five hours.  Plonk the bodies in the hole and quickly put the soil back in an hour or two, and we are all finished in under a day!  I chewed my lip thoughtfully, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.  But, first, check the details one more time before we make any commitment to this.

All of my estimates had been ignoring any possible complications, so what extra details might slow us down?  That was when it struck me that the city we were camped around might have something to say about this!  If they came out and helped, that would be good, but it was much more likely that they would notice something was up in our camp, see us handling dead bodies and digging trenches and so on, and send out a few raiding parties.  After that…well it wasn’t hard to guess that we were going to end up trying to dig holes with men from the city attacking us; carrying corpses while the populace from the surrounding areas tried to knock the stuffing out of us.

Could we spare enough men to protect the rest as they worked?  After all, there were only a few thousand men in Libnah and they wouldn’t commit them all to a fight – we would still outnumber them if we formed up.  But we would be spread all around, in ones and twos collecting bodies, and in 24 larger groups digging pits.  Even if we overcame this setback, there was still the question of where we would put the soil while the cadavers were being put in the pits ready to be covered over.  Everything would conspire to slow us down, and now, to top it all off, the sun was coming from behind the clouds.  I could almost feel the smell getting suddenly worse.

How many bodies could we fit in the cisterns?  There were several cisterns around the city.  Our engineers had investigated them to make sure they were clean and to see whether they could provide us with enough water.  Of course, they couldn’t – no city wants to provide an easy supply of water for attacking forces.  Large cisterns are always constructed inside city walls.  Even so, the cisterns were relatively large and totalled almost one million litres – enough to last our original army for up to nine days if we were careful – but we had more than 10 million litres of bodies to dispose of.  Whatever way I looked at it, I couldn’t see a way forward.

Wells – not enough volume there either.

Lakes – the bodies would all float as they decomposed.  A lake full of bloated floating “conquerors”?  Not exactly a good presentation of overwhelming Assyrian power.

I’m afraid we didn’t have any choice.  In the end, we had to walk away and leave the bodies to rot.  Even the Assyrian army can be bested sometimes.

Women of Assyrian, I failed you.  I gave no “light to your departed”.

I only hope the king won’t mention this in his annals….

[1] Angel of Death
[2] Isaiah 37:8
[3] Second In Command