A cornered ex-Marine, with his back to the wall, brings up the big guns--but forgets the ammunition

In imagining the other day that we could have videocassettes of any moments in history, I said I would prefer to see the intimate moments, rather than the epic--”the fusing of empires through illicit love affairs,” rather than the panoramic battles.

For example, I said, I would like to see that moment “when Cleopatra, presenting herself to Julius Caesar in Rome, is unrolled from a rug, naked, at his feet. . . .”

I am pleased, though embarrassed, to find that so many of my readers are classic scholars.

“The specific incident, as described,” writes Michael Lewis, public defender of Riverside County, “is of doubtful truth, although Plutarch does speak of Cleopatra being smuggled into Caesar’s apartment in the ‘coverlet of a bed,’ but the overwhelming, if not absolute, weight of historical opinion is that the first meeting of Caesar and Cleopatra took place in Egypt , not in Rome.

“That is where Plutarch set the scene, and where Emil Ludwig, who also spoke of the involvement of a rug, set the scene in his biography of Cleopatra. Egypt is also where the scene was set in Shaw’s ‘Caesar and Cleopatra,’ and where it was set when Elizabeth Taylor was rolled out before Rex Harrison in the movie ‘Cleopatra,’ which I assume is what you were referring to when you said, ‘We have seen Cleo rolled before Caesar from her rug.”’

Up to that point, I was hoping that if I ever committed a felony it could be in Riverside County, so I could be defended by the astute Mr. Lewis. But then he added:

“The inference I drew from your article is that if you were given a choice between having a videotape of Cleopatra being unrolled from a rug, naked, before Julius Caesar, or one of Elizabeth Taylor being unrolled from a rug, with or without leotard, before Rex Harrison, you would choose the latter.”

Now how could he possibly have made that inference? As gorgeous as Miss Taylor still is, I would much rather see the mysterious Cleo revealed.

What a woman she must have been. Will Durant, who knew his women in history, and liked them, generally, better than the men, described her thus:

“Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek by origin, and more probably blonde than brunette. She was not particularly beautiful; but the grace of her carriage, the vivacity of her body and her mind, the variety of her accomplishments, the suavity of her manners, the very melody of her voice, combined with her royal position to make her a heady wine even for a Roman general. . . . She added the intellectual fascination of an Aspasia to the seductive abandon of a completely uninhibited woman. . . .”

What man could decline a chance to see a woman like that rolled naked from a rug?

And if the incident never happened, I remind you of Winston Churchill’s dismissal of the “tedious historians” who questioned another such charming incident in history.

I am more embarrassed, however, by another error: “I have always had contempt for those petty, mean-spirited nit-pickers who wait for you to make a mistake in spelling or grammar or a minor error in fact, only to pounce on it with glee.” writes Robert F. Walsh of Burbank. “However, today I cannot resist the temptation. . . . When you refer to 60,000 Englishmen being killed during ‘the first battle of the Marne ,’ I am sure you are referring to the first day of the conflict on the Somme , July 1, 1916, between British and German armies, where this catastrophe occurred. . . .”

This error was also noted by Dr. Arthur L. Duarte, John T. Laptus, Dan Brennan and Phillip Rock.

I had written, you may remember, that we might not want to see things the way they really were, especially war. “Nothing we have ever seen,” I wrote, “conveys the horror of the first battle of the Marne, when 60,000 young Englishmen, the cream of a nation’s younger generation, staggered over no man’s land into the German machine guns to their deaths. . . . It is ‘The Sands of Iwo Jima’ we want to see, with John Wayne, not the real Iwo Jima, with 6,000 dead Marines laid out on the beach in the grotesque attitudes of rigor mortis, unburied, turning yellow.”

“As the author of the original story and screenplay of ‘The Sands of Iwo Jima,’ ” writes Harry Brown, “I agree with you that it doesn’t show audiences the real battle. . . . Hell , it wasn’t intended to. But my final draft of the script, which was basically a character study of men in war, was a lot more realistic than what was shown on the screen, after studio heads and producers and directors and Marines--especially Marines--had given the thing their imprimatur. . . . Unfortunately, this Tender Loving Care on the part of the Corps turned my story into a recruiting poster. Thousands of boys who saw the film joined the Marines, and far too many of these beguiled innocents ended up as gobbets of flesh in Vietnam. I wish now that I’d never written the damned film. . . .”

He notes, in passing, that there were 60,000 total casualties that first day on the Somme, and only 20,000 dead. (In the end, the battle cost the British 250,000 men, wounded and dead.)

Actually, I am fairly familiar with the battle of the Somme, having recently reread the superb analysis of it in “The Face of Battle,” by John Keegan, the British military scholar; and also Siegfried Sassoon’s vivid “Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.” How I happened to write Marne instead of Somme I don’t know.

Maybe it was battle fatigue.