Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (11 page)

In the end, Caesar had to keep the cavalry with the infantry.

On the march, envoys arrived from the Trinovantes tribe, old enemies of King Cassivellaunus, who asked for protection against the king. When Caesar granted the tribe the protection they asked for, five other tribes also came to him and surrendered. The Roman force then reached Cassivellaunus’s stronghold. This was a densely wooded spot, heavily fortified with an earth wall and trench, thought to have been at Wheathampstead, five miles north of where Cassivellaunus’s son and successor would build c05.qxd 12/5/01 4:55 PM Page 48

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the settlement the Romans called Verulamium and that would grow into the modern city of St. Albans.

The stronghold was full of warriors and cattle, and Caesar wasted no time sending the legions against it. They attacked from two sides, the ferocity of their assault sending the defenders fleeing over a third wall in terror.

While the main body of the Roman army was capturing Cassivellaunus’s stronghold, four tribes in Kent decided to launch an assault on the Roman supply base back on the coast. General Atrius, the rear-echelon commander, quickly sent cohorts of the 12th Legion out to meet the British infantry, and they charged the poorly led locals, who were routed without loss to the 12th Legion. A number of tribesmen were killed, and many, including a chieftain, taken prisoner.

When he heard of this defeat on the coast, and, now deprived of his stronghold, King Cassivellaunus bowed to the inevitable and sent envoys to Caesar for surrender terms. Caesar agreed to peace in return for hostages, an annual payment to Rome, and a guarantee from the king that he wouldn’t molest the Trinovantes people.

As soon as the hostages were handed over, Caesar withdrew to the coast. It seems he never intended leaving a permanent Roman presence in Britain. As in Gaul, his intention was to make allies of the locals, if not subjects, without tying his troops down in garrisons. Caesar knew better than anyone that the secret of his legions’ success was their mobility.

The damaged ships had all been repaired, but with a large number of prisoners who would be sold into slavery once ferried across the Channel, and because sixty new transports built in France by General Labienus were forced back by adverse winds every time they tried to sail, Caesar sent the troops back to Europe in two waves. He was in the second wave, which sailed as the autumnal equinox approached. After several calm days, he packed his last troops into the ships that had returned for him, and in the late evening they pulled away from the Kent shore with the tide. In their usual fashion, the legions would have left their camp of the past few months afire, so it was of no use to the Britons.

The flames would have offered an eerie farewell to the men of the 10th Legion sailing with Caesar. Looking back to the orange glow on the Kent coast, many of them would have guessed that they would never set foot in Britain again. Caesar had achieved all he’d set out to achieve among the barbarous Britons. Plutarch was to say that prior to this many Greek and Roman historians had even doubted that Britain existed. Caesar had proven otherwise, and in the process had rewritten history. But in c05.qxd 12/5/01 4:55 PM Page 49

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his own eyes it was no major achievement. Britain, he felt, had nothing to offer Rome.

The return journey went smoothly and swiftly, with the convoy reaching France with the dawn. Both waves returned to the Pas de Calais without the loss of a single ship. Once they had landed, the 10th Legion and its brother legions marched to various camps in France and Belgium, hoping for a quiet winter.

To let the natives know that the Roman army was back, Caesar dispersed his troops, sending single legions to a variety of locations throughout the region. He was later to excuse his action by saying the wheat harvest that year had been poor and it was necessary to spread the legions far and wide to secure more grain for the winter. But breaking up the army like this was to prove a fatal mistake.

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REVOLT AND REVENGE

n Caesar’s orders, Generals Sabinus and Cotta led the 14th Legion and five unidentified cohorts from one or more of the other
O
legions—also from the newer units, it seems—into eastern Belgium. They made camp for the winter of 54–53 b.c. at Atuatuca on the Geer River, northwest of modern Liège. The city of Tongres, oldest in Belgium, would grow on this site. Named Atuatuca Tongrorum, it would be the capital of the Tungri tribe, immigrants from Germany, but at this time the riverside camp built by the fifteen legionary cohorts under General Sabinus was on a virgin site in the territory of the Eburones, a native Belgic tribe.

Within weeks of the legionaries building their fortified camp at Atuatuca, the Eburones rose up under their chief, Ambiorix, determined to rid their homeland of the Romans. Ambiorix allied himself with Germans from across the Rhine, then surrounded and laid siege to the Roman fort with tens of thousands of fighting men. During a truce, Ambiorix offered General Sabinus and his men amnesty if they vacated their position and his territory. Sabinus’s deputy, General Cotta, and most of the other Roman officers at Atuatuca argued that they would be going against Caesar’s orders if they pulled out. Besides, they didn’t trust Ambiorix. But Sabinus, worried that his troops would be starved into submission, decided to accept the Belgian offer. Many of Sabinus’s own men had a low opinion of their general, but as the force’s commanding general his word was law, and next morning the legionaries marched out of their camp behind him.

Passing through a forest two miles from Atuatuca, the 14th Legion and their accompanying five cohorts walked straight into an ambush. A few hundred men managed to fight their way back to the camp, but most of the others, including Generals Sabinus and Cotta, were surrounded and killed in the ambush, fighting to the last man in an
orbis,
the Roman army’s circular formation of last resort. That night, the survivors holding
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the camp, out of ammunition, out of food, and out of hope, entered into a pact, and every man took his own life. In the forest and in the camp, more than eight thousand legionaries died that day.

This success inspired other tribes throughout the region to rise up and attack the Roman forces stationed in their areas. The legion of General Quintus Cicero, younger brother of the famous orator Cicero, was besieged at its camp near the Sambre River by a force that grew to number sixty thousand men. We don’t know which legion it was, but from its stout resistance it sounds like one of the veteran Spanish legions, possibly the 7th. Unlike Sabinus, General Cicero kept his troops behind the walls of their fortified camp.

For more than seven days Cicero and his surrounded legion held out without being able to send a messenger for help, but finally a loyal native of the area managed to get through enemy lines to Caesar, eighty miles away. Caesar immediately sent orders for the three nearest legions to march to Cicero’s aid, and set off himself with a cavalry force. The 10th Legion would have been one of the three. General Labienus sent word that tribesmen were massing three miles from his camp and he and his legions didn’t dare leave the protection of its walls, so the relief force was reduced to just one legion, possibly the 10th, plus cavalry, a total of seven thousand men.

A messenger galloped back to Cicero with a dispatch from Caesar, written in Greek so the tribesmen couldn’t understand it if it fell into the wrong hands. But the courier couldn’t get through the enemy. So, pre-tending to be one of the attackers, he joined their next raid against the Roman camp, and threw a javelin with the message tied to it. The javelin lodged in the woodwork of a Roman guard tower and went unnoticed for another two days before a sentry spotted the message, unfurled it, and took it to General Cicero.

Caesar was to write that the general read the message aloud to his exhausted legionaries: “Caesar is coming with the legions!” he announced.

“He tells us to hold on and put on a bold front!”

As Cicero’s legionaries cheered with relief, lookouts yelled that they could at that very moment see smoke on the horizon—farm buildings put to the torch by advancing Roman troops.

When they realized that Caesar was approaching, the Belgians gave up the siege and advanced to meet him. With only some five thousand infantrymen and two thousand cavalry, Caesar was significantly outnumbered, so he chose a camp site at the most favorable location he could find and set his men to work furiously constructing trenches and walls of earth c06.qxd 12/5/01 4:56 PM Page 52

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as the enemy advanced on him. Caesar was always thinking, always inno-vative, and at the camp gates he had his men build walls made of a single brick’s thickness of earth. From the outside, it looked as if the gates were as solid as the walls, and the tribesmen didn’t even bother to attack there, gates normally being the most heavily defended part of any Roman camp.

Instead, they tried to storm the walls at various places.

With sixty thousand Belgians and their German allies congregated around the walls, Caesar gave an order. His flag dropped, trumpets sounded.

The apparently solid walls at the gateways suddenly tumbled outward, and the Roman cavalry charged out into the massed ranks of the enemy. The results were panic and slaughter. Tribesmen were still running at sundown.

Caesar and the 10th were then able to link up with General Cicero and his legion. When the besieged legion paraded for their commander in chief, Caesar saw that nine out of ten legionaries were wounded. He praised the men, and he praised the centurions and tribunes, for holding off a much superior force for so long. This was the stuff that legion legends were made of. Unfortunately, we don’t know which legion deserves the credit for such stout resistance.

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Caesar and his generals spent the rest of the winter putting out the fires of revolt along the Rhine and nearby regions. During the winter, which Caesar spent in Gaul with the legions for the first time because of the volatile situation, three legions were raised in northern Italy and Switzerland—a whole new enlistment for the 14th Legion, to replace the cohorts wiped out in Belgium with General Sabinus, and two brand-new legions, the 15th and the 16th. Caesar now commanded ten legions, the largest Roman army in the field at the time.

The campaigning season of 53 b.c. saw Caesar use the large number of troops at his disposal in a single dominating force that crushed resistance throughout northern France, Belgium, southern Holland, and those parts of Germany west of the Rhine, a campaign that culminated in his second crossing of the Rhine, a brief incursion to frighten off the Seubi tribe, which had been massing in the region of the Ubii, a tribe allied to Rome.

But his first act was to march to the Geer River to punish the Eburones for the Sabinus massacre. While he employed a scorched-earth policy throughout Eburone territory, the new recruits of the 14th and the army’s recovering wounded were left by Caesar with General Cicero in his rear at the old Atuatuca camp where the predecessors of the new men of the c06.qxd 12/5/01 4:56 PM Page 53

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14th had perished the previous winter. Every living thing was tracked down and either killed or captured by Caesar’s army, while the timber buildings of the region attracted flaming Roman torches—every village, every farmhouse in Eburone territory was burned to the ground.

The Atuatuca fort seems to have been ill starred, for, in Caesar’s absence, cohorts of new 14th Legion recruits were allowed to go foraging by General Cicero, and they were caught in the open by German cavalry on a raid across the Rhine. Another thousand young legionaries of the 14th died before the detachment made it back to the safety of the camp, and the Germans withdrew back across the Rhine with the legion’s baggage animals for spoils.

At the end of the summer, Caesar, potentate of all he surveyed, convened a council of all the Gallic tribes who now submitted to Rome’s authority. The tribal leaders gathered at Rheims, capital of the Remi. The culmination of the Gallic Council meeting was the trial of a leader of the Senones tribe accused of instigating the first uprising of the year. Found guilty by his peers, he was whipped, then publicly beheaded.

The legions went into camp for the next winter. But Caesar had learned his lesson after dispersing his units too broadly the previous year.

This time two legions went into camp near Trier in Germany, and two in the region of Dijon in central France. The remaining six legions built a massive military camp at Sens, sixty-five miles south of the village of Lutetia on an island in the Seine that would grow into the city of Paris.

From there they could strike in any direction,
en masse,
if further trouble were to break out. Inevitably, it did.

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Vercingetorix was a young noble of the Arverni tribe in south-central France. In the winter of 53–52 b.c., he was living at the Arverni capital of Gergovia, some four miles south of present day Clermont-Ferrand on a plateau twelve hundred feet above sea level at the northern end of the Auvergne Mountains. A coin issued in 52 b.c. shows Vercingetorix as a handsome man probably in his twenties, with curly hair falling over his ears, and large eyes. He was the son of the late chief of the Arverni who had once tried to rule all the Belgic people of Gaul but who had been put to death by the tribes for his autocratic ways; the tribes of Gaul had a natural dislike of any man who tried to impose his rule on them.

Vercingetorix was unhappy about the Roman occupation of his homeland, and in January of 52 b.c. he was excited by news from the north that c06.qxd 12/5/01 4:56 PM Page 54

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