Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (6 page)

On the hill, the fighting for the 10th Legion and its companion units ended at sunset. But at the wagons, the battle continued well into the night, with defiant tribesmen raining spears from the vehicles and poking pikes out beneath them and through the wheels. Finally, the wagon laager was overrun by the legions. All the Helvetian worldly goods and all the tribe’s supplies were captured, along with numerous noncombatants, including the children of nobility. The booty would be shared among the c03.qxd 12/5/01 4:53 PM Page 20

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legions. It was later said that 130,000 Helvetii fled from the scene of the battle that night. How many were killed in the fighting no one could calculate; there were too many to count.

Caesar spent three days burying the dead of both sides and patching up his wounded before marching after the surviving Helvetii. Centurion Crastinus was leading his men of the 10th Legion down the road when envoys from the Helvetii approached the Roman column. When they were conveyed to Caesar, the Helvetians prostrated themselves in front of him, and, in tears, begged him to grant peace to their people. Caesar commanded them to cease their flight and wait for him.

The Helvetii obeyed, and the Roman army found them waiting apprehensively several miles ahead, their people on foot now—the fighting men and the women, children and old people, looking tired, hungry, bedraggled, and defeated. The legions formed up and watched in silence as the tribesmen lay down their arms, handed over escaped Roman slaves, and provided hostages. Apart from six thousand fighting men who slipped away at night and were rounded up by friendly tribes and put to death, the Helvetii received no punishment other than being sent back to Switzerland, repairing the damage they’d done to towns, villages, and farms
en
route.
The tribe tramped back to where they’d come from and never ventured from Switzerland again. The official name of Switzerland today is the Helvetian Confederation.

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The 10th Legion wasn’t done with fighting for the year. It was barely the midsummer of 58 b.c., and on the heels of Caesar’s defeat of the Helvetii the tribes of the region came to him and asked him to free them from the threat of a German king, Ariovistus, and his fierce German warriors, who had invaded northern Gaul. Caesar gave his legions the familiar order

“Prepare to March.” The trumpets of the legions sounded the call three times, as was customary. The camp was struck. Legionaries loaded the baggage train and formed up in marching order. On the third trumpet call, the lead elements moved out.

As the Germans advanced south toward the territory of the Sequani tribe in the modern Alsace region of eastern France, Caesar reached the Sequani capital of Besançon in three days of forced marches and occupied the town, which sat on a horseshoe bend of the Doubs River east of Dijon.

Here Caesar’s troops mixed with the locals, who spoke of the immense stature and terrifying military skills of the Germans who were marching toward c03.qxd 12/5/01 4:53 PM Page 21

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the town. The newer tribunes and commanders of auxiliary units, pam-pered young men recently arrived from Rome, many with not a day’s active service among them, were unnerved by the talk. Their growing dread of the Germans spread to the troops. Soon the campfire talk was all doom and gloom, and everywhere men were making and sealing their wills. Seasoned centurions such as Gaius Crastinus went to Caesar and warned him that when he gave the order to march, the men might refuse to obey.

Caesar now summoned all his centurions. He told them he intended moving camp that same night. If necessary, he said, he would advance against Ariovistus and his Germans with just the men of the 10th Legion, a unit he had every confidence would never let him down. And he repeated his old promise to make the 10th his personal bodyguard. When they heard this, the men of the 10th asked their tribunes to thank their general for his high opinion of them and to assure him they were ready to take the field with him at a moment’s notice, no matter what the rest of the army did. But the rest of the army had no intention of letting the 10th enjoy all the glory, and the spoils, and was stirred into action. In the early hours of the morning, all six legions of the task force marched out of Besançon with Caesar and headed for the approaching German army.

After six days of solid marching, scouts reported that Ariovistus was just twenty-three miles away.

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No one doubted Julius Caesar’s courage. According to Suetonius, Caesar was presented with the Civic Crown, one of Rome’s highest bravery awards, in 81 b.c. when he was just a young staff officer of nineteen or twenty, after saving the life of a fellow citizen during the storming of Mytilene, modern Mitilini, capital of the island of Lesbos. And during his operations in Spain and now in Switzerland and France, Caesar always led from the front. But neither could he be called incautious. And now he was being particularly cautious.

Ariovistus, king of the Suebi Germans, had sent Caesar a message, accepting an offer of a peace conference. But he had attached an unusual condition to the meeting—both leaders were only to be accompanied by a bodyguard of mounted troops. This started Caesar thinking that perhaps the German had bribed members of the Roman general’s Gallic cavalry to assassinate him on the way to or at the conference. To be on the safe side, Caesar ordered his cavalry to temporarily give up their horses, and mounted infantrymen of the 10th Legion in their place. He was to later c03.qxd 12/5/01 4:53 PM Page 22

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write that by this stage he considered the legionaries of the 10th to be men in whose devotion he could rely absolutely.

As the legionaries were mounting up, a soldier of the 10th was heard to remark, “Caesar’s being better than his word. He promised to make the 10th his bodyguard, and now he’s knighting us.” Caesar himself would have smiled when the comment was repeated to him, for he was to later include it in his memoirs.

The meeting took place on a rise halfway between the Roman and the German camps, with the mounted men of the 10th Legion formed up three hundred yards behind their general and King Ariovistus’s big-framed cavalrymen a similar distance behind him. Accompanied by a personal escort of ten men each, and on horseback, Caesar and Ariovistus conducted a tense face-to-face conference. As the two leaders spoke at length, with each trying to convince the other to withdraw from Gaul, German cavalrymen tried to provoke the mounted legionaries of the 10th, and Caesar temporarily broke off discussions to order his men not to retaliate.

The day’s conference ended in a stalemate, and next day Caesar sent two envoys to continue discussions on his behalf. When Ariovistus made prisoners of the envoys, his intent was clear enough. For days, the two armies jostled for position, with the Germans moving camp in an attempt to cut Caesar off from supplies coming up from Besançon, and with Caesar dividing his troops between two camps. The Germans attacked the camps, but whenever Caesar formed up his troops in battle lines, the Germans avoided a full-scale battle. Then, from prisoners, Caesar learned that the Germans believed they would not win if they fought a major encounter before the new moon. Ariovistus was stalling for time. So Caesar marched on the German camp, just fifteen miles from the Rhine River, determined to force Ariovistus to do battle before he wanted to. Even though his forty thousand men would be outnumbered, Caesar was counting on having a psychological advantage. As it turned out, pressing for a battle now had another advantage, which Caesar only later discovered: Suebi reinforcements were at that moment approaching the Rhine from the east, planning to link up with Ariovistus.

Forced to defend their camp, the Germans tumbled into the fields outside it and formed up in their clans: the Harudes; the Tribboci; the Van-giones; the Nemetes; the Eudusii; the numerous Suebi, who gave their name to the tribe as a whole; and a clan then based in the Main valley, the Marcomanni, which would grow in size and influence and within half a century settle in Bohemia, and, another 175 years later, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, would prove to be one of Rome’s fiercest foes. The c03.qxd 12/5/01 4:53 PM Page 23

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German warriors were on average several inches taller than the Romans, broad-shouldered, with long hair and beards. Their nobles, better dressed and armed than the rank and file, who often wore nothing but a fur cloak and went barefoot, wore their hair tied up in the characteristic Suebian knot. The principal weapon of the Germans was the long spear.

Caesar’s four thousand cavalry and the six thousand German cavalry held back as the legions advanced in their customary three battle lines, with the 10th Legion occupying what was now its regular position on the right wing. Caesar personally took command on the right when he saw the enemy line at its weakest on that side, and when he ordered his first two lines to charge, the men of the 10th dashed forward enthusiastically.

Even though they had been unprepared to fight, the Germans opposite ran so quickly to the attack that the legionaries didn’t even have time to throw their javelins. Dropping them, they drew their swords as the two armies came together. The Germans adopted the phalanx formation used by the Helvetii, with their line bristling with long spears, which, in theory, would keep them out of range of the short Roman swords.

Undaunted, men of the 10th brushed aside the spears and literally threw themselves on the front line of German shields. Some wrenched shields out of the hands of their owners. Others reached over the top of the shields and stabbed the points of their swords into German faces.

Using these aggressive tactics, the 10th soon routed the German left.

Meanwhile, the German right was pushing back the Roman left. Seeing this, young Publius Crassus, whom Caesar had left behind in charge of the cavalry, ordered the stationary third line to advance to the relief of the Roman left. Their arrival turned the battle, and soon the entire German army was on the run. The legions pursued them all the way to the Rhine. A few Germans managed to swim the river. King Ariovistus and one or two others escaped in boats. But all the rest, including the king’s wives and daughters, were hunted down and killed or captured by the Roman cavalry. East of the Rhine, when the Suebi reinforcements heard of the disastrous battle, they turned and fled for home. The 10th Legion could add another victory to its growing roll of honor.

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CONQUERING GAUL

t had been a short but profitable campaign for the men of the 10th. They had stripped thousands of dead Swiss and German
I
troops. They had looted their camps and baggage trains. All with only minimal casualties in their own ranks. By the fall they had settled into a massive camp in Alsace not far from Besançon, to spend a leisurely six months waiting out the winter before Caesar led them on new adventures in Gaul the following spring. Caesar himself had gone to northern Italy to carry out his duties as chief judge of his provinces, leaving the legions under the command of General Labienus. But as winter arrived, Labienus began sending Caesar intelligence reports that the tribes of northern Gaul, the Belgae, were planning to attack the Roman forces to prevent them from advancing farther into Gaul. Caesar had his own spies among the tribes, and when these insiders added credence to Labienus’s reports, he acted quickly.

Raising two new legions in northern Italy, the 13th and the 14th, Caesar returned to Gaul to confront the rebellious tribes. Collecting his six existing legions then wintering in Alsace, he marched his bolstered army up into the present-day region of Champagne-Ardenne, northeast of Paris, the home territory of the Remi people, allies of Rome, who had their capital at Rheims. Against him it was estimated that the tribes of the Belgae could muster 260,000 men, although the actual number who met him at the Aisne River north of Rheims was perhaps a third of that.

After each army tried to outmaneuver the other, Caesar dealt the Belgae a defeat using just his cavalry and auxiliaries, and the tribes split up and retreated in disorder to their home territories. This allowed Caesar to march on individual tribes and defeat them piecemeal over the coming weeks, often accepting their surrender after laying siege to their chief towns.

In this way he bloodlessly conquered the Suessiones, the Bellovaci—the largest of the Belgic tribes—and the Ambiani, then marched into the ter-

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ritory of the Nervii, who occupied an area in central Belgium east of the Scheldt River.

The Nervii were a proud people, famous fighters originally from Germany who even barred traders from selling wine in their territory because they believed it made men soft, and they had no intention of submitting to the Romans. From spies they learned the Roman order of march—Cae-sar was advancing with each legion separated by its baggage train from the next—and saw an opportunity to attack part of the column before more legions could come up in support. The Nervii had few mounted troops of their own, and to hamper enemy cavalry they had long before planted hedgerows across their fields; this gave them the confidence to take on the Roman army without fear of Caesar’s cavalry, and the king of the Nervii, Boduognatus, convinced his Belgian neighbors of the Atrebate and Viromandui tribes to join his people as they carefully prepared an ambush beside the Sambre River.

But Caesar’s scouts had forewarned him that enemy troops were active near the Sambre, so he changed the order of march as he approached the river, putting the 10th and his five other experienced legions in battle order in the vanguard of his advance, with the baggage of all the legions coming up next and the two new legions forming a rear guard. Seeing Nervian cavalry pickets on the far bank, Caesar sent his cavalry across where the river was only three feet deep and ordered his legions to begin work building a fortified camp on the slope of a hill that ran down to the Sambre. The 10th and 9th Legions were assigned the left end of the encampment, under General Labienus. The 7th and the 12th took the right, while the 8th and the 11th set to work in the middle.