Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
Tags: #Historical
the Carnute tribe had risen up and massacred newly arrived Roman settlers at their capital of Orléans. He began talking openly about rebelling against the Romans, but this terrified his uncle and other Arvernian elders, and the young man was ejected from Gergovia.
Over the next few weeks, Vercingetorix went around the villages of the Arverni preaching rebellion and gathering supporters everywhere he went, until he was able to return to Gergovia like a messiah, eject his uncle and the other elders, and claim the leadership of his people. He then sent emissaries to neighboring tribes, urging them to join the Arverni to force the Romans from Gaul. From Paris to the Bay of Biscay, French tribes recently humbled by the legions had been waiting for just such an opportunity to combine against the invading Romans, and they threw their support behind the young man, unanimously electing him the commanding general of their renewed war effort.
Gathering a large force in the mountains, Vercingetorix and his lieutenant Lucterius marched into the territory of neighboring tribes who had previously been for Rome, and soon threatened the Roman province in the south of France, the later Gallia Narbonensis.
Caesar now hurried from his winter quarters in northern Italy and raised a defense force locally in the south of France that he left with Decimus Brutus, one of his future assassins. Then, saying that he would return shortly, so that spies wouldn’t guess where he was going, he slipped north along snow-covered roads with just a small cavalry escort and joined the two legions based at Dijon. From there he summoned his eight remaining legions, and once they marched in he left two newest legions, the 15th and 16th, to guard the heavy baggage, then hurried to intercept Vercingetorix’s growing army.
To secure his supply lines he laid siege to the Senone town of Mon-targis, or Vellaunodunum, as the Romans called it. Within two days, the quaking Senones sent out envoys to organize the town’s surrender. Leaving General Labienus in charge of the arrangements, Caesar pushed on to Orléans, reaching it after a two-day march. The gates were closed, the walls lined with armed Carnutes. Arriving too late in the day to commence an assault, Caesar made camp, leaving two legions under arms all night. After midnight, the townspeople began to evacuate Orléans, flooding over the bridge that crossed the Loire. With the town gates open, Caesar sent in the two legions on standby. Orléans was quickly taken and ruthlessly plundered.
The legions crossed the Loire and advanced toward Vercingetorix, taking the town of Noviodunum. Vercingetorix’s cavalry now approached.
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But when Caesar’s cavalry engaged it, the Roman troopers were soon in trouble, so Caesar sent in four hundred German mercenary troopers of his bodyguard, whose charge set the French horsemen to flight.
Farther south, Vercingetorix and the other tribal leaders held a council of war, voting to employ a scorched-earth policy, burning the towns and villages in Caesar’s path to deny them to the Romans, and to make a stand at Avaricum, modern Bourges, sixty miles southeast of Orléans.
Vercingetorix, who’d been against holding the town at first, sent ten thousand of his men to help the forty thousand people of Bourges defend their city. As the gates of Bourges creaked shut and the defenders began to prepare ammunition stockpiles around the town’s solid walls, Vercingetorix encamped with his main army eighteen miles away.
Caesar was not long in accepting the invitation to attack Bourges. For three weeks his legions laid siege to the town in incessant winter rain, using their usual siege techniques. Two legions remained on standby during the night and slept during the day, with the remaining legions working in daylight shifts at undermining the town walls and battering the gates, using the shelter of mantlets and siege towers. The defenders weren’t idle either. There were a number of copper miners in the town, and they dug tunnels out under the town walls to undermine the siege works.
But ultimately, inevitably, the legions came over the walls one wet night. Just eight hundred people in the town managed to escape to Vercingetorix’s camp in the darkness. Tens of thousands more were cut down in the narrow streets of the town.
Delaying his next move to solve a constitutional problem of the loyal Aeduans, Caesar then divided his legions between General Labienus and himself. Of his two best legions, he kept the 10th with him and gave the 7th to Labienus. Then he sent Labienus with the 7th, 12th, 15th, and 16th Legions to sort out the rebellious tribes in the Paris area while he swung south with six legions and marched on Vercingetorix’s mountain capital, Gergovia, following the Allier River, the Roman Elaver, south.
Seeing this, Vercingetorix set off at forced-march pace down the opposite bank, determined to reach Gergovia first.
Both sides climbed up onto the plateau and reached Gergovia at much the same time after a march of five days, but Vercingetorix arrived just ahead of the Romans. With the town on a mountaintop and difficult to besiege, Caesar tried to cut off its access and water supply, lodging his legions in two camps in the hills, connecting the camps using an extensive double trench system.
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Meanwhile, Vercingetorix’s agents had brought the Aeduan tribe over to the Gallic cause with a combination of rhetoric, threats, and gold.
With spring just around the corner, a force of ten thousand Aeduans was assembled, armed, and marched down to the Auvergne Mountains. Officially they were coming to reinforce Caesar’s legions, but in reality they intended to attack the Romans from the rear. Caesar’s famous luck held, because word of the double-cross plan reached him via loyal Aeduans.
Caesar then took the 10th and three other legions and marched twenty-four miles in a day and confronted the Aeduans on the road to Gergovia. At the sight of the legions appearing unexpectedly in front of them, the young Gallic soldiers promptly threw down their arms and surrendered. Caesar not only spared them all, he added them to his force.
Giving his troops just three hours’ rest, Caesar then turned around and headed back toward Gergovia.
Twelve miles from the town, Caesar was met in the darkness by Roman cavalry bearing news that the two legions left behind outside Gergovia had been under heavy attack from tens of thousands of Vercingetorix’s troops ever since Caesar had departed with the bulk of the army, and they’d only just managed to keep the enemy out of their camp. Pounding on through the night, Caesar brought his four legions back to Gergovia a little before dawn, after marching forty-eight miles in a day and a night.
Whether his legionaries had been in the camp or on the march, they’d had a rough day.
Caesar then initiated a complicated operation that he later claimed had only limited objectives. He put helmets on his noncombatant mule drivers, then put the mule drivers on his thousands of pack animals and sent them, looking like cavalry, marching off with the 13th Legion as a feint attack on one flank. The plan worked beautifully. Enemy troops were drawn away to cover this force, and Caesar was able to launch an attack on the enemy camps outside Gergovia. Three camps were overrun.
But, according to Caesar, only the 10th Legion then obeyed the
“Recall” command. The other legions surged all the way to the walls of the town, led by the men of the 8th Legion. The enemy troops who had been drawn off now rushed back to Gergovia, and there was frantic fighting outside the town walls. A centurion of the 8th and several of his men even succeeded in mounting one of the walls before they were cut down.
When Caesar sent the ten thousand Aeduans to the aid of his men trapped by the town, the struggling legionaries mistook them for the enemy. Many panicked, and most began to give ground. Appian was to claim that an entire legion was wiped out here, but Caesar gives an unusu-
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ally credible on-the-spot accounting in which his legions, principally the 8th, lost more than seven hundred men, including forty-six centurions, before being forced to withdraw.
The victorious tribesmen surged after the retreating legionaries, but the day was saved by the 10th Legion, which Caesar had formed up on a rise in the path of the retreat. The 10th held its ground, and, personally led by Caesar, stopped the advancing enemy in their tracks. Retreating legionaries also joined their stand, and eventually the tribesmen withdrew back to Gergovia, taking numerous captured legion standards with them.
An indication of how desperate the fighting outside Gergovia was comes from a story told by Plutarch. In his day, at the end of the first century, the Averni people showed all comers a sword hanging in one of their temples. It was Julius Caesar’s sword, they said, lost by him during the Battle of Gergovia. From other sources Plutarch learned that Caesar was himself shown the sword in the temple at Gergovia several years after the battle, and his officers urged him to reclaim it. But he only smiled and told them to leave it where it was. It was now consecrated, he said.
For the first time in his career, Caesar had suffered a military reverse.
Abandoning the siege of Gergovia, he marched his bloodied legions down from the mountains. This gave the rebel tribes great heart, as did the news that General Labienus and his legions had been forced to withdraw from the Seine River after heavy fighting around Lutetia, capital of the Parisii tribe, which occupied the island in the middle of the river where Notre Dame Cathedral stands today. Labienus and his legions had won a major battle beside the Seine, only to have to retreat when tribes massing in their rear threatened to cut them off.
With both Roman armies in retreat, new supporters flocked to the rebel cause in their thousands. As Caesar was rejoined by General Labienus and marched south, Vercingetorix boasted to other Gallic leaders that the Roman commander was abandoning Gaul. Full of confidence, Vercingetorix sent his cavalry against the Roman army on the march, but they were routed by Caesar’s cavalry, which had been bolstered by a number of newly arrived German troopers, mercenaries recruited from across the Rhine by Caesar. Not only did the Gauls suffer heavy losses, but several Gallic commanders were taken prisoner as well.
Stung by this, and rather than meet Caesar’s legions in the field, Vercingetorix concentrated eighty thousand men at Alesia, modern Alise Saint Reine, on the plateau of Mont Auxois, thirty miles northwest of Dijon. The town of Alesia was then a fortified hilltop stronghold of the Mandubii tribe. On a plateau between the Ose and the Brenne Rivers, it c06.qxd 12/5/01 4:56 PM Page 58
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offered a formidable natural defensive position. Caesar wasted no time in swinging his legions around and following Vercingetorix to Alesia. There, Caesar surrounded the hill. The siege that followed became one of the most famous in history.
Caesar’s ten legions dug entrenchments around Alesia with a circum-ference of ten miles and dotted with twenty-three forts. As it became obvious that Vercingetorix was preparing to hold out for some time, Caesar built a second outer line of trenches, walls, and towers, extending for fourteen miles, to defend against attack from any relieving force from the outside. He had now trapped Vercingetorix and his army on the hilltop and sealed his own outnumbered force in around the hill. Vercingetorix’s cavalry soon attempted to break out, but in a battle on the plain below Alesia, it suffered heavy losses. In the night, some eight thousand of Vercingetorix’s cavalry did finally manage to break out, and galloped off to bring help.
Alerted to Vercingetorix’s plight, other tribes now assembled a massive relief column in central France between the Loire and the Saône Rivers.
Caesar reckoned they numbered 80,000 cavalry and 250,000 infantry.
Knowing his talent for inflation of enemy casualty figures, these numbers are probably overstated to make him look good, but there can be no doubt the army that now marched south was very large indeed, certainly more than 100,000 strong. Among the Gallic commanders marching down to the relief of Alesia was Commius, the man Caesar had made king of the Atrebates. Caesar’s onetime ally and envoy during the invasions of Britain had caught the infectious spirit of liberation. Caesar himself had a force in the region of 50,000 legionaries plus large numbers of auxiliary cavalry and infantry. Even so, all told his army wouldn’t have exceeded 80,000 men.
When the Gallic relief force arrived at Alesia, its initial attempts to storm the walls of the outer defensive ring were beaten off by Caesar’s troops. Then, when 60,000 picked Gauls launched an attack from Mount Rea, Vercingetorix attempted a coordinated attack from the inside at the same time, sending men pouring out of Alesia against Caesar’s inner entrenchments.
With Caesar’s troops strung out at the forts around the siege works, this two-way attack should have succeeded, but it didn’t. Caesar’s deputies commanded coolly and intelligently—Generals Labienus, Brutus, Fabius, and a recently arrived colonel, Mark Antony, all playing their part. Caesar describes his troop movements during this final battle in terms of his generals and cohorts, never telling us which of his ten legions did what. In c06.qxd 12/5/01 4:56 PM Page 59
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fact, the forces thrown into the breaches were eclectic, with six detached cohorts here going into action, eleven mixed cohorts there, and so on.
As the battle raged, the astute General Labienus sent Caesar a message, urging him to go onto the offensive. The time was right, he said, pointing out where the enemy line was weakest. Caesar seems to have trusted Labienus’s judgment implicitly; a number of subordinate generals had come and gone over the past six years, but he had retained Labienus, for his skill and his loyalty. Caesar accepted Labienus’s advice, and he himself led the subsequent counterattack. By his own account, his troops and those of the other side were able to identify him by his flowing
paludamentum,
the scarlet general’s cloak, in the forefront of the charge.