Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
Tags: #Historical
The Nervian cavalry retreated into a wood on the sloping far bank, but kept reappearing to harry the Roman cavalry. In the meantime, the legionaries stacked their backpacks, shields, and javelins, and set to work with entrenching tools building their camp. After a time the Roman baggage train came lumbering onto the scene. This was the moment the tribesmen had been waiting for—they had agreed to hold off their attack until the first Roman baggage train arrived. Not realizing the Romans now had just one large train, and that six legions, not one, were now on the far bank, the Belgae poured from the wood in their tens of thousands. Caesar was to estimate he faced sixty thousand warriors at the Sambre. In the face of this wall of screaming men, the surprised Roman cavalry fled in all directions, and the hollering tribesmen dashed to the river.
The Belgae were already splashing across the Sambre by the time Caesar was able to comprehend the scope of what was happening. He issued a c04.qxd 12/5/01 4:54 PM Page 26
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minimum of orders; his flag went up, and the trumpets sounded “To Arms.”
Men were running everywhere as he galloped to the 10th Legion on his left.
The legionaries of the 10th had dropped their tools, grabbed their arms, and hurried down the slope to form up in their cohorts below the camp works, with the leather weather covers still on their shields. Many were so pushed for time they didn’t even have the chance to don their helmets, let alone add plumes or decorations.
“My soldiers of the 10th,” Caesar yelled, “live up to your tradition of bravery, keep your nerve, meet the enemy’s attack with boldness, and we shall win the day!”
The men of the 10th roared a hurrah, shaking their javelins in the air.
Confident his favorite legion would hold their wing, and with a nod of assurance from General Labienus, Caesar galloped off to organize defenses elsewhere.
The slope, the hedgerows, and the suddenness of the attack combined to split up the Roman army. The 10th and the 9th found themselves separated from the other legions as warriors of the Atrebates tribe emerged from the river and came surging up the slope toward them. General Labienus coolly waited for the tribesmen to come within range, then gave the order for the front line to let fly with their javelins. A volley of missiles sliced down into the Atrebates. Out of breath, many of them wounded, with comrades falling dead all around them, the Atrebates stopped in their tracks.
Now the Roman commander gave the order to charge. With swords drawn, and with General Labienus leading the way, the men of the 10th and 9th Legions swept down the hill and overwhelmed the Belgian warriors. Tribesmen in the rear turned and ran to the river, and the legionaries chased them all the way across, cutting down many from behind as they fled in panic. The river was soon filled with bloody, dismembered bodies. The men of the 10th and the 9th pursued other Atrebates up the slope on the far bank, all the way to the woods at the top of the slope from which they had emerged a little time before.
On the Roman right wing, the 7th and 12th Legions had been all but surrounded by Boduognatus and his Nervii. Here, the Roman disorder, particularly among the men of the less experienced 12th Legion, most of whose centurions were already dead or wounded, threatened to give way to defeat. The legion’s 4th Cohort, which had taken the brunt of the Nervian attack, had lost every centurion and a standard bearer. Caesar arrived on the scene to find men assembled behind any standard and packed tightly together in their fear. Caesar dismounted and grabbed a shield c04.qxd 12/5/01 4:54 PM Page 27
from a man in the rear, then made his way to the forefront of the battle, yelling orders. “Push forward! Spread out! Give yourselves room to fight!”
He addressed the surviving centurions by name, urging them and their men on. Given new heart by the arrival of their general, the men of the 12th rallied. Seeing the 7th Legion close by similarly hard pressed, Caesar shouted to their tribunes, ordering them to link up with the 12th and form one large square. As this formation was created, Boduognatus and his Nervii were held back, but Caesar and the two legions were still being pressed by compact phalanxes on three sides.
On the far bank of the river, General Labienus and his two legions had chased the Atrebates into the woods and discovered the tribes’ camp, where the Belgians had lain in wait for the Roman column for days prior to Caesar’s arrival. Quickly dealing with the few sentries, Labienus occupied the camp, then pushed on up to the top of the hill. Looking back across the river, he saw the predicament of Caesar and the 7th and the 12th, and quickly ordered the 10th Legion to go to Caesar’s aid before the Nervii broke through.
As the men of the 10th came wading back across the river, the two legions of the rear guard, the 13th and the 14th, topped the hill above the Roman earthworks. From there, the recently recruited new arrivals from northern Italy could see Belgae tribesmen in the partly built Roman camp.
The enemy were looting the baggage train as noncombatants, cavalry, and auxiliaries ran for their lives. They also saw that Caesar and his legions at the bottom of the hill were in big trouble. There was German auxiliary cavalry from the Treveri tribe with the rear guard—Caesar was to say Trever cavalry was the best and most numerous in all of Gaul. These German troopers were convinced all was lost and turned around and galloped away.
Days later, when they reached their own capital, Trier, on the Moselle, they reported that Caesar and his army had been wiped out by the Nervii.
On the right, Boduognatus and his closely packed ranks only had eyes for Caesar and his trapped legions. They didn’t know anything about the return of the 10th Legion until its leading cohorts plowed into their flank at the charge. The 10th was heavily outnumbered, but despite this, the legion’s arrival turned the battle. The men of the 10th fought so fiercely to save Caesar that Plutarch was to say later that they displayed more than human courage this day. Stunned by their savage onslaught, the Nervii were pushed back to the river bank by the 10th, enabling Caesar to regroup the 7th and 12th Legions and lead them to join the 10th.
In the center, the 8th and 11th Legions succeeded in withstanding the attack of the Viromandui, then also pushed them back to the river’s edge.
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Once the Viromandui broke off and fled, the 8th and the 11th were able to swing over and join the other three legions throwing themselves at the Nervii, who made a brave stand on the bank, fighting from behind mounds of their own dead and refusing to flee. Thousands were felled. A handful escaped and others were made prisoners as the Roman cavalry regrouped and searched the countryside for enemy on the run.
Caesar was to estimate that just five hundred fighting men of the Nervii remained capable of carrying arms following this battle. Later events were to prove this an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that on this day the flower of the Nervii were cut down beside the Sambre. We never hear of Boduognatus again, so presumably he died with many of his men. Three surviving Nervian elders of an original six hundred on the Nervii governing counsel sent envoys to Caesar begging peace, which he agreed to, with lenient conditions.
Meanwhile, the Atuatuci, Belgian neighbors of the Nervii, were marching to their aid when news of their defeat at the Sambre reached them. As the Atuatuci turned around and retreated to a stronghold, probably at Mount Falhize, Caesar sent young General Publius Crassus with the 7th Legion to prevent the tribes on France’s Atlantic seaboard from entering the conflict, while he himself marched on the Atuatuci with the 10th and his other legions. After a brief siege the Atuatuci surrendered. Caesar sold fifty-three thousand of them into slavery. Roman settlers from the south would soon spread into captured territory and acquire the homes and farms of defeated tribespeople.
At the same time, on the coast, Crassus and the 7th forced seven Gallic tribes into submission. On receipt of Caesar’s dispatches describing his crushing victories in France and Belgium, the Senate at Rome, convinced he had conquered all of Gaul, voted him fifteen straight days of public thanksgiving. As Caesar himself would later point out, no one in Roman history had previously been granted such an honor. But the war in Gaul was not yet at an end.
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Over the next three years Caesar would send Crassus and the 7th to conquer Aquitania and would himself destroy the tribes of Brittany, primarily in a naval battle off the coast in which men from his legions acted as marines and successfully boarded and destroyed the ships of the coastal tribes. Over the winter of 56–55 b.c., two German tribes, the Usipetes and the Tenctheri, crossed the Rhine near its mouth in Holland and occu-
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pied part of northern Gaul. Caesar, who had been wintering in northern Italy, as was his habit, hurried back into Gaul and marched his legions against the Germans.
After an initial cavalry skirmish, the German leaders came to the Roman camp to discuss a peace, but Caesar broke all the international rules of neutrality by making them his prisoners, an act that brought him much criticism. Plutarch says that Cato the Younger, speaking in the Senate, described the tactic as “madness and folly,” and advocated handing Caesar over to the Germans for this breach. Caesar himself never offered a plausible excuse in his own writings. It was an act of expediency, pure and simple, one that enabled him to march his legions to the German camp, eight miles away, and to overrun the leaderless invaders.
Many Germans were killed by Caesar’s troops; others were drowned trying to swim back across the Rhine. Plutarch says three hundred thousand died in total. To further awe the Germans, Caesar then had his legions put a wooden bridge across the Rhine, near modern Koblenz. Forty feet wide, according to Caesar it took just ten days to build. He then crossed the Rhine and destroyed German towns and farms east of the river for the next eighteen days, before withdrawing and destroying much of his bridge.
Now, at last, Gaul was quiet. Yet it was still summer. To the west, beyond the Channel ports Caesar had seized along the French coast, lay the largest island then known to the Romans, Britain. Caesar had the troops, he had the time, and he had ships, some provided by new Gallic allies, others captured from the tribes of Brittany the previous year. Now Caesar set plans in motion for a daring amphibious operation.
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V
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INVADING BRITAIN
here was an eerie silence as the dawn broke over the fleet of ships sailing in close company across the English Channel. With
T
tense expressions, all on board the eighty transports and the dozen warships of their escort strained their eyes to study the foreign land ahead as the white cliffs of Dover began to shine luminously in the new day’s light.
They had sailed from France at midnight, putting out with the tide, after a day of good late summer weather. With a southerly wind behind them they’d made excellent progress in the night, passing Cape Gris-Nez, then turning northwest. They were following a course planned in advance for them by young Colonel Gaius Volusenus, who had earlier reconnoitered potential landing sites along the southern coast of England in the frigate that would have now been leading the invasion convoy.
Julius Caesar and his senior officers were spread among the warships of the escort, frigates and cruisers with banks of oars that flashed and dipped in the early morning light to the beat pounded out by the warships’
keleustes,
their timekeepers, with wooden mallets on wooden blocks. On board the transports, locally built craft with relatively flat bottoms, high prows, and sterns and powered by just a single square sail each, were the Spanish legionaries of the 10th and 7th Legions, with an average of 150
men to each troopship.
With just enough vessels at his disposal to carry two legions and several hundred cavalry, it had been a given that one of the legions Caesar would take with him was the 10th. The 7th, four years older than the 10th, with its men aged between twenty-seven and thirty, had won a place in the invasion force after its dominating performances against the Gallic tribes of Brittany and Aquitania over the past few years. The two legions had built an embarkation camp at Boulogne in the Pas de Calais area, and there the preparations for the operation had been made, the equipment
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readied, the fleet assembled, and the ammunition and supplies brought in for a brief exploratory visit across the Channel. Caesar himself admitted that little could be achieved in the short amount of campaigning time left to him that year, but, as Plutarch was to say, Caesar had a love of honor and a passion for distinction. He was on a high after his latest successes against the Gauls and the Germans, and, driven by a determination to exceed the reputations of rivals living and dead, he was determined to set foot on Britain, to go where no Roman general had gone before.
While Caesar was engaged on his British expedition, the rest of the army wasn’t to be idle. He had divided the remainder of the legions into two forces. One, under General Publius Sulpicius Rufus, was guarding the embarkation area around Boulogne. The other, under General Quintus Titurius Sabinus, was marching up the coast to subdue a tribe in Belgium and another in Holland that had yet to send ambassadors and negotiate peace treaties with the Romans.
There was movement along the top of the chalk cliffs to their left as the invasion fleet slid up the coast of Kent, or Cantium, as the Romans dubbed it. Observing the ships from the heights were British tribesmen, cavalry and infantry, fully armed and waiting in their war paint—their exposed upper bodies and grim faces daubed in wild, tattoolike patterns with blue-green woad, a plant dye. The Britons’ friends in Gaul had warned them of Roman preparations to cross the Channel, and they had initially sent envoys to Caesar to discuss an alliance with Rome, to fore-stall an invasion. But when Caesar sent his new ally King Commius of the Atrebates tribe—a man he’d installed as leader of the Atrebates after the Battle of the Sambre—as his ambassador, to continue discussions on his behalf, the Britons had made Commius and the thirty mounted Atrebat-ian warriors of his escort prisoners. Just as Caesar was really more interested in conquering British tribes on their doorstep than signing treaties with them from afar, the tribes were determined to repel invaders.