Romans and Barbarians: Four Views From the Empire's Edge (18 page)

This defeat would henceforth be known as
clades Variani,
the Varian Disaster. It wiped out twenty years' effort east of the Rhine. At a stroke it cost a province, its governor, his staff and perhaps 30,000 men, women and children; including three crack legions and their eagles. All garrisons within Germania were massacred. In all forts so far excavated on the Lippe, evidence of intensive activity, with coins, abundant to
AD
9, ends in the sardonic silence of a layer of ashes. However, one of these, Aliso,
105
held out for a short time. Haggard and wild-eyed, a few of Varus' survivors stumbled in. Armin was not far behind. Soon the last fort in Germany was surrounded by an exultant mob ‘brandishing the impaled heads of slain Romans on spears before the rampart'.
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At night, when perhaps the Germans were drunk, the garrison made a break for freedom and fought its way back to the Rhine with the grievous tidings.

The sombre dispatches burst on the emperor like a bomb; his over-reaction resembling that of three years earlier, to the Illyrican revolt,
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when he foresaw the imminent invasion of Italy; confirming him as a man of alarmist and emotional temperament, hardly in line with the serene public image:

On hearing of the disaster Augustus rent his clothes and mourned deeply, not just for the dead soldiers but also as an expression of fear for the endangered German
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and Gallic provinces, and because he expected the enemy would march on Rome. No citizens of military age worth mentioning were left. Moreover there were many Gauls and Germans in Rome, both in his bodyguard and on other business. These he sent away: the bodyguard to certain islands, the civilians out of the city.
109

A panic recruiting drive now followed, in Italy and the capital itself. This was by lot, with draft-dodgers punished by confiscation of property and even death. Freed slaves were enrolled and veterans recalled. The new units were sent to stand between Italy and Germany. Nevertheless the three lost legions would not be replaced. Their numbers, henceforward considered unlucky, were omitted in perpetuity from the army list.

Suetonius allows us a more personal glimpse of the emperor's distress:

When the news arrived Augustus had night watches posted throughout the city in case of disturbance and prolonged the terms of all provincial governors.
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He was said to be so stricken he refused to cut his hair or shave for months and would often bang his head against doors, shouting: ‘Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!' Each year he observed the anniversary of the disaster as one of grief and mourning.
111

Augustus was now seventy-two and had ruled for thirty-six years. Though he displayed private and public grief, the
débâcle
would not, as far as we know, be mentioned in official documents or pronouncements, least of all in his own
Accomplishments.
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Like the Balkan setback, this was a responsibility which could not be offloaded. Having stripped the senate of military powers and kept all decisions and appointments to himself, he could hardly complain of having been ill-advised. As Tacitus would put it, ‘Augustus so arranged it that the emperor must bear the blame or praise for Rome's distant wars alone.'
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He had sent a civilian into a savage land; a governor with neither tactics nor tact, a commander who had never commanded and a judge incapable of judging men. Nepotism and distrust of career generals had cost Augustus dear.

Armin did not march on Italy. It is probable that his coalition fell apart the moment Rome's presence was removed. Far from uniting a nation, he could not even resolve his private feuds; and it was owing to them, twelve years later, that he was murdered. In view of Roman prejudice, Tacitus' tribute is remarkable:

Without doubt the liberator of Germany. A man who took on the Roman nation, not in her infancy but at the summit of her sovereignty. In war without defeat, he lived thirty-seven years, twelve in power. Even now
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his fame is sung in barbarian ballads. He fell by the treachery of his own kinsmen.
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Armin's power did not spread far. Nor does his name survive in German folklore. It would remain for 17th-century learning to restore it to memory and for 19th-century nationalism to equate it with unity. Armin became Kaiser Wilhelm's answer to Napoleon III's glorification of Vercingetorix and the Victorian cult of the misspelt ‘Boadicea'.
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So earnestly did such rivalries seek Roman precedent that Clemenceau would argue Gaul's boundaries in support of French claims at Versailles.

It would be time to leave this remarkable young man who, at twenty-five years of age, defied and defeated Augustus; except that a group of events, six years later, offers a final glimpse. The postscript is by courtesy of Tacitus who, in his latest work, the
Annals,
deals with Rome's vengeance. In the last year of Augustus' life a war of revenge was unleashed on Germany. In command was Drusus' son, Germanicus; Tiberius' nephew and father of Caligula, next emperor but one. Here was a young man with his father's feverish zeal, buoyed up and urged on by popular expectation that he would restore Rome's tarnished honour. ‘He was', as Tacitus reminds us, ‘great-nephew of Augustus and the grandson of Antony; and in his imagination there resided the whole great picture of triumph and tragedy.'
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Nothing in this resumption of the German War could be closer to Germanicus' heart than revival of the amphibious strategy by which his father had first led the eagles into northern Germany. This would also be the perfect pincer to nip the Cheruscans, prime target of revenge, though it seemed likely that Armin himself would by now have fled eastwards or into Scandinavia. In Tacitus' view the objective was ‘rather to expiate the shame of Quintilius Varus than extend the empire',
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but the inferences of Germanicus' dispatches and conduct are that he saw the restitution of a lapsed province as his sacred duty.

Like his father, he would spend three summers in Germany. It is the second of these,
AD
15, which is of special interest: for not only did he rediscover the site of the Teutoburg battle, but also there are vivid descriptions both of the sea passage and the bog war, which compensate in some measure for the sources' silence on similar aspects of his father's and uncle's campaigns.

So, with Germanicus, the North German War returns to its starting place; what are now the Netherlands; and particularly to that part of them which the Romans called the Batavian Island, the largest piece of relatively dry land, between the Old Rhine and the Waal. The rest of the huge delta was water or reedy fen, though with ridges left by former river courses and the natural levees of existing ones, along which ran prehistoric paths and tracks. Native settlement was mainly on mounds (in Dutch,
Terpen
) elevated and enlarged by centuries of tipping. Here were small plots, a few animals, plus a living to be made from fishing and fowling; for this vast wetland must have been a bird haven whose like northern Europe has long forgotten. The Romans copied the local method of mound-making, or founded their buildings on wooden stakes, hammered into the mud. Place names with the syllable
wijk,
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Latin
vicus
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(village), show how numerous Roman settlements were eventually to become.

Now, throughout the winter, scores of small shipyards sprang up along the muddy shores of the Batavian Island. With timber floated down from the German forest, thousands of soldiers instructed by hundreds of sailors laboured to cobble together the shallow-draught troopships and supply vessels for the coming campaign. We have statistics for the year following, when eight legions, their auxiliaries, horses and supplies embarked in a thousand newly built ships. The scale suggests how terrible Rome's revenge would be. Why, one may ask, were new ships built before each season? The answer must be that Germanicus had no option but to use green timber, which warps rapidly, rendering ships useless within a few months. Tacitus' celebrated narrative of the seaborne operation concerns the return journey only. His account of the overland arm of the expedition, which deals with both the outward and inward journey, is no less sensational. Here a vanguard detachment, partway up the Lippe Valley, encountered a group of Bructer,
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perhaps thirty miles south of the Teutoburg region. They engaged and the Germans fled. To the Romans' surprise and intense excitement, a search of the captured
impedimenta
revealed the eagle of
Legio XIX,
lost with Varus. Led by survivors of the disaster, who were acting as guides, they pressed on:

Now they were approaching the Teutoburg
saltus
where the remains of Varus and his legions were said still to be lying unburied. On they marched across the gloomy plain, chilling both to look at and to think about. Varus' first camp was wide in extent, with its tent plots marked out for men and officers, suited to the size of three legions. Then a half-ruined dyke and shallow ditch showed where the last remnant had taken cover. In the parade ground area were bleaching bones, scattered where men had fallen individually, or in heaps where they had made a stand. Splintered spears and horses' legs lay around. Human skulls were nailed to tree trunks. In nearby groves were savage altars at which they had sacrificed the young lieutenants and warrant officers. Some among the relieving force, who had survived the battle or given their captors the slip, recounted where the commanders had fallen, where the eagles were seized, where Varus was first wounded and where he died by his own tragic hand. They told of the platform from which Armin had harangued his fellow victors, of the arrogance with which he had insulted the standards and the eagles; and of the gibbets and torture pits for the prisoners.

Following the main army's arrival the battlefield was tidied and a memorial service held: ‘And so, six years after the disaster, a Roman army buried three legions' bones, while Germanicus laid the first sod upon the funeral mound.'
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Little is known of the season's retribution which followed. One can only guess at the extent of atrocity committed in the name of
Mars Ultor
(‘Mars, who has the last word'). At the end of it, in September or early October, Germanicus began the usual retirement toward the Rhine. His army now regrouped into two columns, one returning by land the other making for a pick-up point on one of the rivers, where the fleet waited.

The landward army, under the veteran commander V. Severus Caecina, was crossing stretches of log causeway, improved during previous campaigns but now badly deteriorated. The route was seemingly along the line where the wooded hills and the plain met; a place of danger and difficulty owing to the excessive run-off from the adjacent high ground and the concealment which its trees afforded. ‘All around was vile, heaving bog and clinging mud, veined with small streams.' The legionaries struggled to repair the causeways. At this worst of moments the worst happened. Not only did a large force of Germans appear through the trees above, but their leader – it could clearly be seen – was none other than Armin himself: not skulking beyond the Oder or a refugee across the Skagerrak, but here in person, uncomfortably close to the scene of the Varian Disaster and under circumstances which looked painfully similar. As his main force rushed downhill to attack, others diverted streams, flooding the area where the Romans were already stuck. Not just the place and season, but also Armin's instinct for the psychological moment, were frighteningly familiar. The only improvement, from a Roman viewpoint, was that Caecina was no lawyer but an able and experienced soldier.

The subsiding ground made it too soft to stand still and too slippery to move. They were in heavy armour and could not balance themselves to throw their javelins effectively. To the Cheruscans, however, such conditions were normal. The legions were close to breaking point when nightfall saved them. But this would be a night of little ease.

In Tacitus' description of the nocturnal ordeal, strongly reminiscent of the night before Agincourt,
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the predicament of the two armies is suggested by contrasting sounds. However, in the apparition of Varus, Tacitus plays an even more horrific card.

As the Germans revelled, the valleys and forests echoed with their savage shoutings and jubilant chants; while in the Roman lines men huddled round fitful fires, speaking in snatches, lying down behind their improvised dykes or wandering among the tents in a sleepless daze. That night, too, the general had a most horrible dream in which he beheld Quintilius Varus, drenched in blood, rising from the morass and beckoning him.