Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (8 page)

At about 9:00 a.m. the Roman fleet dropped anchor off a beach just past the South Foreland, which had been selected for the landing during Colonel Volusenus’s earlier reconnaissance mission. But Caesar was far from happy with the site chosen by Volusenus, a narrow beach with high cliffs on either side from which the gathering Britons could send down a hail of missiles against a force trying to land from the sea. Caesar held off giving the order to go ashore, allowing time for all the ships of the convoy to arrive.

In particular he was waiting for his cavalry. The Roman mounted troops assigned to the operation had been sent to the little port of Amble-

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teuse, six miles up the coast from Boulogne, where a smaller fleet of eighteen transports had been prepared for them. This second convoy, carrying the cavalry units, was supposed to leave Ambleteuse at the same time the infantry set sail. What Caesar didn’t know was that the smaller convoy’s departure had been delayed by the late overland arrival of the cavalry from Boulogne. By the time they’d been loaded with horses, riders, equipment, and feed, these ships missed the tide and were driven back to the French coast in the darkness. There they remained still, at anchor and waiting for a fresh tide and a favorable wind.

By the early afternoon, running out of patience with the missing cavalry, Caesar convened a conference of senior officers on board his flagship to discuss the situation. They were all rowed to his cruiser in their warships’ dinghies. There, on the deck, and in sight of the Britons on the bluffs, Caesar briefed his generals and colonels on the alternative landing sites previously identified by Colonel Volusenus. Caesar then passed on his intention to land farther up the coast before nightfall. He tells us that prior to dismissing them, he gave his commanders a warning: “For this landing to succeed, my orders—and there are likely to be a number of them, in rapid succession—will have to be obeyed instantly.”

Wind and tide were running with them, and Caesar gave the order to weigh anchor as soon as the officers had been rowed back to their ships.

It was 3:00 p.m. when the fleet began to move up the coast.

On land, the surprised Britons followed their progress. Then, realizing the Roman intentions, their war chiefs sent cavalry galloping ahead. And chariots. With each vehicle containing a seated driver and a standing warrior, a noble of his tribe, and drawn by a pair of horses, these two-wheeled war machines were nothing like the idealized and historically inaccurate statue of Boudicca and her Roman-style chariot on London’s Thames Embankment today. The British chariot was an open-ended platform with low wicker sides. And, contrary to folklore, there were no blades attached to the wheels. War chariots had ceased to be used in mainland Europe at least a hundred years earlier, but they were still deployed by armies in some parts of the East, as Caesar would find at the Battle of Zela in eight years’ time.

The new landing site was a long, flat beach between present-day Walmer Castle and Deal. The Britons reached it first. As the leading ships of the fleet came up, cavalry and chariots were galloping along the sands, the warriors waving their javelins and challenging the invaders. Others dismounted and came a little way into the water, shaking their javelins and large rectangular shields and yelling insults. The nobles were better c05.qxd 12/5/01 4:55 PM Page 33

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clothed and equipped. The rank and file were generally lithe little men with mustaches but not beards, and stripped to the waist with their faces and torsos decorated with blue woad designs.

Caesar gave the order for the landing to go ahead, and the transports slid into the shallows and grounded. But because of their draft and heavy loads, the craft were still in relatively deep water. Spanish legionaries going over the sides fully armed with shields and javelins would find themselves up to their chests in water, even up to their necks in some cases, and they didn’t like the idea at all. One stumble and they would be fish feed. There were a lot of heads shaking along the low rails of the transports.

Seeing this, Caesar signaled the warships of the escort to also run aground, farther down the beach on the Britons’ right flank, from where they could cover the landing with their artillery and the auxiliary archers carried by several cruisers. Without hesitation, the masters of the warships obeyed—the cruisers and frigates slid into shore with their oars raking the surf, and ejecting volleys of arrows.

On the sand, the Britons, who had never seen ships powered by banks of oars before, lost their initial bravado and drew back out of range. This was the moment Caesar had been waiting for, and he gave the order for the legionaries of the 7th and the 10th to go over the side. But still the troops hesitated, looking at the deep water beside them and the rolling surf that could knock them off their feet.

It was now that the
aquilifer
of the 10th Legion, the bearer of its eagle standard, took the step that was to immortalize him, although his name has not come down to us. No more than twenty-seven years of age, he probably first uttered the Legionary’s Prayer: “Jupiter Greatest and Best, protect this legion, soldiers all,” adding, according to Caesar, “May my act bring good luck to us all.” Then he went over the side with the eagle of the 10th.

“Jump in, boys!” he called to his comrades, holding the standard high,

“unless you want to surrender our eagle to the enemy. I, for one, intend doing my duty by my homeland and by my general.”

The men of the 10th on ships all around him gaped in horror as the
aquilifer
bore their eagle toward the beach. The eagle of the legion, silver at this time, gold by imperial times, was venerated by its legionaries. Kept at an altar in camp with lamps burning throughout the night, it and the ground it stood on were considered sacred. Conveyance and protection of the eagle were the tasks of the men of the 1st Cohort, but it was the obligation of every soldier in the legion to defend it with his life. Roman c05.qxd 12/5/01 4:55 PM Page 34

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generals were feted as national heroes for retrieving eagles wrested from legions by the enemy. But the loss itself was never forgotten. It was the greatest dishonor a legion could suffer to have its eagle taken in battle, a stain to the reputation of legion and legionary alike that never went away.

Well did the men of the 10th know there were many instances in Roman history of eagle-bearers and legionaries and centurions giving their lives to save their eagle. And here was this idiot about to make a gift of the eagle of the 10th to the barbarian British! With a roar, affronted men of the 10th went over the side and then splashed through the water, following their crazy-brave eagle-bearer and their hallowed eagle through the surf toward the waiting Britons. Not to be outdone, on seeing the 10th proceeding to land, the men of the 7th Legion went over the side as well.

Legionaries managed to reach the beach without any great difficulty, but because only small groups were coming off the boats in long, thin lines, each group was quickly attacked by the British cavalry on the sands, with the Britons astutely aiming their missiles at the Romans’ unprotected right sides. Many legionaries soon lost contact with their individual standards as they tried to keep the Britons at bay. The legionary was taught early in his training that if he couldn’t find his own unit’s standard in battle, any standard would do in an emergency. But in obeying this ethic now the men of the landing force found confusion, not clarity, bunching here, leaving gaps there.

Realizing that many of the men straggling ashore from each transport stood the risk of being isolated and wiped out, Caesar ordered the small boats of each larger vessel lowered. These were loaded with men who were then landed as ready-action squads wherever legionaries were in trouble.

This tactic paid dividends as the reinforced maniples and cohorts were able to regroup in numbers behind their own standards, then drive the Britons back. As the natives began to turn and flee, Caesar cursed his missing cavalry. It was at this point in a battle that the cavalry arm usually followed up the infantry success and chased the enemy for miles. As it was, his legionaries were called back after half a mile or so rather than lose contact with their commanders on the beach.

Just the same, the success of the Roman landing had a humbling effect on the tribesmen. As the landing force began digging in just inland of the beachhead, British envoys came to Caesar, bringing the captive Atrebates king Commius, Caesar’s ambassador, and his thirty-man cavalry escort, complete with their horses. The prisoners were all handed over unharmed, with Caesar warmly greeting the young king of the Atrebates. The British envoys now asked for peace. In return, Caesar demanded hostages. Some c05.qxd 12/5/01 4:55 PM Page 35

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were handed over immediately, and others from tribes far and wide began to make their way to him.

Four days after Caesar’s landing in Kent, the south wind picked up sufficiently for the cavalry to again set sail from Ambleteuse to join their commander in chief. But as the eighteen transports carrying the troopers and their horses slowly approached the Deal area and hove in sight of the Roman troops at the beachhead, a savage storm swept down from the north. Some of the transports were driven back to France, others were pushed down the English coast and forced to stand well out to sea during the night before making their way back to their starting point at Ambleteuse next day. None was sunk, but none reached Caesar either.

The ships of the first convoy fared even worse in the storm. The warships were still drawn up on the sand where they had beached themselves on day one, while the transports lay at anchor off the beach. There was a full moon that night, accompanied by a king tide. Romans had never previously taken note of the fact that particularly high tides accompanied full moons on the Atlantic shore, and no precautions had been taken, with the result that the high tide swamped the warships. Meanwhile, the storm drove the ships at anchor ashore. Some were wrecked on the coast, and all the others sustained often serious damage. Come the morning not a single ship was usable.

Now, all of a sudden, Caesar was cut off, without any long-term supplies or means of getting them from France, let alone transport for a speedy return to France for the winter as planned. Inspired by this, the British chieftains who’d been all for peace and fraternity a few days before put their heads together and decided to renew hostilities against the relatively small Roman force. As Caesar was to later learn, their plan was to starve the legionaries into submission, in the hope that their fate would discourage any future Roman forays onto British shores.

While the men of the 10th Legion concentrated on salvaging the wrecked ships, Caesar sent the 7th Legion out into the fields, which were ripe with British wheat. The 7th Legion’s bold and successful commander of the past two years, young General Publius Crassus, had gone back to Rome over the winter of 56–55 b.c. to take up a civil appointment in his father’s administration—he was consul for the year, along with Pompey the Great, in 55 b.c. The senior Crassus would travel to the Middle East the following year to take charge in Syria, and young Publius would go with him, becoming deputy commander of the force of seven legions that the elder Crassus was to take into Parthia in 53 b.c., when both father and son were killed at the infamous Battle of Carrhae, one of Rome’s most c05.qxd 12/5/01 4:55 PM Page 36

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costly defeats, in present-day Turkey. The younger Crassus would die first, leading the advance guard. The Parthians put his severed head on the point of a spear and taunted his father and the rest of the Roman troops with it. Ironically, perhaps, young Crassus’s widow, Cornelia, soon married Pompey the Great, becoming his fifth wife. Pompey had been married to Caesar’s daughter Julia, but she was to die in childbirth in 54 b.c.

So it was without the guiding hand and brave leadership of popular young General Crassus that the 7th went to Britain, and went in search of wheat this day. The first day of wheat-gathering had gone well, with the legionaries toting numerous sacks full of it back to the beachhead camp.

After dawn, the men of the 7th marched back out into the fields. It was a pleasant, sunny late summer’s morning as the legionaries marched along, passing small groups of Britons on their way to the camp to do business with the Roman supply officers at the beach. Away in the distance, men, women, and children were working in the fields, tilling the soil, tending their cattle. To the Spanish legionaries this would have been a rural scene reminiscent of home.

A few miles from the camp, and out of sight of it, they came to where they’d been working the previous day, a wheat field spreading to distant woods. Two-thirds of the wheat field had previously been leveled by the 7th, and just one section near the woods remained to be harvested. The men of the legion planted their standards in the ground, did the same with their javelins, leaned their shields against them, and removed their helmets. Then, taking scythes, wicker baskets, and empty sacks with them, they spread out in the rows of wheat stalks, cutting and collecting, chattering and laughing among themselves as they worked, closely supervised by their
optios
—sergeant majors—and centurions, who soon told them to shut up if they became too rowdy.

The legion hadn’t been at work many minutes when, out of the blue, javelins began slicing into the ground around the feet of bent and toiling soldiers nearest the woods. Moments later, with terrifying war cries, thousands of Britons came streaming from the trees, brandishing their weapons, and after Roman blood. Legionaries closest to the woods were cut down before they knew what hit them. With centurions bawling orders, the men of the 7th dashed for their weapons. There wasn’t time for trumpet calls, no time to form up by squad, century, maniple, or cohort. The Roman troops could only form a rough, disorganized battle line, with stranger beside stranger and each man realizing how much he’d become accustomed to the habits and company of the comrades of his own unit.