John Roberts - Nobody Loves a Centurion

Pompey and Crassus, Caesar’s colleagues, had secured him his extraordinary five-year command of Gaul and had promised to support him. If he trusted those two, I thought, he might be waiting a long time for his reinforcements.

Carbo looked me over with an even more sour expression. “And Decius, do yourself, me, the army, and the immortal gods a favor and get out of that parade rig before you report to Caesar. This is not like the other armies of your experience.”

“Really? I thought I was pretty well turned out.” For the first time I noticed that Carbo wore a plain, Gallic mail shirt and a potshaped bronze helmet devoid of decoration, just like any legionary except that his sword hung on the left side instead of the right and he had a purple sash of command around his waist. Even as I noted this, we heard a series of trumpet notes from inside the camp.

“Too late,” Carbo said. “There’s commander’s call. You’ll have to report immediately. Prepare for a little ribbing.”

We set out on foot for the camp, Hermes behind us leading the animals.

“How long is this rampart you’re building?” I asked Carbo.

“It stretches from the lake to the mountains to contain the Helvetii, about nineteen miles.”

“ Nineteen miles ?” I said, aghast. “Is this Caius Julius Caesar we’re talking about here? The same Caesar I knew in Rome, who never walked where he could be carried and who never lifted a weapon heavier than his voice?”

“You’re going to meet a different Caesar,” he promised me. And so I did.

We entered the camp by the southern gate and walked up the Via Praetoria, which led straight as an arrow’s path through the center of the camp to the praetorium, the inner compound containing the commander’s staff tent, surrounded by its own low earthen rampart. The Via Principalis intersected the Via Praetoria at right angles; beyond it lay the quarter occupied by the higher officers and whatever troops they cared to keep separate from the regular legionaries, decurions, and centurions. Usually, these were extraordinarii , men with more than twenty years in the ranks who had no duties except for combat. I noticed an unusual number of tents ranked beyond the praetorium and asked Carbo about them.

“A special praetorian guard Caesar has organized. They’re mostly auxilia, both foot and cavalry.” Other generals used praetorian guards, usually as bodyguards on campaign, but often as a special reserve to employ at crucial moments in battle. From the size of Caesar’s guard, I assumed that their purpose was the latter.

Before the praetorium, along the length of the Via Principalis were ranked the individual tents of the prefects and tribunes. At the juncture of the two streets stood the legion’s shrine: a tent containing the standards. Before it stood an honor guard, and since the weather was good the standards were uncovered on their wooden pedestal. The guards stood motionless with drawn swords, and from their short mail shirts and small, circular shields you might have taken them for auxiliary skirmishers; but their position and the lion skins covering their helmets and hanging down their backs proclaimed that these were signifers and the aquilifer , among the most important officers of the legion, raised from the ranks because they were the bravest of the brave.

We saluted the eagle as we passed, and I noted that the rectangular plaque below the eagle, with its dangling horsetail terminals, read: LEGIO X . That was comforting. The Tenth was rated by everyone as the best. By everyone except the other legions, that is. I knew a number of men who served with the Tenth, both officers and rankers. If I had to be out here with only a single legion around me, I couldn’t have asked for better.

Two of the praetorian guards stood before the gap in the waist-high rampart that surrounded the praetorium; men armed with thrusting spears, bearing light armor and shields. The rampart was more a symbolic partition than a real defense. In the middle of its eastern wall was the high platform from which the general could address the forum, an open space where the legion could assemble, and where the traders did business with the legion and the local farmers could hold markets on specified days.

Naturally, we were the last to arrive. A large table had been set up before the big general’s tent and all the senior officers were grouped around it. These were the tribunes and prefects, the officers of auxilia, and a single centurion. This last, I knew, would be the centurion of the First Century of the First Cohort, known in every legion as the primus pilus : First Spear. Alone among the officers he wore bronze greaves strapped to his shins, archaic armor abandoned centuries before by other foot soldiers but retained as a sign of rank for centurions. At the moment we entered, he was gesturing toward something on the table with his vinestaff, a three-foot stick the thickness of a man’s thumb and another badge of the centurionate. As we walked in, he looked up, and his face froze.

Caesar was leaning on the table, looking at what I now saw was a map. Behind him stood his twelve proconsular lictors, leaning on their fasces . In Rome, the lictors wore togas, but here they were in field dress: red tunics with wide leather belts dyed black and studded with bronze nails, a custom dating to the time of the Etruscan kings. As the staff fell silent, Caesar looked up and straightened, then he took on his familiar, hieratic pontifex maximus demeanor. Slowly, solemnly, he drew a fold of his military cloak over his head.

“Gentlemen,” he pronounced, “cover your heads. It is a visitation from Olympus. Victory must be ours, for the god Mars has descended to be among us.”

The assembly broke up into raucous laughter so loud it probably alarmed the sentries. Even Carbo laughed so hard he got hiccups. I hoped my helmet hid the worst of my flaming face as I stood like an idiot with my arm still fully extended in salute.

“I don’t suppose you brought any reinforcements, Decius?” Caesar said, mopping the tears from his face with his cloak.

“I am afraid not, Proconsul.”

“I suppose it was too much to hope. Well, we were all in need of a good laugh, anyway. Join us, Decius. Titus Vinius was about to give us a report on the state of the fortifications and enemy action against it. Continue, First Spear.”

Enemy action? I thought. There was no host massed out there in the usual Gallic prebattle fashion. A line crawled across the map from the mountains to the lake and it was toward the lake that the centurion pointed with his vinestaff.

“Weakest spot’s here where we run into the lake. The ground is swampy there and they come around the end of the wall through the shallows, do what damage they can, and run back the same way. They can flank it just as easily from the mountain end, but they’re too lazy to go that far. Plus, in the swamps we can’t chase ’em with our cavalry.”

Caesar looked up at Carbo. “Gnaeus, I want you to put together a small force of picked auxilia; good swimmers who aren’t afraid of water. No armor, not even helmets. Just hand weapons and light shields. I want an end to these attacks by web-footed Gauls.”

“They’ll be on duty tonight, Commander,” Carbo said. I cleared my throat.

“Mars wishes to speak,” said Lucius Caecilius Metellus, a distant relative of mine, nicknamed “Lumpy” for a couple of prominent facial wens. He wore a tribune’s sash over his plain armor.

“Good to see you here, Lumpy,” I said, giving him a big smile. “Where are the hundred sesterces you owe me from the Cerealis races two years ago?” That shut him up.

“You have a question, Decius?” Caesar said.