Harry Turtledove: Give Me Back My Legions!

“A god made it so,” Arminius said. “May you have better luck with it than the fellow who wore it before.”

Something glinted in the late-afternoon sunshine. A dead Pannonian wore a heavy gold ring in his left car. Stooping, Arminius pulled on the ring till it tore through the flesh of the earlobe. It hardly got any blood on it; the enemy warrior must have died early in the fight. Arminius weighed the bauble in the palm of his hand. It had to be worth a couple of aurei. He stuck it into a belt pouch.

Somebody had driven a spear clean through the dead man’s mail-shirt. Arminius nodded to himself. That stroke deserved respect. He had no doubt he could have matched it—in his early twenties, he was at the peak of his strength (and also, though he didn’t think of it that way, at the peak of his arrogance)—but not many men could have.

A moment later, he nodded again. The way the Pannonians had fought back against the Germans and Romans also deserved respect. The Romans were unlikely to give it. Arminius did. He’d seen, not for the first time, how the Pannonians had imitated Roman fighting methods till they could stand up against the toughest soldiers in the world.

“Do you think we could have fought this well, Chlodovegius?” he asked—he made a point of learning the names of the men he led.

Chlodovegius had taken off his new helmet and was admiring it. He looked up. “That many of us against so many Romans? We’d’ve licked ‘em.” He made as if to draw his long, straight sword for a bit of cut and thrust. He was a few years older than Arminius, but he didn’t lack for arrogance, either.

Arminius smiled. “Well, maybe we would have.” He didn’t feel like arguing. But he also didn’t believe Chlodovegius. One German had an excellent chance against one Roman. Ten Romans had the edge on ten Germans. A hundred Romans would massacre a hundred Germans.

They would in open country like this, anyhow. In the forests and swamps of Germany, ambushes and harassment came easier. The Romans could send troops through Germany. They’d been doing that since Arminius was a little boy. But they’d never been able to hold down the countryside… which didn’t mean they didn’t keep trying.

“What will we do if the Romans turn our country, our homeland, into one of their provinces?” Arminius wasn’t really asking Chlodovegius; he was thinking out loud.

But the other German heard him and, laughing, answered, “What are you worrying about? We’re already halfway to turning into Romans. If we serve out our terms in the auxiliaries, they’ll make us citizens.”

They’d already made Arminius a citizen: he came from a chieftain’s family. They’d even made him a member of the Equestrian Order, the social class one rank below the Senators who helped their chieftain, Augustus, rule Rome. While Arminius was tolerably fluent in Latin these days, he’d understood only a few words when he joined the auxiliaries a couple of years earlier.

He was a man with an itch to know. He always had been. He’d joined the auxiliaries to learn how the Romans did things. He’d also learned a lot, not all of it what he’d expected. Roman discipline looked different from the inside. In Germany, he’d always thought Roman soldiers were slaves because of the way they let their superiors order them around. No free German would have put up with that for even a moment.

When Germans went to war, though, they fought as individuals or as members of a little band. They went forward to show off their bravery to their kinsmen and friends. How else would you fight?

How else? The Romans had another way. A man in a legion, or in a troop of auxiliaries, was part of something bigger than himself. He still needed to be brave, but he also needed to remember he was only a part. If all the parts did what they were supposed to do—what their superiors told them to do—the legion or troop was very hard to beat.

They also kept more freedom than they seemed to from the outside. Arminius knew what he’d done in this latest clash with the Pannonians. So did the men around him. But he hadn’t done it to prove he was brave. He’d done it to help the larger unit.

The Pannonians fought the same way. They’d learned it from the Romans. Arminius wondered if his folk could, too. He hoped so. If they couldn’t, wouldn’t they go down the way the Gauls had, the way the Pannonians were now?

A wounded man nearby couldn’t hold in a groan. Arminius finished him off, then looked to see if he had anything worth taking. To the German’s annoyance, the Pannonian didn’t. Had Arminius known that ahead of time, he might have let the foeman lie there and suffer.

But no. Orders were to make sure the wounded died. And Arminius could see the reason for those orders. If legionaries and auxiliaries were parts of something larger than themselves, so were enemy warriors. The Romans didn’t just aim to kill individuals. They wanted to kill the very idea of nationhood among their foes.

Here, Arminius thought uneasily, and back home in Germany, too.

He dogged his men till they finished cleaning up the field and left it to the birds and foxes. Even that thought made him uncomfortable as he marched them back to the encampment they and the legionaries with them had made the night before. Am I anything but the Romans’ dog? he wondered.

Flavus, his older brother, was a Roman dog. Flavus liked life in the auxiliaries. He was fighting somewhere else in Pannonia, serving Augustus as best he could. Arminius didn’t know just where, and didn’t care to find out. He couldn’t decide whether Flavus frightened or infuriated him more.

He dismissed his brother from his mind with nothing but relief. Yes, back to the encampment. Only one thing ever changed about Roman fortified camps: the size, which depended on how many men they needed to hold. Otherwise, they were as much alike as two coins. Standardizing things was another idea the Romans had had that was new to the Germans. Arminius could see the advantages: if you always did this and that the same way, you just went ahead and did them. You didn’t have to wonder whether to do this first or how to take care of that or if you should bother with something else. Again, the Romans made each man one stick in the wattle of a house, so to speak.

A Roman centurion—he showed his rank by the cross-crested helm he still wore—waved to Arminius as the German brought in his warriors. “Your men fought like wolves today,” the veteran called.

“My thanks. You Romans were fierce, too,” Arminius answered. That wasn’t quite the right word. Capable came closer, but didn’t seem praise enough.

“Ai!” The centurion snapped his fingers, reminding himself of something. “There’s a fellow from your tribe in camp. He’s looking for you.”

“Thanks again. Did he say why?” Whatever news the man brought from the land of the Cherusci, Arminius feared it would be bad. Only bad news needed to travel fast. Good news could commonly wait. “Are my father and mother hale?”

“I don’t know. Sorry.” The Roman spread his hands. “I didn’t ask, and your friend doesn’t speak a whole lot of Latin anyhow.” He never imagined that he might learn the Germans’ language.

Well, this was a Roman province, so that wasn’t unreasonable. But if the Romans held Germany, wouldn’t Latin come to dominate there, too? Arminius pulled his mind back from such things to the business at hand. “Thank you for telling me. I find—I will find—him and see what the news is.”

“Hope it’s nothing too awful.” The centurion’s rough sympathy said he knew how these things usually went.

“Thanks,” Arminius said once more. He hurried off with his men to the northwest corner of the encampment, where then- always pitched their tents. In every Roman camp ever made, auxiliaries were quartered in the northwest and northeast corners. The Romans had done things that way for centuries. They were a tidy folk; everything had its place among them. And, once they found a way of doing things that worked, they stuck with it.