R. Peake - Marching With Caesar - Conquest of Gaul

After the looting, we turned back to more practical matters, the most pressing being the construction of a new bridge and the burying of the bodies. We hoped that we were going to be given the task of building the bridge, but it was our turn for Fortuna to dump on us when the 10th was assigned the job of digging a mass burial pit. There were more bodies to bury than we had ever experienced before, and while the idea of digging one huge pit was discussed, it was almost immediately discarded as being impractical. Instead, each Cohort was assigned to dig a pit, given a section of the battlefield to clear, and we worked well into the night completing the task. Once we were done we marched back, filthy and exhausted, to the camp built perhaps a mile away from the site and tried to get as much sleep as we could. Meanwhile, the 9th was charged with building another bridge. Although burning the first one had been a practical necessity, it also meant that the materials previously readily available for its construction were destroyed, so the 9th was sent farther upriver to scour the area for more boats. Caesar deemed this the most expeditious manner of getting across, as opposed to building a proper bridge. The other Legions were sent for and would arrive by midday the next day, while hopefully the 9th would find what they needed to help us get across the river. The 8th had constructed the camp we were now occupying, where most of us immediately dropped to our cots, not bothering to take off our armor or eating anything, and dropped off to sleep immediately.

The next day saw the 9th successful in finding the number of boats needed to bridge the Aras although it was going to be narrower than what the Helvetii built. We would find out that this was a huge blow to the Helvetii, not as much by the construction of the bridge itself, but in the damage done to their morale, because it took them 20 days to build the bridge we destroyed, yet it took Caesar only one before we were tramping across in pursuit of the Helvetii. I can only imagine the kind of consternation this caused when they learned this, and as I have since come to understand, one can never underestimate the importance of morale in waging war. By the middle of the day, the other Legions Caesar had sent for reached the crossing, just in time to see the last of our group crossing the bridge, whereupon they joined the tail end of the column, almost as if planned that way, and perhaps it was. A Cohort was left behind to guard the bridge, along with firing the debris left over from the battle the day before, which had been piled into a huge pyre to be set alight. The smoke column that it produced was visible to us the rest of the day as we moved in pursuit of the Helvetii. For their part, they turned back to the north, seeking a low pass through the mountains that barred their way west, enabling us to quickly come within striking distance, whereupon they sent a deputation to Caesar, led by a chief named Divico who once led a campaign against Cassius, a relative of that bastard who called himself one of “The Liberators.” The Helvetii were severely shaken by the easy slaughter of a quarter of their number; once the final count of bodies was finished it numbered almost 100,000 people we buried back at the river. Divico begged Caesar to stop his pursuit of the Helvetii, telling him that they only wanted new lands to settle and would go wherever Caesar wished and do what he asked. Caesar told Divico that the Helvetii must make reparations to those tribes whose lands through which they had already passed and devastated, along with giving up a number of hostages, a perfectly reasonable request given all that occurred. Apparently the old boy did not see it that way and got a bit huffy about it, saying something about how the Helvetii never gave hostages, they took them. Whatever took place, the talks were not successful, so the Helvetii began to march to the north again, this time with an army of six Legions following them.

This was the pattern of almost two full weeks, with the army following the Helvetii procession about five or six miles behind them as they plodded north along the Aras. About the fifth day of the first week, they turned away from the Aras to head west for a pass through the low mountains. The terrain got rougher, yet more importantly their route took us farther away from our supply line, which was the river itself. Caesar had ordered the Aedui to supply us with grain by way of boats sent from their towns along the river, and the farther we marched away from that, the longer our supply line grew. Perhaps it was this that persuaded Dumnorix, one of the chiefs of the Aedui, that it would be more politic of him to withhold the grain from us, a fact that soon became apparent even to us in the ranks. It was made known to Caesar even earlier, who summoned Diviciacus and Liscus, both of them also high officials in the Aedui tribe, to demand an explanation. Diviciacus was a Druid, something called a Vergobret, and previously Caesar had been friendly with Diviciacus, who reciprocated the friendship. Diviciacus more importantly was also Dumnorix’s brother, and it was this relationship that Caesar hoped to prevail upon to convince Dumnorix that holding back our food was going to be a bad idea for everyone involved. While this negotiation was going on, Caesar also recruited more cavalry from the surrounding tribes and even from across the Rhenus, fearsome looking men who wore trousers and cultivated long flowing mustaches, though they were reputed to be great horsemen. I will admit they were ready enough for a fight, but they possessed very little discipline. The squadrons now had swelled so that there were some 4,000 horsemen, and aside from the normal outriders and scouts who rode in small groups, they were kept in one body. It was this unit that had the job of keeping in visual contact with the Helvetii column, while the rest of us marched behind. For the first couple of days the marches were very tense affairs, as we were constantly on guard and ready to be summoned into battle. However, it soon became clear that neither the Helvetii nor Caesar had any desire to tangle just yet, a fact that we spent much time in the evening speculating about. After about a week of this we settled into a monotonous routine of marching, then stopping and waiting, then marching again, our pace of travel being much faster than the Helvetii, and Caesar wanting to keep a buffer of several miles between us. It was dreadfully boring, causing the grumbling around the campfire to become more pronounced. One night, as we were talking about it, Calienus said something that finally made some sense to us.

“I wonder if Caesar’s lost his nerve,” Vibius mused, drawing a chorus of angry remarks, to which he replied defensively, “Then what other reason could we have of not engaging with these bastards? We’ve passed over good ground that would've made a perfect battlefield, but we do nothing. So what else could it be?”

In this much, Vibius was right and we all knew it. It was not a matter of terrain; even with the hills, there had been plenty of spots where two armies of our size could have deployed then gone about the business of slaughtering each other.

“I don’t think it has to do with terrain, I think it has to do with us.” This came from Calienus, immediately catching our attention and to be honest, arousing our irritation. Seeing the reaction on our faces that his remark caused, he added quickly, “I’m not talking about us, the 10th, or the other veterans in the 7th 8th and 9th for that matter. But how long have those boys in the 11th and 12th been in the army now? A month?”

Someone calculated quickly and answered, “They’ve been in one week longer than a month.”

“So how well trained could they possibly be?” he asked, rhetorically, since we all knew the answer to that. They had taken a hard course in marching and all that goes with it, we had to give them that, but that left precious little time for weapons training. Their training regimen was composed of snatched bits of time whenever they could grab it. They had undoubtedly been training in the camp when we had attacked the Helvetii at the bridge, yet how much good would that have done? Sitting in silence as we mulled this over, I for one could see the sense of it, and I said so. Caesar was not fighting because he wanted to season the new Legions a bit more before we forced a battle on the Helvetii, so we would continue to march and wait.