Geraint Jones - Blood Forest

‘Get up,’ a voice commanded.

Pavo. I looked up at him, silhouetted against the grey skies. The striking centurion had been smiling in the hours following the death of our legion’s commander, knowing that the man’s end had increased the chances of his own survival. There was no smile now. Only the two words that every tired soldier dreads to hear.

He spoke, his words clipped. ‘Work party.’

And so, with every sinew of our bodies aching, using hands and weapons to push ourselves up from the mud, we struggled to our feet and followed behind Pavo with the rest of our depleted century. Looking around, I sensed that our numbers had thinned further still since we had made the marching camp. My suspicions were confirmed as I overheard two veterans talking – three men in the century had taken their own lives. Another had died from exposure.

They would not be the last. Arminius could sit back in the trees and watch us wait and bleed our way to oblivion. We would have to break out, I knew; it was our only chance. A small, terrifying chance, but one that would have to be taken, and soon.

But before that, there was a task to be performed. A task that our section had been assigned to. We needed to bury the dead.

‘Mass grave,’ Pavo informed us. ‘Just dig.’

We did. It was slow work. Miserable work. The ramparts that day had been agony enough, and that was before our leaders had abandoned us to our fate.

‘I bet they’re not going into a mass grave,’ Stumps said, and he was right. A veteran of the Nineteenth Legion, a friend of Titus, explained that Varus and his staff officers had been cremated before their individual burials so their bodies could not be desecrated by the Germans.

‘But the lads got sick of waiting for the fucker to burn,’ the veteran spat. ‘So they just filled the hole in once his hair had been singed off.’

‘Better resting place than he deserves,’ Titus opined, and his friend agreed before going on his way. Watching the men exchange goodbyes, I knew that neither of the veterans expected to see the other again in this life.

The mass grave was only knee-deep before a call came from the centurions that put a stop to the digging. We were then ordered to begin filling it with the dead of the common soldiery.

‘I fucking hate this!’ I heard Stumps call out. Looking at him, I saw that he held an arm in his hand, the shoulder joint ragged with flesh.

‘It came off when I lifted him,’ he explained, half smiling as tears flowed over his cheeks.

Many more of the bodies showed wounds from the morning’s fighting, but dozens were intact and unscathed. Often these were the youngest soldiers, the boys having succumbed to a combination of terror and exposure. Not all of the wax-faced corpses were soldiers, and amongst the red-tunicked bodies were dozens of camp followers – women and children of all colours and ages.

‘I knew him,’ Titus grunted, referring to a veteran who had died from a chest wound. ‘Good bloke.’

‘What was his name?’ Cnaeus asked.

‘What’s it matter?’ Titus shrugged, suddenly prickly. ‘What the fuck does it matter,’ he repeated to himself.

There were other familiar faces. Moonface was grieved to see his favourite whore amongst the dead. Stumps buried a comrade from his days as a recruit. As he had done when digging the rampart that day, the man wept silently to himself. Chickenhead sat alone and undisturbed. Like the dead in the grave, he had no further interest in this world. He was a shell now, already resigned to death. I suspected that, when it came, he would welcome it, and that pained me, for the man had shown me kindness and comradeship. I struggled to think of a way to bring him back, but failed. How do you tell a man that life is worth living, and all is good, when you are standing up to your knees in the corpses of those who had been your friends and comrades?

‘We need another grave digging,’ Pavo ordered, seeing that the first was full and bodies were still stacked above ground in the mud.

And so we dug.

The skies were dark before the final body was dropped into the dirt. Then began the task of covering the fallen with soil, condemning them to a grave that would surely be dug up by the Germans as soon as we departed the marching camp. Our enemies would be keen to make sport of our dead by desecrating their bodies.

I cannot tell you how long the task took. Only that, at times, I was at peace with my place in the world, feeling not a care for my past, or my future. At other moments, I felt as if a boulder were on my chest, crushing me with the weight of my depression. Then at other times I simply wept, and I could not have told you whether it was from joy or grief.

If not already broken, I would say that my mind was breaking.

I was not the only man on the edge of insanity or, more truthfully, with a footstep inside its boundaries. Some men fled the camp in the darkness. Others took their own lives. Some, however, held their nerves in an iron grip. It was down to these men that we were still an army, and not a rabble.

One of these men was Caeonius. The man had served long enough to have stared disaster and death in the face many times, and though nothing could have compared in scale to the tragedy in which we now found ourselves, Caeonius was undeterred as he took control of the army.

‘We’re going to form two battle groups,’ Pavo informed his huddled century. We were at full strength now, our depleted ranks merged with another unit that had lost their own centurion. ‘Prefect Caeonius will lead the first, and we’ll be in there with him. When dawn comes, we break out.’

Despite his best efforts, Pavo’s words sounded hollow, but no one could blame him. We were an army of exhausted, starved men, battered by nature, and surrounded by a ferocious enemy that hated us. What chance could there be of our successful escape?

None.

But what other choice was there?

And so we would fight.

The hours of darkness passed in misery and squalor. As a section, we sat huddled and shivering beneath sodden blankets, our breath thick and stinking beneath the wool. From somewhere, Titus produced a handful of hardtack biscuits, which he rationed out amongst our seven. No one asked where, or how, the big man had come by the food, but I had little doubt that we had his scarred fists to thank for it.

We took our turn on the rampart, too tired to care if the Germans should attack. In darkness or in the dawn, we would have to face their spears eventually. Some men decided to take their chances and deserted during the night.

‘Best of luck to them,’ Stumps said with a shrug when we heard that a pair from our own century had run. The news earned nothing more than a nod or an empty stare from the other veterans – let them take their chances, was the muttered opinion. If our leaders would not stand for us, then why should the rank and file stand for them?

I wondered if my former comrades had been as understanding of my own abandonment of them. Perhaps Varo and Priscus would have forgiven me, but despite my best efforts to convince myself, I knew that I was forever damned in the eyes of my oldest friend, Marcus. Perhaps he watched me now from the afterlife, eager to see my end.

I spoke to the wind. ‘Not long, Marcus.’

I saw echoes of past battle-brothers in the men who sheltered with me now. Priscus and Stumps would have become great friends, I was certain. Varo and Titus would have clashed at first, but I could envision the pair of brutes ruling the army’s black-market trade with an iron fist. Marcus and Moonface could have fawned together over the grandeur of empire and the nobility of conquest.

I shook my head in grief for the comrades I had lost, and the ones I was certain would follow.