Geraint Jones - Blood Forest

Prefect Caeonius had no words for me. I, though I tried, had none for him.

‘What now?’ He spoke instead to Arminius.

‘Show me where Varus is buried.’

Caeonius shrugged, as if he had been expecting the order, and led off.

Berengar called something in German, and a dozen of Arminius’s household warriors ran off, quickly returning to their leader’s presence with picks and shovels.

‘Here.’ Caeonius pointed to the earth, the position seared into his memory through shame and anger.

It took only moments for the strong German warriors to dig up the corpse. As we had been told by Titus’s veteran comrade, Varus should have been cremated, but only his hair was singed, his lips twisted from the heat. There was no mistaking the man.

Arminius now pulled down his breeches and, to the cheers of his followers, pissed all over the charred face of a governor who had been amongst the most powerful men in Rome.

Caeonius said nothing. Nor did he protest when Berengar stepped forward and used the edge of a shovel to brutally hack the governor’s head from his shoulders in a series of wet slaps. He held it up for Arminius’s inspection, the prince’s eyes flashing with venom as he spat into the dead face.

‘Send it to King Marabodus,’ Arminius ordered, translating for the benefit of myself and Caeonius.

‘Why?’ I found myself compelled to ask.

‘His tribe are the Marcomanni. You won’t find any of them on this battlefield, Corvus. It’s time for everyone to choose a side,’ he finished ominously, and from those words, I knew that the bloodshed would not end here, in this forest. This was only the beginning of Arminius’s rebellion against Rome.

‘What now?’ I asked him, picturing those future battlefields.

Arminius did not direct his answer towards me. Instead, his eyes stayed fixed on the headless corpse of Varus. Perhaps it was his hatred for the man, and all he embodied about Rome, that caused the answer that Arminius snarled.

‘Kill all of the officers,’ he ordered.

Caeonius made no attempt to dissuade Arminius from the sentence of death that the prince had proclaimed. He did not beg for his life, or beseech him for mercy. He simply held back his shoulders, his weathered face a blank mask as he awaited the inevitable. Perhaps it was this stoicism that compelled Arminius to speak.

‘You are a good man, Caeonius,’ he offered to the soldier he had condemned to die. ‘Too good to be left alive. This will be a long war.’

The Roman veteran nodded. ‘It will.’

But his part in it was over. Berengar’s blade hacked into the prefect’s neck with such force that Caeonius’s spine was severed instantly, his head flopping forward uselessly as an arc of blood gushed into the air.

Cries of alarm rang out from the Roman prisoners who had witnessed the act. The body of men pushed and crowded together like sheep stalked by hungry wolves, no man wanting to be on the unprotected outside.

Arminius called something in German, and his men moved forward to begin separating the rank from the file, pulling centurions and tribunes away from the common soldiery.

Following the prefect’s example, many marched out with their shoulders back and heads held high. Others were dragged from the body of men like screaming toddlers.

‘You said they would be slaves,’ I protested.

Arminius placed his hand on my shoulder as if I were a naive child. Perhaps, after all that I had endured, I still was.

‘These people are a disease, my friend. An infection that must be cut out, as if we were surgeons. The soldiers I can spare, but the officers will never overcome this defeat. Shame will push them to act, and to encourage dissent amongst the ranks. For some to survive, the leadership must die.’

I wanted to find fault in his words, but I had seen enough of war, and man’s ways, to know that he was right. Perhaps if the executions of the Roman officers had been clean and merciful, like the surgery Arminius claimed it to be, then I would have stood firmly by his side through all of the coming storm.

But they were not.

In all the horrors that I have seen, little can compare to those moments following Arminius’s order to kill the officers. The German warriors fell on the assembly of prisoners with glee, dragging away those whose rank and station were given away by the ostentation of their uniforms.

The screams began moments later.

Tribesmen pinned centurions to the dirt as their comrades sawed tongues from crying mouths. Bodies were hacked into pieces as if they were logs for a fire. Heads were cut from shoulders, gathered into grotesque piles and taken to the forest to be nailed on to trees. Seeing this horror, some Roman officers took their own lives rather than suffer the drawn-out torture – I saw one split open his skull with the very chains that bound his wrists, grey jelly spilling from his smashed eye socket as he collapsed into the bloody dirt.

‘Stop this, Arminius,’ I finally hissed as my vision swam. ‘Stop this!’ I shouted, taking hold of the prince’s arm.

He met my look. There was no pleasure in his eyes at the suffering, only a grim acceptance that his men had endured their own hell in the forest, and that now they would make their enemy suffer for every freezing night and bloody skirmish.

‘Please stop it,’ I begged.

Arminius looked away, and I knew then that I had been a fool. Not because I had thought the Roman Empire was corpulent and cruel, but because I had thought that it could be replaced with something better. Something just. As I watched the blades chop into the screaming Roman faces, I saw laughter, terror and confusion. I saw the face of power through bloodshed, no matter the uniform, language or banners. I saw that all I had endured, all I had fought for, had been pointless, a horrifying ordeal that offered no end, only the promise of more suffering.

And so I had only one last thing to ask of Arminius.

One last thing to beg for.

‘Just kill me. Please. Just fucking kill me.’

‘Why would I kill you?’ he asked, bemused.

I threw out my arms at the horrors that were unfolding about us. ‘Roman emperor or German prince, it’s all the fucking same!’ I cursed him. ‘Look at this! This isn’t war!’

‘It is war.’ Arminius shrugged, and the shrieks of the tortured Roman officers added weight to his words.

‘It’s fucking murder!’ I shouted into his face, and saw his bodyguards bristle at the open hostility towards their leader. ‘It’s fucking murder, Arminius! It’s what you said we would stop!’

‘It’s war,’ he said again, his tone low. ‘And you can either accept that, Corvus, or you can’t.’

I spat at his feet. ‘I can’t accept it. I won’t accept it. So just fucking kill me.’

‘No.’

‘Berengar!’ I shouted at the brute, who was eyeing me as if I had gone mad. ‘Kill me!’

The giant shook his head.

I wanted to call them both cowards, but how could I? I was the coward. I was the man who could not stomach war.

And so I sank to my knees in the mud.

‘I won’t kill you, Corvus,’ Arminius told me as he saw the fight flee from my wretched body.

‘I can’t be a part of this,’ I murmured.

‘You can. You just need a rest. Then you’ll see things clearly.’

‘I do see things clearly,’ I breathed, watching as another Roman head was hacked from its shoulders, blood pumping from the stump of the neck in violent spurts. ‘I’ve seen too much, clearly. I don’t want to see clearly! I just want to die!’

My words were pathetic. Pathetic words, from a pathetic creature. Arminius looked me up and down then, doubtless wondering how he could ever have considered me a worthy ally.