Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (10 page)

Throughout its career, the 11th Legion would be like a new pair of shoes that you never really take to—they looked the part but were never a comfortable fit. Everything points to the 11th being left behind in France with the newer 13th and 14th Legions during the British operation, under the command of Caesar’s deputy General Labienus, to guard the French ports and gather wheat.

From camps along the French coast, a force of some fifty thousand legionaries and auxiliaries headed for the embarkation point that spring.

But first Caesar marched his four Spanish legions to Trier in Germany, capital of the Treveri Germans, on the Moselle River. The Treveri were proving troublesome to Caesar, the problem stemming from an internal power struggle. After awing the Germans with the pomp and steel of four veteran legions, he sorted out Trever political matters, then turned around and marched back to the Atlantic coast.

The embarkation point for the latest amphibious operation had been moved several miles up the coast from Boulogne to a place Caesar called Portus Itius, which modern historians believe was probably Wissant. This shortened the Channel crossing for the invasion force, which Caesar reckoned would now be a distance of just thirty miles.

Caesar had to delay the departure for almost four weeks because the prevailing wind from the northwest was against him. When the weather improved and the wind changed, he gave orders for the legions and the cavalry to embark. But while the troops were boarding their ships, one of the Gallic auxiliary leaders, Dumnorix, a noble of the Aedui tribe, deserted with some followers and rode off toward his home in central France, between the Loire and Saône Rivers. Putting the invasion on hold, Cae-

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sar sent a large cavalry force after the deserters, determined to make an example of them to keep his other auxiliary troops in line, and the cavalry soon overtook them. When Dumnorix refused to come back and drew his sword, he was cut down. Only once his followers returned to camp did Caesar give the green light for the new British operation to go forward.

It was well into spring by the time the invasion convoy sailed. The first ships of the massive fleet upped anchor at sunset, and with a light southerly breeze behind them made steady progress up the French coast and out into the Channel as the night closed around them. By midnight the wind had dropped away, and come the dawn the current had pushed the leading divisions well up the coast of Kent, past the North Foreland and beyond the previous year’s landing zone.

Caesar was determined to land in familiar territory, and his decision to equip all the transports with oars now paid dividends. The legionaries on board the transports willingly manned the oars and pulled the heavily laden craft back down the coast toward present-day Deal, enjoying the fact that they were able to keep pace with the sleek warships of the escort with their trained oarsmen.

At midday, the fleet was off the coast from which Caesar had departed the previous fall. The shore was ominously deserted. Not a soul could be seen from the ships. But the tribesmen were there, skulking up on the hilltops. Since daybreak they’d been watching the horizon fill with hundreds and hundreds of sails, and been dazzled by the thousands of flashing oars.

The previous year the Britons had seen little more than 80 Roman vessels off their shores. Now they were staggered to see 800. As the hours passed, the Dover Strait darkened with brown hulls. Never again would an invasion fleet as large as this come to Britain’s shores. The Spanish Armada of 1588 would comprise only a paltry 130 vessels, carrying little more than 19,000 troops. The British tribal leaders were so terrified by the sight of the Roman vessels that they decided to withdraw to higher ground.

Unopposed, the landing went ahead, on a long, sandy stretch of coastline between Deal and Sandwich a little north of the previous year’s landing site. Today the greens of a golf course roll along this picturesque stretch of Kent coastline. Even as long lines of legionaries were still wading onto the sands from vessels in the shallows, work began on construction of a camp where fairways now run. At the same time, cavalry patrols fanned out inland. Soon the patrols returned with unwary tribespeople who’d been too slow to run when the troopers unexpectedly appeared in their fields. From the prisoners, Caesar learned that British warriors were massing, and where.

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Throughout his career, Julius Caesar made a habit of marching in the early hours of the morning to catch his adversaries off guard, and a little after midnight, leaving his least experienced legion, the 12th, together with three hundred cavalry, to guard the new camp under the command of General Quintus Atrius, Caesar marched into the night with his four Spanish legions and seventeen hundred cavalry. The column covered twelve miles in the darkness, and with the dawn they saw that the Britons had advanced their chariots and cavalry to a river in their path, the Stour, not far from present-day Canterbury.

The surprised Britons quickly withdrew a short distance to higher ground, their chariot drivers showing impressive skill controlling their horses on the slopes at full gallop. As the legions came up, the chariots swept down from the hill. But Caesar had been expecting this, and his cavalry easily intercepted the chariots and drove them off.

The Britons pulled back to a woods, where they took refuge in an old stockade, previously used during intertribal warfare. They rolled massive logs in front of the gateways. Some small bands came out to skirmish with the Roman column as it marched to the woods but soon withdrew. Caesar now chose one of his legions to go against the stockade. He’d been disappointed with the 7th Legion the previous year. To his mind, it had allowed itself to be surrounded in the wheat field, and had to be rescued by him. He now gave the unit an opportunity to redeem itself.

While the 10th, 8th, and 9th Legions stood in battle formation and watched like spectators at a football game, the 7th went to work. Locking their shields over their heads in the
testudo,
or “tortoise” formation, the 7th went forward against British stones and javelins, and under cover of the
testudos
heaped earth against the walls of the stockade to form ramps, an activity that took several hours. They then surged up the ramps in formation and dropped into the stockade. The Britons fled in every direction, with the men of the 7th giving chase through the trees and cutting down all who tried to stand and fight, before Caesar sounded the “Recall.”

It was now late in the day, and he wanted to build a marching camp for the night. The 7th, which had suffered only a few wounded in the action, was once more the apple of Julius Caesar’s eye.

Next morning, he kept one legion at the marching camp—probably the 7th after their exertions of the previous day—and led the other three as he went looking for the enemy. They had been marching for several hours and had caught sight of bands of British warriors in the distance when dispatch riders overtook the column. Caesar called a halt and read c05.qxd 12/5/01 4:55 PM Page 45

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a hastily written dispatch from General Atrius back at the beachhead camp. Atrius reported that a severe storm had swept along the coast in the night and many ships of the invasion fleet had broken their cables and been driven into each other or onto the shore. The losses were significant, said Atrius’s message. Always careful to secure his rear, Caesar promptly turned his column around and marched back to the coast, picking up the 7th Legion on the way.

On the beach next day, Caesar and his staff officers surveyed the damage. Forty transports were total wrecks. The rest could be repaired, but it would take time, valuable campaigning time. But Julius Caesar was a man who usually got his priorities right, and this occasion was no exception.

He gave orders for all the skilled workmen of the legions to dedicate themselves to salvage and repair work. He also sent an undamaged frigate skimming back to France with orders for General Labienus to hastily build new ships to replace those that had been lost.

Toiling around the clock, with oil lamps burning through the night at the repair sites and work teams rostered in shifts, the damaged vessels were all repaired within ten days. The ships were then hauled up onto the beach, all 760 of them, and enclosed on three sides by fortifications extending down to the water’s edge from the camp. Satisfied that the fleet would be safe, Caesar again allocated the 12th Legion to guard duty and marched off with the 10th and the three other Spanish legions to take up where he’d left off with the Britons.

During this pause in the offensive, the tribes had spread their alliance north of the River Thames. The Catuvellauni tribe, centered in Hertford-shire and Middlesex just to the north of modern London, was at that time the most powerful tribe in southern England. It had regularly waged war against the tribes south of the Thames in the past, but now it shelved old enmities and joined the British confederation, with the tribe’s king, Cassivellaunus, elected as commander in chief of all the tribal forces for the war against the Romans. The wily king formulated a plan to harass the Romans with mixed forces of infantry, cavalry, and chariots, to keep them south of the Thames for as long as possible while he assembled a massive chariot force north of the Thames. If and when the Romans succeeded in crossing the river, the king was determined that they would be in for a shock.

When Caesar marched back to the Stour River with four legions, his scouts reported that the forest stronghold that had been overrun by the 7th Legion two weeks earlier was once more occupied by tribesmen, but in c05.qxd 12/5/01 4:55 PM Page 46

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larger numbers than before. British cavalry and chariots attempted to get to the Roman column as it marched up, but yet again they were intercepted by Caesar’s cavalry and driven back to the hills and woods.

Reaching the old marching camp used the last time they had come this way, Caesar halted for the day and set the legions to work strengthening the camp’s defenses. As they worked, and while the legionaries’

guard was down, British cavalry and chariots charged from the nearest woods and swooped on the men on picket duty in front of the camp.

Knowing they faced the death penalty if they left their post, the men of the picket stood their ground and put up a furious fight, even though heavily outnumbered.

To support the pickets, Caesar sent out the two guard cohorts on duty—the 1st cohorts of two legions, as it happened—under the tribune of the watch, Colonel Quintus Durus, and sounded “To Arms” throughout the camp. The relief cohorts were soon in deep trouble, as the Britons drove between them and divided them. The tribesmen employed well-organized tactics, probably under the influence of King Cassivellaunus—squadrons of cavalry were held back at the tree line in reserve, and when those in the fray tired or ran out of ammunition, they were replaced by men from the reserve.

It was only when more Roman reinforcements arrived from the camp that the attackers were driven off. Both sides suffered only a few casualties in the skirmish, but one of the Roman fatalities was Colonel Durus, the young watch commander.

The next day, at noon, after their normal lunch of a piece of bread, the men of three legions were led out on a foraging expedition by General Gaius Trebonius, who had come up to Gaul to join Caesar’s staff for this campaign after serving as a civil tribune at Rome the previous year. Once the column was well away from the camp, the British chariots and cavalry reappeared, driving into the column and almost reaching the legions’

eagles. Trebonius was able to regroup the legionaries, then charged at the run, to the surprise of the charioteers. The Roman cavalry joined in. A number of chariots were overwhelmed, and the rest of the British forces ran for the hills.

The Britons were demoralized after this, seeing the Roman heavy infantry charge and overrun the chariots that many had thought invincible. Men went home to their farms in droves, and organized British resistance faltered.

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waterway. The cavalry splashed across, and the infantry waded across, up to their necks in water at times. On the other side, they combined and easily dispersed warriors from Cassivellaunus’s tribe who were supposed to be guarding the riverbank.

Appian tells the story that at one point in these operations beside the Thames, where the changing tides both revealed and covered treacherous pathways with frightening speed, Caesar and a group of senior Roman officers became trapped by a small group of Britons in the marshes. A lone legionary, almost certainly a man of Caesar’s bodyguard from the 10th Legion, threw himself at the tribesmen and fought them off, allowing the officers to make their way to solid ground. The legionary then took to the water and, partly by swimming and partly by wading, joined the officers.

But in the process he had to let go of his shield. As Caesar and his companions came up to him to congratulate him on his deed, the soldier dropped to his knees in front of the general.

“Forgive me, Caesar,” said the soldier, close to tears.

“Forgive you?” Caesar responded with surprise. “But why?”

“For losing my shield,” the legionary replied with genuine concern.

Under legion regulations, he could be severely punished.

Appian doesn’t tell us any more, but no such punishment is mentioned. And, if Caesar remained true to form, far from receiving a punishment, the legionary would have been the recipient of substantial rewards at the end of the campaign.

The legions crossed the Thames without further incident, and as Caesar continued north, guided by prisoners who knew where the British king’s stronghold was located, Cassivellaunus shadowed the advancing column with a force of four thousand chariots he’d been assembling north of the river—two chariots for every one of Caesar’s cavalrymen. Caesar was accustomed to sending his cavalry out on search-and-destroy missions while the infantry marched, but now, whenever the Roman cavalry strayed too far from the column, chariots appeared from the trees in vast numbers and swept in on the outnumbered troopers like hordes of locusts.