Military history

III

SAVAGING THE SWISS, OVERRUNNING THE GERMANS

Caesar was thoughtful for a moment, looking at the dust-covered faces of the cavalry scouts. He himself would write of what took place this eventful day, in his memoirs.

Turning to his quartermaster, he asked: “How many days’ rations do the men have left?”

“Two days’ rations, Caesar,” the quartermaster replied.

Caesar nodded. One scout had told him that he was seventeen miles from Bibracte, capital of the Aedui tribe. Another told him the massive column of the Helvetii tribe from Switzerland that he’d been following across eastern France for weeks was still in the camp they’d established three miles from his the previous day. “We march for Bibracte,” Caesar announced.

He would have looked over at Major General Titus Labienus, his second-in-command, a man in his midthirties, and informed him of his intention to secure the army’s food supply from the Aedui before he concerned himself any further with the Helvetii. And then he issued the order for the trumpets to sound “Prepare to March.”

It was the summer of 58 B.C., and Julius Caesar had kept his word to the men of the 10th Legion. As soon as he’d taken up his new appointment as governor of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum at the beginning of the year, a command soon extended by the Senate to also cover Transalpine Gaul on the death of its governor, he sent for the 10th Legion, and it marched from Spain to new quarters in the south of France.

At the same time, with the authority of the Senate—at the instigation of Pompey—to command four legions for five years, Caesar had sent for the other two legions he’d led three years before, the 8th and 9th, plus the 7th, another Spanish legion raised by Pompey, and posted them all to the city of Aquileia in the northeast of Italy, near present-day Venice, so they were midway between his provinces. But before the winter was over he received reports that the huge Helvetii tribe of Switzerland had decided to migrate to the south of Gaul, modern France, where Rome had a large and prosperous province. The Helvetii had sent out messages to all their clans and four other tribes who intended joining their march, to mass at the Rhône River on March 28, then cross the bridge at Geneva and pass down into France. Caesar was determined to stop them.

He had quickly marched the 10th Legion to Geneva, destroyed the Rhône bridge, then had his legionaries build a sixteen-foot earth wall for eighteen miles along the bank of the Rhône from Lake Geneva to the Jura Mountains. For weeks the Helvetii had tried to cross the river using boats and rafts, even wading and swimming, usually at night, but the legion and the walls between them turned the tribesmen away, and the Helvetii had diverted to another route, marching between the Rhône and the Jura Mountains, and swarming down into the territory of the Aedui people of eastern France—present-day Burgundy, between the Saône and the Loire Rivers. The Aedui had sought Caesar’s help in repelling the invaders, and he hadn’t been slow to respond. Quickly recruiting two new legions in northern Italy, the 11th and 12th, he’d combined them with his existing legions and marched into southern France to do battle with the Helvetii.

His first battle plan had been ruined a few days back by a soldier who’d let him down. For weeks Caesar had hung on the tail of the ponderous Helvetii column, always staying just five or six miles behind it, waiting for an opportunity to attack to present itself. And then the Helvetii had camped at the base of a large hill. A cavalry patrol that reconnoitered the reverse side of the hill reported back to Caesar that it would not be difficult to climb, so, a little after midnight, Caesar had sent General Labienus with two legions to make the ascent, while he marched on the hill from the opposite direction with the remaining four legions. He sent his cavalry on ahead, and in advance of that again a patrol led by an officer by the name of Publius Considius.

A little after daybreak, Caesar was only a mile and a half from the hill when Considius came galloping up to him. “Turn back, Caesar,” Caesar reports he’d breathlessly advised. “The enemy are in possession of the hilltop. I recognized their Gallic arms and their helmet crests.”

One of Caesar’s closest aides, Colonel (later General) Gaius Asinius Pollio, would write that Caesar had a habit of accepting the reports of his subordinates without corroborating them. So Caesar took Considius at his word and pulled back to another hill. Only late in the day did he learn that it was General Labienus’s legions who’d occupied the hilltop at dawn, not the enemy.

Caesar says Labienus waited all day on the hilltop for him to appear before he himself was forced to withdraw. Plutarch says that Labienus in fact engaged the Germans, but Caesar’s account of a botched operation is more credible. Labienus would have wanted answers when he reunited with his chief. An excellent commander, energetic, with a quick mind and a fine tactical sense, Labienus also became renowned for a sarcastic turn of phrase, which he tended for reserve for the lower ranks.

“Considius lost his head,” Caesar sourly informed his deputy, in words he was to consign to his memoirs. “He was recommended to me as a first-class soldier who had served under Sulla and Crassus. But today he reported that he had seen what was not there to be seen.”

The legions had turned away from the Helvetii column and were marching toward Bibracte to secure grain from the Aedui when Colonel Lucius Aemilius, commander of Caesar’s Gallic cavalry, came galloping to his commander in chief from the rear.

“The Helvetii are following us, Caesar,” Aemilius reported. “Their cavalry is harrying my rear guard, and the entire column is moving down the road to Bibracte behind us.”

Caesar rode to the rear of the legion column and saw for himself the dust to the east raised by the feet and hooves and wagons and carts of the Helvetii trailing him in their tens of thousands. Now he ordered Colonel Aemilius to take all the cavalry and head off the Helvetii to give him enough time to prepare the legions for battle. As his four thousand mounted troops from southern and central France thundered away with Aemilius, Caesar chose a grassy hill close by as the place where he would form his battle lines, and in a hasty conference on horseback agreed unit dispositions with his generals. Soon the trumpets were sounding, standards were inclining to one side, and the legions were wheeling off the road and toward the hill.

The 10th and the three other Spanish legions, the 7th, 8th, and 9th, were formed up in three lines halfway up the hill. The two new legions, the 11th and 12th, took up their position on the top of the hill along with the auxiliaries—Caesar didn’t have a great deal of faith in either the new legions or the auxiliaries. Veterans of the older legions occupied the third line, and they quickly dug entrenchments around the wagons of the baggage train, and the backpacks of all the legionaries of the army were brought and piled in the same enclosure. All this time, as lines were formed and trenches dug, the legionaries could see the Helvetii slowly flood across the plain toward them.

Standing with his men of the 10th Legion in the first line was Centurion Gaius Crastinus. His rank evidenced by the transverse crest of eagle feathers on his helmet, the metal greaves on his shins, and the fact that he wore his sword on his left hip rather than on the right like enlisted men, Centurion Crastinus had joined the 8th or 9th Legion in 65 B.C. when Pompey the Great raised the new legions in Spain. He had transferred over to the 10th when it was formed four years later as a junior grade centurion, being personally chosen by Caesar. Now, not more than twenty-seven, he would have commanded a cohort of six hundred men. Later events would suggest that Crastinus was a good centurion. He was a fearless fighter, but it took more than that to command the respect and attention of his men. He showed an interest in their welfare, on and off the battlefield. And he never tired of encouraging them. A few weeks back, the legion had turned back a mass of Helvetii tribesmen when they’d tried to make another river crossing, this time at the Saône, and if Crastinus remained true to form he would have dived from maniple to maniple of his cohort, exhorting his men.

Crastinus, standing on the extreme left of his cohort’s front line, probably pondered the same question that would have been exercising the minds of his men as they watched the Helvetii roll up to their elevated position. Later, documents would be found in the Helvetii baggage, written in Greek, that turned out to be a register of the names of 368,000 men, women, and children who were taking part in the migration from Switzerland. And the vast majority of them were here, now.

Mounted Helvetii had dispersed Colonel Aemilius and his cavalry and were chasing them all over the plain as the main Helvetian body came up to the hill with all their wheeled transport. Their women, children, and elderly parked the vast train in a mass below the hill as their men-at-arms joined their traditional clans and formed into solid phalanxes of spearmen many men deep, each wearing a Gallic-style helmet with a plume like a horse’s tail, a small breastplate, and carrying a spear up to twelve feet long. The Helvetii were Celts, larger men than the Romans, brave, and well versed in the arts of war. They had defeated Roman armies in the past and were confident of doing it again.

As Centurion Crastinus looked down the slope, he would have seen Caesar dismount and have his horse led away. At the commander in chief’s instruction, all the other officers did the same. Crastinus was to become devoted to Julius Caesar, and it’s probable that ever since he’d served under Caesar in Spain he’d been of the firm opinion that the general was a great man, a man destined for great things. And Crastinus would have recognized that in sending the horses away Caesar was cleverly sending a message to his troops that they all, officers and enlisted men alike, now stood in equal danger.

If Crastinus was as astute as he was brave, he wouldn’t have had as high a regard for some of Caesar’s generals as he did for Caesar himself, men sent by the Senate so that Caesar had to take the good with the bad. They were easy enough to pick out in their scarlet cloaks, one pacing nervously back and forth, another talking with aides, one or two resolutely arming themselves with shields. Even though the campaign was only months old, the centurion may have already summed up Caesar’s mixed bag of commanders, with their strengths and weaknesses revealed by their actions. Labienus, the second-in-command—a damn fine general, despite his savage tongue, cool under pressure, and quick to see both dangers and opportunities. Galba—overconfident, petty, ambitious. Pedius, a relative of Caesar’s—young, but competent and reliable. Sabinus—a fool, gullible, unadventurous, and too inclined toward the safe course, a man who shouldn’t be leading troops. Cotta—stubborn, argumentative, but a good man to have at your head just the same. Crassus, youngest son of Consul Crassus who conquered Spartacus and his slave army—a well-liked young man with a good head and great promise. And Balbus, the chief of staff, a Spaniard from Farther Spain, which would have pleased the men of the 10th, from a very wealthy family, loyal, dependable, a skillful mediator, and an excellent organizer. Later serving as Caesar’s private secretary and publishing his writings after his death, he would be made a consul by the Senate in 40 B.C., the first provincial ever to receive a consular appointment.

As Crastinus took a quick glance to his right, he would have seen the faces of his men as they stood stock-still in their rows with their expressions set, their eyes to the front, some betraying their tension with pale, bloodless faces. The breeze rustled the yellow horsehair crests on their helmets, the sun glinted on the bravery decorations they’d put on for the battle on Caesar’s orders to awe the Celts. On their left arm, each legionary held his shield. Polybius tells us the legionary’s rectangular, curved shield was as thick as a man’s palm, curved, but with straight sides, four feet high and two and a half feet wide, made from two layers of wood covered with canvas and calfskin, the metal boss in the center fixed to the handle on the reverse. In these ranks, the shields were painted with the bull emblem of the 10th Legion. In his right hand each man held two javelins, straight up and down for now. On his right hip hung his sword. When the javelins had all been released, Crastinus would give the order for his men to draw their swords, in preparation for close combat.

If Crastinus had looked to the sky, he would have seen that the sun was directly overhead.

Walking along the front line, Caesar addressed his troops. Above him, the hill was covered with forty thousand men. Caesar had done plenty of public speaking, would even write a book on the subject. He chose his words with care, and he expertly elevated his voice so that even those in the rear ranks could hear him. He praised his men, and he urged them to victory. It had to be a short speech—the Helvetii had combined smaller phalanxes into one dense mass of spearmen, who were now advancing toward the hill.

The phalanx, a formation developed into an art form by earlier Greek armies, had two strengths. The Greek phalanx had been sixteen men deep, so that a graduated wall of spear points protruded for some eight feet from the front of the formation like the spines of a porcupine. The men of the tightly packed formation also overlapped their shields, so that there were sixteen solid lines of shield from front to rear. We don’t know how deep the Helvetian phalanx was, but with no shortage of warriors it would have been as deep as was practicable.

Caesar withdrew behind his second line and waited as the phalanx began to move up the lower slope of the hill toward the Roman front line at walking pace. Then Caesar gave an order. With a roar from thousands of legionary throats, his front line launched a volley of javelins. On command, another volley flew through the air.

Coming up the slope, with the hill above them thick with Roman legionaries and the air full of missiles, the Helvetian warriors instinctively raised their shields to protect themselves from the Roman javelins. This, they quickly discovered, wasn’t as easy as just blocking them. Forty years before, Consul Marius had introduced a revolutionary change to the design of Roman javelins; since his time, they had been manufactured with soft metal behind the point. Once the javelin struck anything, the weight of the shaft caused it to bend like a hockey stick where shaft and head joined. With its aerodynamic qualities destroyed, it couldn’t be effectively thrown back. And if it lodged in a shield, it became extremely difficult to remove, as the Helvetii now found. What was worse, in their case, with their shields overlapping, javelins were going though several at a time, pinning them together. With some members of the phalanx downed and others struggling with tangled shields, their formation was broken by these initial volleys.

Caesar gave another order. His flag dropped, and the trumpets of the first line sounded the “Charge.” With a roar, the front-line legionaries charged down the hill with drawn swords. After repeated attempts to free their shields, many Helvetii threw them away, leaving themselves virtually defenseless. Getting in past the massive but unwieldy spears, the legionaries cut the Celts to pieces, inflicting terrible wounds to necks, shoulders, arms, and torsos.

The bloodied Helvetii bravely stood their ground, despite their losses and despite their wounds, but after a while they were forced to begin to yield ground, and steadily withdrew to a hill a mile away, fighting all the way. Leaving the 11th and 12th Legions on the hill to guard his baggage, Caesar ordered all three lines in advance of them to pursue the Helvetii, at marching pace and maintaining formation. But as the Roman troops came up, a force of fifteen thousand members of the Boii and Tulungi clans, who had been acting as the Helvetii rear guard, unexpectedly swung around from the rear and attacked the Romans’ right flank. Encouraged by this, the Helvetii on the hill regrouped and advanced to attack once more.

Caesar acted swiftly and decisively to this threat. He ordered his first and second lines to take on the Helvetii main force, while the third line wheeled to the right and engaged the Boii and Tulungi. With a blare of trumpets, the legions charged on two fronts. Time and again the Romans charged, re-formed, then charged again. The fighting lasted all afternoon. Not a single warrior of the Helvetii turned to run. But gradually their shattered formations were divided and pushed back. The men from the hill were forced to retreat up the slope, with Centurion Crastinus and his 10th Legion troops in the thick of the fighting. The enemy on the right were pushed all the way back to the parked wagons by men of other legions.

On the hill, the fighting for the 10th Legion and its companion units ended at sunset. But at the wagons, the battle continued well into the night, with defiant tribesmen raining spears from the vehicles and poking pikes out beneath them and through the wheels. Finally, the wagon laager was overrun by the legions. All the Helvetian worldly goods and all the tribe’s supplies were captured, along with numerous noncombatants, including the children of nobility. The booty would be shared among the legions. It was later said that 130,000 Helvetii fled from the scene of the battle that night. How many were killed in the fighting no one could calculate; there were too many to count.

Caesar spent three days burying the dead of both sides and patching up his wounded before marching after the surviving Helvetii. Centurion Crastinus was leading his men of the 10th Legion down the road when envoys from the Helvetii approached the Roman column. When they were conveyed to Caesar, the Helvetians prostrated themselves in front of him, and, in tears, begged him to grant peace to their people. Caesar commanded them to cease their flight and wait for him.

The Helvetii obeyed, and the Roman army found them waiting apprehensively several miles ahead, their people on foot now—the fighting men and the women, children and old people, looking tired, hungry, bedraggled, and defeated. The legions formed up and watched in silence as the tribesmen lay down their arms, handed over escaped Roman slaves, and provided hostages. Apart from six thousand fighting men who slipped away at night and were rounded up by friendly tribes and put to death, the Helvetii received no punishment other than being sent back to Switzerland, repairing the damage they’d done to towns, villages, and farms en route. The tribe tramped back to where they’d come from and never ventured from Switzerland again. The official name of Switzerland today is the Helvetian Confederation.

The 10th Legion wasn’t done with fighting for the year. It was barely the midsummer of 58 B.C., and on the heels of Caesar’s defeat of the Helvetii the tribes of the region came to him and asked him to free them from the threat of a German king, Ariovistus, and his fierce German warriors, who had invaded northern Gaul. Caesar gave his legions the familiar order “Prepare to March.” The trumpets of the legions sounded the call three times, as was customary. The camp was struck. Legionaries loaded the baggage train and formed up in marching order. On the third trumpet call, the lead elements moved out.

As the Germans advanced south toward the territory of the Sequani tribe in the modern Alsace region of eastern France, Caesar reached the Sequani capital of Besançon in three days of forced marches and occupied the town, which sat on a horseshoe bend of the Doubs River east of Dijon. Here Caesar’s troops mixed with the locals, who spoke of the immense stature and terrifying military skills of the Germans who were marching toward the town. The newer tribunes and commanders of auxiliary units, pampered young men recently arrived from Rome, many with not a day’s active service among them, were unnerved by the talk. Their growing dread of the Germans spread to the troops. Soon the campfire talk was all doom and gloom, and everywhere men were making and sealing their wills. Seasoned centurions such as Gaius Crastinus went to Caesar and warned him that when he gave the order to march, the men might refuse to obey.

Caesar now summoned all his centurions. He told them he intended moving camp that same night. If necessary, he said, he would advance against Ariovistus and his Germans with just the men of the 10th Legion, a unit he had every confidence would never let him down. And he repeated his old promise to make the 10th his personal bodyguard. When they heard this, the men of the 10th asked their tribunes to thank their general for his high opinion of them and to assure him they were ready to take the field with him at a moment’s notice, no matter what the rest of the army did. But the rest of the army had no intention of letting the 10th enjoy all the glory, and the spoils, and was stirred into action. In the early hours of the morning, all six legions of the task force marched out of Besançon with Caesar and headed for the approaching German army. After six days of solid marching, scouts reported that Ariovistus was just twenty-three miles away.

No one doubted Julius Caesar’s courage. According to Suetonius, Caesar was presented with the Civic Crown, one of Rome’s highest bravery awards, in 81 B.C. when he was just a young staff officer of nineteen or twenty, after saving the life of a fellow citizen during the storming of Mytilene, modern Mitilini, capital of the island of Lesbos. And during his operations in Spain and now in Switzerland and France, Caesar always led from the front. But neither could he be called incautious. And now he was being particularly cautious.

Ariovistus, king of the Suebi Germans, had sent Caesar a message, accepting an offer of a peace conference. But he had attached an unusual condition to the meeting—both leaders were only to be accompanied by a bodyguard of mounted troops. This started Caesar thinking that perhaps the German had bribed members of the Roman general’s Gallic cavalry to assassinate him on the way to or at the conference. To be on the safe side, Caesar ordered his cavalry to temporarily give up their horses, and mounted infantrymen of the 10th Legion in their place. He was to later write that by this stage he considered the legionaries of the 10th to be men in whose devotion he could rely absolutely.

As the legionaries were mounting up, a soldier of the 10th was heard to remark, “Caesar’s being better than his word. He promised to make the 10th his bodyguard, and now he’s knighting us.” Caesar himself would have smiled when the comment was repeated to him, for he was to later include it in his memoirs.

The meeting took place on a rise halfway between the Roman and the German camps, with the mounted men of the 10th Legion formed up three hundred yards behind their general and King Ariovistus’s big-framed cavalrymen a similar distance behind him. Accompanied by a personal escort of ten men each, and on horseback, Caesar and Ariovistus conducted a tense face-to-face conference. As the two leaders spoke at length, with each trying to convince the other to withdraw from Gaul, German cavalrymen tried to provoke the mounted legionaries of the 10th, and Caesar temporarily broke off discussions to order his men not to retaliate.

The day’s conference ended in a stalemate, and next day Caesar sent two envoys to continue discussions on his behalf. When Ariovistus made prisoners of the envoys, his intent was clear enough. For days, the two armies jostled for position, with the Germans moving camp in an attempt to cut Caesar off from supplies coming up from Besançon, and with Caesar dividing his troops between two camps. The Germans attacked the camps, but whenever Caesar formed up his troops in battle lines, the Germans avoided a full-scale battle. Then, from prisoners, Caesar learned that the Germans believed they would not win if they fought a major encounter before the new moon. Ariovistus was stalling for time. So Caesar marched on the German camp, just fifteen miles from the Rhine River, determined to force Ariovistus to do battle before he wanted to. Even though his forty thousand men would be outnumbered, Caesar was counting on having a psychological advantage. As it turned out, pressing for a battle now had another advantage, which Caesar only later discovered: Suebi reinforcements were at that moment approaching the Rhine from the east, planning to link up with Ariovistus.

Forced to defend their camp, the Germans tumbled into the fields outside it and formed up in their clans: the Harudes; the Tribboci; the Vangiones; the Nemetes; the Eudusii; the numerous Suebi, who gave their name to the tribe as a whole; and a clan then based in the Main valley, the Marcomanni, which would grow in size and influence and within half a century settle in Bohemia, and, another 175 years later, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, would prove to be one of Rome’s fiercest foes. The German warriors were on average several inches taller than the Romans, broad-shouldered, with long hair and beards. Their nobles, better dressed and armed than the rank and file, who often wore nothing but a fur cloak and went barefoot, wore their hair tied up in the characteristic Suebian knot. The principal weapon of the Germans was the long spear.

Caesar’s four thousand cavalry and the six thousand German cavalry held back as the legions advanced in their customary three battle lines, with the 10th Legion occupying what was now its regular position on the right wing. Caesar personally took command on the right when he saw the enemy line at its weakest on that side, and when he ordered his first two lines to charge, the men of the 10th dashed forward enthusiastically.

Even though they had been unprepared to fight, the Germans opposite ran so quickly to the attack that the legionaries didn’t even have time to throw their javelins. Dropping them, they drew their swords as the two armies came together. The Germans adopted the phalanx formation used by the Helvetii, with their line bristling with long spears, which, in theory, would keep them out of range of the short Roman swords.

Undaunted, men of the 10th brushed aside the spears and literally threw themselves on the front line of German shields. Some wrenched shields out of the hands of their owners. Others reached over the top of the shields and stabbed the points of their swords into German faces. Using these aggressive tactics, the 10th soon routed the German left.

Meanwhile, the German right was pushing back the Roman left. Seeing this, young Publius Crassus, whom Caesar had left behind in charge of the cavalry, ordered the stationary third line to advance to the relief of the Roman left. Their arrival turned the battle, and soon the entire German army was on the run. The legions pursued them all the way to the Rhine. A few Germans managed to swim the river. King Ariovistus and one or two others escaped in boats. But all the rest, including the king’s wives and daughters, were hunted down and killed or captured by the Roman cavalry. East of the Rhine, when the Suebi reinforcements heard of the disastrous battle, they turned and fled for home. The 10th Legion could add another victory to its growing roll of honor.

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