Military history

VI

REVOLT AND REVENGE

On Caesar’s orders, Generals Sabinus and Cotta led the 14th Legion and five unidentified cohorts from one or more of the other legions—also from the newer units, it seems—into eastern Belgium. They made camp for the winter of 54–53 B.C. at Atuatuca on the Geer River, northwest of modern Liège. The city of Tongres, oldest in Belgium, would grow on this site. Named Atuatuca Tongrorum, it would be the capital of the Tungri tribe, immigrants from Germany, but at this time the riverside camp built by the fifteen legionary cohorts under General Sabinus was on a virgin site in the territory of the Eburones, a native Belgic tribe.

Within weeks of the legionaries building their fortified camp at Atuatuca, the Eburones rose up under their chief, Ambiorix, determined to rid their homeland of the Romans. Ambiorix allied himself with Germans from across the Rhine, then surrounded and laid siege to the Roman fort with tens of thousands of fighting men. During a truce, Ambiorix offered General Sabinus and his men amnesty if they vacated their position and his territory. Sabinus’s deputy, General Cotta, and most of the other Roman officers at Atuatuca argued that they would be going against Caesar’s orders if they pulled out. Besides, they didn’t trust Ambiorix. But Sabinus, worried that his troops would be starved into submission, decided to accept the Belgian offer. Many of Sabinus’s own men had a low opinion of their general, but as the force’s commanding general his word was law, and next morning the legionaries marched out of their camp behind him.

Passing through a forest two miles from Atuatuca, the 14th Legion and their accompanying five cohorts walked straight into an ambush. A few hundred men managed to fight their way back to the camp, but most of the others, including Generals Sabinus and Cotta, were surrounded and killed in the ambush, fighting to the last man in an orbis, the Roman army’s circular formation of last resort. That night, the survivors holding the camp, out of ammunition, out of food, and out of hope, entered into a pact, and every man took his own life. In the forest and in the camp, more than eight thousand legionaries died that day.

This success inspired other tribes throughout the region to rise up and attack the Roman forces stationed in their areas. The legion of General Quintus Cicero, younger brother of the famous orator Cicero, was besieged at its camp near the Sambre River by a force that grew to number sixty thousand men. We don’t know which legion it was, but from its stout resistance it sounds like one of the veteran Spanish legions, possibly the 7th. Unlike Sabinus, General Cicero kept his troops behind the walls of their fortified camp.

For more than seven days Cicero and his surrounded legion held out without being able to send a messenger for help, but finally a loyal native of the area managed to get through enemy lines to Caesar, eighty miles away. Caesar immediately sent orders for the three nearest legions to march to Cicero’s aid, and set off himself with a cavalry force. The 10th Legion would have been one of the three. General Labienus sent word that tribesmen were massing three miles from his camp and he and his legions didn’t dare leave the protection of its walls, so the relief force was reduced to just one legion, possibly the 10th, plus cavalry, a total of seven thousand men.

A messenger galloped back to Cicero with a dispatch from Caesar, written in Greek so the tribesmen couldn’t understand it if it fell into the wrong hands. But the courier couldn’t get through the enemy. So, pretending to be one of the attackers, he joined their next raid against the Roman camp, and threw a javelin with the message tied to it. The javelin lodged in the woodwork of a Roman guard tower and went unnoticed for another two days before a sentry spotted the message, unfurled it, and took it to General Cicero.

Caesar was to write that the general read the message aloud to his exhausted legionaries: “Caesar is coming with the legions!” he announced. “He tells us to hold on and put on a bold front!”

As Cicero’s legionaries cheered with relief, lookouts yelled that they could at that very moment see smoke on the horizon—farm buildings put to the torch by advancing Roman troops.

When they realized that Caesar was approaching, the Belgians gave up the siege and advanced to meet him. With only some five thousand infantrymen and two thousand cavalry, Caesar was significantly outnumbered, so he chose a camp site at the most favorable location he could find and set his men to work furiously constructing trenches and walls of earth as the enemy advanced on him. Caesar was always thinking, always innovative, and at the camp gates he had his men build walls made of a single brick’s thickness of earth. From the outside, it looked as if the gates were as solid as the walls, and the tribesmen didn’t even bother to attack there, gates normally being the most heavily defended part of any Roman camp. Instead, they tried to storm the walls at various places.

With sixty thousand Belgians and their German allies congregated around the walls, Caesar gave an order. His flag dropped, trumpets sounded. The apparently solid walls at the gateways suddenly tumbled outward, and the Roman cavalry charged out into the massed ranks of the enemy. The results were panic and slaughter. Tribesmen were still running at sundown.

Caesar and the 10th were then able to link up with General Cicero and his legion. When the besieged legion paraded for their commander in chief, Caesar saw that nine out of ten legionaries were wounded. He praised the men, and he praised the centurions and tribunes, for holding off a much superior force for so long. This was the stuff that legion legends were made of. Unfortunately, we don’t know which legion deserves the credit for such stout resistance.

Caesar and his generals spent the rest of the winter putting out the fires of revolt along the Rhine and nearby regions. During the winter, which Caesar spent in Gaul with the legions for the first time because of the volatile situation, three legions were raised in northern Italy and Switzerland—a whole new enlistment for the 14th Legion, to replace the cohorts wiped out in Belgium with General Sabinus, and two brand-new legions, the 15th and the 16th. Caesar now commanded ten legions, the largest Roman army in the field at the time.

The campaigning season of 53 B.C. saw Caesar use the large number of troops at his disposal in a single dominating force that crushed resistance throughout northern France, Belgium, southern Holland, and those parts of Germany west of the Rhine, a campaign that culminated in his second crossing of the Rhine, a brief incursion to frighten off the Seubi tribe, which had been massing in the region of the Ubii, a tribe allied to Rome. But his first act was to march to the Geer River to punish the Eburones for the Sabinus massacre. While he employed a scorched-earth policy throughout Eburone territory, the new recruits of the 14th and the army’s recovering wounded were left by Caesar with General Cicero in his rear at the old Atuatuca camp where the predecessors of the new men of the 14th had perished the previous winter. Every living thing was tracked down and either killed or captured by Caesar’s army, while the timber buildings of the region attracted flaming Roman torches—every village, every farmhouse in Eburone territory was burned to the ground.

The Atuatuca fort seems to have been ill starred, for, in Caesar’s absence, cohorts of new 14th Legion recruits were allowed to go foraging by General Cicero, and they were caught in the open by German cavalry on a raid across the Rhine. Another thousand young legionaries of the 14th died before the detachment made it back to the safety of the camp, and the Germans withdrew back across the Rhine with the legion’s baggage animals for spoils.

At the end of the summer, Caesar, potentate of all he surveyed, convened a council of all the Gallic tribes who now submitted to Rome’s authority. The tribal leaders gathered at Rheims, capital of the Remi. The culmination of the Gallic Council meeting was the trial of a leader of the Senones tribe accused of instigating the first uprising of the year. Found guilty by his peers, he was whipped, then publicly beheaded.

The legions went into camp for the next winter. But Caesar had learned his lesson after dispersing his units too broadly the previous year. This time two legions went into camp near Trier in Germany, and two in the region of Dijon in central France. The remaining six legions built a massive military camp at Sens, sixty-five miles south of the village of Lutetia on an island in the Seine that would grow into the city of Paris. From there they could strike in any direction, en masse, if further trouble were to break out. Inevitably, it did.

Vercingetorix was a young noble of the Arverni tribe in south-central France. In the winter of 53–52 B.C., he was living at the Arverni capital of Gergovia, some four miles south of present day Clermont-Ferrand on a plateau twelve hundred feet above sea level at the northern end of the Auvergne Mountains. A coin issued in 52 B.C. shows Vercingetorix as a handsome man probably in his twenties, with curly hair falling over his ears, and large eyes. He was the son of the late chief of the Arverni who had once tried to rule all the Belgic people of Gaul but who had been put to death by the tribes for his autocratic ways; the tribes of Gaul had a natural dislike of any man who tried to impose his rule on them.

Vercingetorix was unhappy about the Roman occupation of his homeland, and in January of 52 B.C. he was excited by news from the north that the Carnute tribe had risen up and massacred newly arrived Roman settlers at their capital of Orléans. He began talking openly about rebelling against the Romans, but this terrified his uncle and other Arvernian elders, and the young man was ejected from Gergovia.

Over the next few weeks, Vercingetorix went around the villages of the Arverni preaching rebellion and gathering supporters everywhere he went, until he was able to return to Gergovia like a messiah, eject his uncle and the other elders, and claim the leadership of his people. He then sent emissaries to neighboring tribes, urging them to join the Arverni to force the Romans from Gaul. From Paris to the Bay of Biscay, French tribes recently humbled by the legions had been waiting for just such an opportunity to combine against the invading Romans, and they threw their support behind the young man, unanimously electing him the commanding general of their renewed war effort.

Gathering a large force in the mountains, Vercingetorix and his lieutenant Lucterius marched into the territory of neighboring tribes who had previously been for Rome, and soon threatened the Roman province in the south of France, the later Gallia Narbonensis.

Caesar now hurried from his winter quarters in northern Italy and raised a defense force locally in the south of France that he left with Decimus Brutus, one of his future assassins. Then, saying that he would return shortly, so that spies wouldn’t guess where he was going, he slipped north along snow-covered roads with just a small cavalry escort and joined the two legions based at Dijon. From there he summoned his eight remaining legions, and once they marched in he left two newest legions, the 15th and 16th, to guard the heavy baggage, then hurried to intercept Vercingetorix’s growing army.

To secure his supply lines he laid siege to the Senone town of Montargis, or Vellaunodunum, as the Romans called it. Within two days, the quaking Senones sent out envoys to organize the town’s surrender. Leaving General Labienus in charge of the arrangements, Caesar pushed on to Orléans, reaching it after a two-day march. The gates were closed, the walls lined with armed Carnutes. Arriving too late in the day to commence an assault, Caesar made camp, leaving two legions under arms all night. After midnight, the townspeople began to evacuate Orléans, flooding over the bridge that crossed the Loire. With the town gates open, Caesar sent in the two legions on standby. Orléans was quickly taken and ruthlessly plundered.

The legions crossed the Loire and advanced toward Vercingetorix, taking the town of Noviodunum. Vercingetorix’s cavalry now approached. But when Caesar’s cavalry engaged it, the Roman troopers were soon in trouble, so Caesar sent in four hundred German mercenary troopers of his bodyguard, whose charge set the French horsemen to flight.

Farther south, Vercingetorix and the other tribal leaders held a council of war, voting to employ a scorched-earth policy, burning the towns and villages in Caesar’s path to deny them to the Romans, and to make a stand at Avaricum, modern Bourges, sixty miles southeast of Orléans. Vercingetorix, who’d been against holding the town at first, sent ten thousand of his men to help the forty thousand people of Bourges defend their city. As the gates of Bourges creaked shut and the defenders began to prepare ammunition stockpiles around the town’s solid walls, Vercingetorix encamped with his main army eighteen miles away.

Caesar was not long in accepting the invitation to attack Bourges. For three weeks his legions laid siege to the town in incessant winter rain, using their usual siege techniques. Two legions remained on standby during the night and slept during the day, with the remaining legions working in daylight shifts at undermining the town walls and battering the gates, using the shelter of mantlets and siege towers. The defenders weren’t idle either. There were a number of copper miners in the town, and they dug tunnels out under the town walls to undermine the siege works.

But ultimately, inevitably, the legions came over the walls one wet night. Just eight hundred people in the town managed to escape to Vercingetorix’s camp in the darkness. Tens of thousands more were cut down in the narrow streets of the town.

Delaying his next move to solve a constitutional problem of the loyal Aeduans, Caesar then divided his legions between General Labienus and himself. Of his two best legions, he kept the 10th with him and gave the 7th to Labienus. Then he sent Labienus with the 7th, 12th, 15th, and 16th Legions to sort out the rebellious tribes in the Paris area while he swung south with six legions and marched on Vercingetorix’s mountain capital, Gergovia, following the Allier River, the Roman Elaver, south. Seeing this, Vercingetorix set off at forced-march pace down the opposite bank, determined to reach Gergovia first.

Both sides climbed up onto the plateau and reached Gergovia at much the same time after a march of five days, but Vercingetorix arrived just ahead of the Romans. With the town on a mountaintop and difficult to besiege, Caesar tried to cut off its access and water supply, lodging his legions in two camps in the hills, connecting the camps using an extensive double trench system.

Meanwhile, Vercingetorix’s agents had brought the Aeduan tribe over to the Gallic cause with a combination of rhetoric, threats, and gold. With spring just around the corner, a force of ten thousand Aeduans was assembled, armed, and marched down to the Auvergne Mountains. Officially they were coming to reinforce Caesar’s legions, but in reality they intended to attack the Romans from the rear. Caesar’s famous luck held, because word of the double-cross plan reached him via loyal Aeduans.

Caesar then took the 10th and three other legions and marched twenty-four miles in a day and confronted the Aeduans on the road to Gergovia. At the sight of the legions appearing unexpectedly in front of them, the young Gallic soldiers promptly threw down their arms and surrendered. Caesar not only spared them all, he added them to his force. Giving his troops just three hours’ rest, Caesar then turned around and headed back toward Gergovia.

Twelve miles from the town, Caesar was met in the darkness by Roman cavalry bearing news that the two legions left behind outside Gergovia had been under heavy attack from tens of thousands of Vercingetorix’s troops ever since Caesar had departed with the bulk of the army, and they’d only just managed to keep the enemy out of their camp. Pounding on through the night, Caesar brought his four legions back to Gergovia a little before dawn, after marching forty-eight miles in a day and a night. Whether his legionaries had been in the camp or on the march, they’d had a rough day.

Caesar then initiated a complicated operation that he later claimed had only limited objectives. He put helmets on his noncombatant mule drivers, then put the mule drivers on his thousands of pack animals and sent them, looking like cavalry, marching off with the 13th Legion as a feint attack on one flank. The plan worked beautifully. Enemy troops were drawn away to cover this force, and Caesar was able to launch an attack on the enemy camps outside Gergovia. Three camps were overrun.

But, according to Caesar, only the 10th Legion then obeyed the “Recall” command. The other legions surged all the way to the walls of the town, led by the men of the 8th Legion. The enemy troops who had been drawn off now rushed back to Gergovia, and there was frantic fighting outside the town walls. A centurion of the 8th and several of his men even succeeded in mounting one of the walls before they were cut down. When Caesar sent the ten thousand Aeduans to the aid of his men trapped by the town, the struggling legionaries mistook them for the enemy. Many panicked, and most began to give ground. Appian was to claim that an entire legion was wiped out here, but Caesar gives an unusually credible on-the-spot accounting in which his legions, principally the 8th, lost more than seven hundred men, including forty-six centurions, before being forced to withdraw.

The victorious tribesmen surged after the retreating legionaries, but the day was saved by the 10th Legion, which Caesar had formed up on a rise in the path of the retreat. The 10th held its ground, and, personally led by Caesar, stopped the advancing enemy in their tracks. Retreating legionaries also joined their stand, and eventually the tribesmen withdrew back to Gergovia, taking numerous captured legion standards with them.

An indication of how desperate the fighting outside Gergovia was comes from a story told by Plutarch. In his day, at the end of the first century, the Averni people showed all comers a sword hanging in one of their temples. It was Julius Caesar’s sword, they said, lost by him during the Battle of Gergovia. From other sources Plutarch learned that Caesar was himself shown the sword in the temple at Gergovia several years after the battle, and his officers urged him to reclaim it. But he only smiled and told them to leave it where it was. It was now consecrated, he said.

For the first time in his career, Caesar had suffered a military reverse. Abandoning the siege of Gergovia, he marched his bloodied legions down from the mountains. This gave the rebel tribes great heart, as did the news that General Labienus and his legions had been forced to withdraw from the Seine River after heavy fighting around Lutetia, capital of the Parisii tribe, which occupied the island in the middle of the river where Notre Dame Cathedral stands today. Labienus and his legions had won a major battle beside the Seine, only to have to retreat when tribes massing in their rear threatened to cut them off.

With both Roman armies in retreat, new supporters flocked to the rebel cause in their thousands. As Caesar was rejoined by General Labienus and marched south, Vercingetorix boasted to other Gallic leaders that the Roman commander was abandoning Gaul. Full of confidence, Vercingetorix sent his cavalry against the Roman army on the march, but they were routed by Caesar’s cavalry, which had been bolstered by a number of newly arrived German troopers, mercenaries recruited from across the Rhine by Caesar. Not only did the Gauls suffer heavy losses, but several Gallic commanders were taken prisoner as well.

Stung by this, and rather than meet Caesar’s legions in the field, Vercingetorix concentrated eighty thousand men at Alesia, modern Alise Saint Reine, on the plateau of Mont Auxois, thirty miles northwest of Dijon. The town of Alesia was then a fortified hilltop stronghold of the Mandubii tribe. On a plateau between the Ose and the Brenne Rivers, it offered a formidable natural defensive position. Caesar wasted no time in swinging his legions around and following Vercingetorix to Alesia. There, Caesar surrounded the hill. The siege that followed became one of the most famous in history.

Caesar’s ten legions dug entrenchments around Alesia with a circumference of ten miles and dotted with twenty-three forts. As it became obvious that Vercingetorix was preparing to hold out for some time, Caesar built a second outer line of trenches, walls, and towers, extending for fourteen miles, to defend against attack from any relieving force from the outside. He had now trapped Vercingetorix and his army on the hilltop and sealed his own outnumbered force in around the hill. Vercingetorix’s cavalry soon attempted to break out, but in a battle on the plain below Alesia, it suffered heavy losses. In the night, some eight thousand of Vercingetorix’s cavalry did finally manage to break out, and galloped off to bring help.

Alerted to Vercingetorix’s plight, other tribes now assembled a massive relief column in central France between the Loire and the Saône Rivers. Caesar reckoned they numbered 80,000 cavalry and 250,000 infantry. Knowing his talent for inflation of enemy casualty figures, these numbers are probably overstated to make him look good, but there can be no doubt the army that now marched south was very large indeed, certainly more than 100,000 strong. Among the Gallic commanders marching down to the relief of Alesia was Commius, the man Caesar had made king of the Atrebates. Caesar’s onetime ally and envoy during the invasions of Britain had caught the infectious spirit of liberation. Caesar himself had a force in the region of 50,000 legionaries plus large numbers of auxiliary cavalry and infantry. Even so, all told his army wouldn’t have exceeded 80,000 men.

When the Gallic relief force arrived at Alesia, its initial attempts to storm the walls of the outer defensive ring were beaten off by Caesar’s troops. Then, when 60,000 picked Gauls launched an attack from Mount Rea, Vercingetorix attempted a coordinated attack from the inside at the same time, sending men pouring out of Alesia against Caesar’s inner entrenchments.

With Caesar’s troops strung out at the forts around the siege works, this two-way attack should have succeeded, but it didn’t. Caesar’s deputies commanded coolly and intelligently—Generals Labienus, Brutus, Fabius, and a recently arrived colonel, Mark Antony, all playing their part. Caesar describes his troop movements during this final battle in terms of his generals and cohorts, never telling us which of his ten legions did what. In fact, the forces thrown into the breaches were eclectic, with six detached cohorts here going into action, eleven mixed cohorts there, and so on.

As the battle raged, the astute General Labienus sent Caesar a message, urging him to go onto the offensive. The time was right, he said, pointing out where the enemy line was weakest. Caesar seems to have trusted Labienus’s judgment implicitly; a number of subordinate generals had come and gone over the past six years, but he had retained Labienus, for his skill and his loyalty. Caesar accepted Labienus’s advice, and he himself led the subsequent counterattack. By his own account, his troops and those of the other side were able to identify him by his flowing paludamentum, the scarlet general’s cloak, in the forefront of the charge.

Following Caesar’s lead, Roman cavalry and infantry broke out of the ring then swung about and attacked the rear of the relief force. Carnage ensued. The surprised troops of the Gallic relief force broke and ran. Roman cavalry mowed them down in their thousands and captured many more. Caesar’s troopers were still chasing escaping tribesmen after midnight. Witnessing the rout, and seeing the futility of continuing to assault Caesar’s fortifications from within, Vercingetorix’s men disconsolately withdrew back up the hill to Alesia.

Tens of thousands of prisoners were taken by the Romans—possibly as many as seventy thousand—enough, Caesar claimed, for him to give every single legionary in his force one prisoner each as a slave. He restored another twenty thousand prisoners to their two tribes in exchange for their submission.

With the relief force dispersed and its survivors scurrying home, the men on the hill knew their fate was sealed. Rather than die of starvation, they surrendered. Caesar ordered them to lay down their arms and for their leaders to be brought to him, then seated himself in front of his fortifications for the surrender ceremony. Young Vercingetorix himself came to submit to Caesar. First putting on his richest armor and adorning his favorite horse with golden trappings, the commander of the Gauls rode out the gate of Alesia alone and came down to Caesar’s camp, where the men of the 10th and the other legions were lined up in their cohorts, standing as still as statues behind their standards, wearing their plumes and decorations. Only their eyes would have moved as the leader of the Gauls came trotting into their midst.

At the head of the 10th Legion stood Centurion Gaius Crastinus. Not only had he survived all the campaigns since the repulse of the Helvetii, seemingly so long before, but he had been steadily promoted through the grades of centurion, until, almost certainly during the British campaigns, he had been promoted to join the first-rank centurions, the handful of primi ordines of the legion’s 1st Cohort. And everything points to Caesar personally appointing Crastinus primus pilus of the 10th Legion following the tough battle outside Gergovia a few months back. Literally meaning “first spear,” this was the post of chief centurion of the legion. With just three years to go before he was due to retire, Chief Centurion Crastinus, now in his early thirties, had risen to the most powerful, most prestigious, most sought-after, and highest-paid rank an ordinary enlisted man could achieve at that time, roughly equivalent in authority to a present-day army captain, but without the status of the modern commissioned officer.

Now, Chief Centurion Crastinus and his men watched in silence— proud, triumphant, and no doubt a little intrigued to see their notorious adversary in the flesh for the first time. On his magnificent charger, the young Gaul completed a full circle of the seated Caesar, then brought his steed to a halt. He dismounted, handed the reins to a Roman groom, then walked to where Julius Caesar sat on a campaign chair in his armor and scarlet cloak. The Roman general was flanked by twelve lictors bearing his fasces of office, the rods and axes, and accompanied by his deputy commanders and staff officers, all standing, as his consular standard probably wafted a little in the breeze behind him.

Without a word, Vercingetorix removed his sword belt and handed it to Caesar. Caesar accepted the sword, then passed it to one of his staff. Vercingetorix removed his helmet, with its distinctive Gallic crest, and passed it over. Then his armor, richly decorated with gold and silver— attendants helped him out of it, and then this, too, he presented to Caesar, who in turn passed it to subordinates. Then Vercingetorix sat himself at Caesar’s feet. There, in silence, he watched as his hungry, dejected troops came out of Alesia in a long stream with heads hung low, and piled their weapons and armor before the conquering Romans and were then led away into slavery. Finally, Vercingetorix, too, was bound with chains and taken away.

Kept a prisoner for six years, Vercingetorix would be exhibited at Caesar’s Triumph at Rome in 46 B.C., lashed, and then executed in the time-honored manner, garroted behind prison walls in the northwestern corner of the Forum, as the culmination of the triumphal parade through the city’s streets.

Other leaders of the uprising had mixed fates. The turncoat King Commius of the Atrebates escaped to the north, but many of his fellow leaders were either executed or submitted themselves and their tribes to Caesar. Some Caesar treated better than others. All were required to offer up hostages to ensure their good behavior in the future, and to provide auxiliaries for the conquering army. These young men from the tribes of Gaul would become the backbone of the auxiliary arm of the Roman armed forces in the decades and centuries to come.

The 10th and Caesar’s nine other legions went into camp in Gaul for the winter of 52–51 B.C.. But the Gallic War was not yet over. Some tribesmen needed to be convinced they were beaten. With the defeat in the south, the tribes of the north decided that instead of massing against Caesar, as Vercingetorix had, they should attack his forces at a number of places at once. Guerrilla warfare.

In late December, when Caesar received intelligence at his headquarters at Bibracte, on Mount Beuvray, twelve miles west of Autun, that the Bituriges tribe of Bourges in west-central France was reassembling to launch raids on his forces, he set out on December 29 with the nearest available legions, the 11th and 13th, and in a forty-day campaign took the Bituriges by surprise and ended all thoughts they had of continued resistance. As he returned to Bibracte, in lieu of booty Caesar promised the men of these two legions two thousand sesterces each—almost three months’ pay—and two hundred sesterces to each centurion. We never hear whether the promise was kept.

Caesar had been back at headquarters just eighteen days when trouble flared again with the Carnutes, neighbors of the Bituriges. This time he marched with the 14th Legion and a newly arrived legion that had been camped with it, the 6th. The 6th Legion was another Spanish legion raised by Pompey the Great back in 65 B.C. along with the 4th, 5th, 7th, 8th, and 9th. It had operated in eastern Spain all these years while its brother legions had been serving under Caesar. Although he remained at Rome, Pompey had made a deal with Caesar and the elder Crassus, forming what historians later were to call the First Triumvirate, which had carved up the empire, extending Caesar’s command in Gaul, giving Crassus command in the East, and Pompey control in Italy and Spain. Caesar asked Pompey for reinforcements in 52 B.C., when the Vercingetorix Revolt blew up and fully stretched his resources. Pompey promptly sent him the 6th, which in 52 B.C. marched up over the Pyrenees and into France from its base in Nearer Spain.

The 6th was a veteran legion, well trained, highly experienced, and, in theory, as good as the 10th or any other in Caesar’s army. But Caesar, who was to show a tendency toward pettiness at times, had relegated the newly arrived 6th to guarding baggage trains and harvesting wheat with the understrength and, to Caesar’s mind, unreliable 14th Legion, for no reason other than that the 6th was one of Pompey’s legions. Caesar only called on it now because the 6th and the14th were the closest units to the latest hot spot. The two legions quickly marched north through appalling winter weather and occupied Orléans, the Carnute capital, as the Carnutes themselves fled in all directions.

Almost immediately, Caesar had more trouble to contend with—news arrived that King Commius had brought together several tribes in eastern France to continue the resistance against Rome. With the 10th Legion the farthest from the trouble, Caesar this time called out the 7th, 8th, and 9th, added the 11th to the task force, and marched against six rebellious tribes gathering to the east.

It was still only February, the weather was icily cold, and the ground wet and difficult to travel, as the three Spanish legions spread out on a broad front and advanced side by side across the French countryside. Behind came the baggage train, with the 11th Legion bringing up the rear. When he found the congregating tribes camped on a hill above marshy ground, Caesar had his legions build a fortress opposite the Gallic camp. His effort was unusually elaborate—its towers were three floors tall, with galleries linking one to the other so there were defenders on two levels. Caesar says this was to make the Gauls think he was afraid of them, but it’s just as likely he was only flexing his engineering muscles after they had won him the battle at Alesia.

For days, skirmishes went on outside the camps between foraging parties. Caesar held off assaulting the Gallic camp because he had sent a dispatch to General Trebonius to join him with three legions, which were wintering farther south. When the tribes heard that another Roman army was on the way, they sent away their women, children, and old people and prepared for an all-out battle. In a frenzy of construction activity, Caesar built causeways to higher ground and threw up a new camp. Commius then created a wall of flames in front of his camp one night, and, screened by this, his troops hastily withdrew to a new position ten miles away.

A Gallic cavalry ambush was soon after turned around by Caesar, who had been forewarned of it, and even before the legions could arrive on the scene, the Roman cavalry and auxiliaries had killed thousands of tribesmen. Shaken by this, the tribes now sent envoys asking to surrender. Again Commius escaped, first to Germany, and later to Britain, where he apparently ended his days.

Now the 10th and its fellow legions spent the rest of the year mopping up the final resistance—like stamping out the last flickerings of flame at the edge of a smothered brush fire.

Recalcitrant tribes in the west and southwest were now punished. In the southwest, Caesar successfully besieged the town of Uxellodenum, near modern Vayrac. After it fell, tired of all these little revolutions springing up when his command in Gaul only had one summer left to run, he had the hands of every captured defender sliced off, as a warning to the rest of Gaul. In the north, General Labienus led a large cavalry force of several thousand troopers, who ended opposition from Treveri Germans around Trier.

With the Gallic War finally brought to a conclusion, the 10th and the other legions were quartered in northern France and Belgium for the winter of 51–50 B.C. The new year, 50 B.C., saw peace in Gaul for the first time in many years, peace that allowed Caesar to return to Italy to concentrate on political matters. For the men of the 10th, it was a year without fighting, a year without profit. After so many seasons full of action, many of them were probably bored to tears by the inactivity.

For their senior centurions—men such as Gaius Crastinus, who’d been enlisted back in 65 B.C.—it was a time to plan what they were going to do with their lives once their sixteen-year enlistments expired and their discharge fell due in the new year. For the younger centurions, men of the 61 B.C. enlistment, it was a time to jockey for the positions that would soon be left vacant by the senior men leaving the legion.

What would retirement bring Centurion Crastinus? He would have saved a tidy sum over the years, from his pay, from bonuses paid by Caesar after one campaign and another, from the profits on booty taken from enemy towns, camps, and men he had killed in battle, from the sale of slaves, from furlough fees that enlisted men paid to their centurions to exempt them from duty in camp. He might buy a farm back in Spain, perhaps a tavern. Nothing too shoddy. He was a chief centurion, after all, and that would rank him highly among the working class when he returned to civilian life. He could expect a place of honor in festival day religious processions in whatever place he settled. The highly status-conscious Romans had a saying, “Eagles don’t catch flies,” and Centurion Crastinus certainly would have felt that applied to him.

It’s a safe bet that like most old soldiers, he would miss the occasional good fight. But most of all he’d miss his comrades. He wouldn’t miss arrogant young tribunes, fresh from Rome, so wet behind the ears, so stupid they didn’t even have the brains to know they were stupid. And generals whose hands he and his fellow centurions had to hold in the field, fools who didn’t know their ass from their elbow—he wouldn’t miss them.

Crastinus would have heard the talk circulating around the legion camp that fall about the looming possibility of a civil war. Caesar was being denied his just deserts by the Senate, the men would have been saying. It was all Pompey’s doing, they would have said, blaming Pompey for being jealous of a gifted rival such as Caesar. But Crastinus would probably would not have relished thoughts of Roman fighting Roman. His father’s generation had gone through a civil war, when Caesar was still only a youth, and too many good men had died for no good end in that war. Crastinus was probably looking forward to a long life, to dying in his own bed without a troubled conscience and with his sixty-year-old children gathered around him. And as they spoke of life in retirement, one of his first-rank centurion friends would have reminded him, with a wink, of another saying of the time: “Don’t make your physician your heir, and you’re sure to live to a ripe old age.”

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