Conscience of the King

by Alfred Duggan

  In the beginning of September we marched northwestwards to Verulamium. Here again the Count offered to refound the city, if people would come to dwell in it, but again with no success; even the squatters who were living there already said that they would move out if he tried to make them pay taxes. We went on northwest along the great road, and left the splendid flint-and-brick walls ungarrisoned, and the mighty gateways yawning open. It was a great disappointment to us all, for we had hoped to restore the forts and blockhouses along the Lindum-Londinium road, and confine the barbarians to the east coast of our island.

  As it was, we marched northwest to Ratae, which was still an inhabited town, and then northeast to Lindum. We caught many little gangs of raiders, and chased others away; but we knew they would start to creep back as soon as our backs were turned. Nevertheless our unopposed march had been so successful that we were in very high spirits, and expected, sooner or later, to free the whole of Britain from the invaders. Then Ambrosius would be Emperor of the Diocese of the Gauls, and we should be his trusted Counts and the rulers of his cities. Even I, who valued my independence so highly, would have accepted a really good subordinate position under that great man.

  We managed to restore Lindum, for the Saxon raids had not been very bad in that district and the people were warlike. At the end of October we set our faces for Corinium and our winter quarters; the Count meant to keep the army together all winter, for he knew that the war would begin again in the spring. In November we dispersed to the hutted camps that had been built round the city, and carried on with our training for the next campaign.

  The army began to exercise as soon as the days grew longer. This drill was beginning to bore us all, for we subordinates could learn our simple part in it very easily, though I see now that the senior officers needed all the practice they could get; in any case we thought it a waste of time, if the barbarians were not going to face us in a pitched battle. But somehow we paraded every morning to the sound of the trumpet, and ran about the drill ground under the eyes of our leader; no one thought of deserting and going home, though there was really nothing to stop us.

  I wish I could explain the remarkable ascendancy that Count Ambrosius had won over his unruly and heterogeneous army. Partly it was the way he took it for granted that we all knew it was our duty to obey him; partly it was the genuine enjoyment we got out of pretending to be better men than we were. Everyone admits that the world has steadily been getting more wicked since recorded history began, and we were proud to imitate our forefathers in the smallest details of our lives; the play-acting was amusing. But chiefly it was because we loved and admired Ambrosius.

  He made no concessions. He was as strict with us as an old-fashioned Roman general ought to be, and on the parade ground he seldom spoke except to utter some rebuke; he exchanged no oaths and distributed no gifts, such as comrades expect from their leader; and he worked us very hard. But we all knew that he worked himself hardest of all, that he lived on his bare rations as we did, and that after drilling us all day he sat up most of the night, writing letters to his allies. His dress was so eccentric that he was always easy to identify, and that is half the battle when troops are to admire their leader; he always wore his cuirass and military cloak when on duty, whatever the weather, and a toga in the evening. You could pick him out half a mile away by his bare arms. He had two quite distinct manners; on parade he was as stern as could be, but off duty he would stroll round the camp, talking to any common soldier he met, praising our efforts and always assuming that the other man was as earnest for the liberation of Britain as he was. Since that time I have seen many barbarian chiefs, who could only command their followers by the affection that they compelled and the rewards they conferred, but no one else who could rule a disciplined army merely by appealing to the better nature of his followers. There will never be another Count Ambrosius.

  We drilled devotedly, for this year we hoped to invade Kent itself, and there would be rich plunder for all. A contingent of Christian Irishmen crossed the sea to join us, and more Saxon mercenaries enlisted, so that my detachment was enlarged to forty men. The Count did not try to drill his foederati; that would have spoilt their natural method of fighting without making them reliable infantry of the line.

  Constans was a changed man. He still had his comitatus under him, and fifty more well-armed soldiers besides, for there had been promotions among the veterans of the first campaign; but he no longer treated them like equal companions, which is the whole idea of a comitatus. They had to stand at attention when he spoke to them, even off parade, and in the evening he formally inspected their food and then went off to sup alone. All this was in accordance with the ideas of Count Ambrosius, but it seemed to me rather shocking all the same, and that the freeborn comrades took it without too much grumbling was a tribute to our leader’s great influence. My own Saxons were on very free-and-easy terms with me, but if I had tried to be strict with them they would just have gone over to the enemy.

  These Saxons of mine had never been followers of Hengist (whom it was now strictly forbidden to call King of Kent). They or their fathers had first come to Britain more than twenty years ago, when the barbarians were still acting as loyal foederati; they had been employed as a personal bodyguard by the Count’s father, a landowner near Corinium, and when the raids began he had settled them in the upper Thames valley, to watch his borders. You might think that twenty years among Christian Romans would have altered their habits and made them civilized men, but this was not the case; apart from a few casual rapes, they had not even intermarried with their neighbours, but obtained their women from Germany or Kent; and they had made no effort to learn our language. Of course, this was because they despised us as second-rate warriors, and their neighbours despised them as savages; so that both parties, though they lived in the same villages, were separated by a deep mutual contempt. I got on well enough, by tactfully treating them all as honourable German heroes; luckily my sense of smell is very weak, the first qualification for living among barbarians. Actually they were not even the best class of Saxon, for they were mostly poor and wicked men, who had been compelled to flee from their tribes because they had committed murder and could not pay the blood fine. If I ever attained independence, or ruled responsibly under the Count, they would do well enough for the rank-and-file of an army, but I would have to find more intelligent officers.

  The prospect of independent rule later on was quite hopeful. If we drove the barbarians right out of Britain Count Ambrosius would have to leave officials behind him to keep the country quiet. I saw myself as one of them, for I had no ambition to follow him abroad; Emperors proclaimed in Britain always try to conquer the West, and so far only Constantine the Great has succeeded. Sooner or later the Count would be killed in battle, and then I could start ruling on my own. His nephew and destined successor, the Tribune Aurelian, was a fussy little man, and he had the job of training the recruits, which was bound to make him unpopular.

  The army that set out on the 1st of June 471 was the finest that had been seen in Britain for many years, and the largest; though my father, who never could take bold decisions, did not send the rest of his forces. Numbers of men are always difficult things to calculate, and as a rule only the commander-in-chief is in a position to make a reasonably accurate guess, but the well-armed foot were divided into twelve numeri of about five hundred men each, one of which my brother commanded, and there were about as many shieldless peasant spearmen in the second line. In addition we had a thousand Irish and Saxon auxiliaries, including my little command of forty men, and about three hundred cavalry, who rode on little ponies. Weight-carrying horses are now extinct in Britain, for raiders have killed or carried off the big stallions who were stabled on rich farms, and the few mares that escaped to breed in the forests and moors have reverted to their natural pony type. It is a problem that worries all soldiers, and we were lucky to have three hundred light cavalry.

  We marched down the Thames by the
same route as last year, though more cautiously and slowly; for we had learnt that the Saxons had gathered a large army and were waiting for us somewhere. The Count insisted on very thorough scouting, and would not encamp until he was sure there was no enemy within a day’s march; the cavalry swept the open country, but my Saxons had to search the woods for ambushes, and very nervous work it was.

  We found no one at all in the Thames valley, and reached Londinium without incident. Then we once again took our old route by Ratae to Lindum; these places had not been raided in the last winter, and were beginning to revive as trading towns. This increased our already high spirits, for it showed that our campaign was already taking effect in eastern Britain.

  It was now August; we had marched for two months along the enemy’s borders without opposition, and we began to wonder if the campaign would again fizzle out without a battle. The Count assembled all the officers to hear him explain his future plans. Bareheaded and wearing his usual cuirass and cloak, he mounted a wooden tribunal and made a set speech in the manner of Livy, which I still remember, but whose eloquence I will spare my readers. He said that we simply must fight a decisive battle this year, for the peasantry of the southwest could not support this great army much longer; we would seek out the Saxons wherever they might be. The army would march south, but not by the way it had come; we would take the direct road, through Durobrivae to Londinium, and continue right on to Durovernum if we did not meet the enemy north of the Thames. In short, we were going to march through the heart of their territory and hem them up against the coast.

  Troops always get a little slack on a long march, when there is no enemy about; but now we had a few days’extra training, and then marched south in very compact formation, ready to fight at a moment’s notice. None of us had ever been along this stretch of road before, for it led through the heart of the great marshes, where the Saxons left their war-boats and changed into little skiffs before raiding up the rivers into the midlands. If we did not meet their army we might perhaps stumble on one of their treasure-hoards.

  We forded two difficult rivers by the paved fords of the great disused road; near the second of these fords were the ruins of Durobrivae, a town more thoroughly destroyed than any that I have ever seen, so that you hardly noticed the nettle-grown ruins until you stumbled over them. I mention this place so that men who have learnt geography may understand whereabouts we were at that time, for the rivers are nameless. Our peasants are bad at river-names and every stream seems to be called either Avon or Ouse, in spite of the names our ancestors gave them.

  After leaving these melancholy ruins we marched south for one day along the great road which skirts the edge of the marshes. Next morning, as usual, the cavalry were sent forward on our right flank, while my Saxons explored the marsh. Soon I noticed that the south wind carried a familiar stench from right ahead; it was the odour of my own men, but ten times stronger, and I knew that there was a large body of Saxons somewhere in front. This was just the sort of moment my followers would choose to change sides, so I halted them at once; I then went forward with only one companion, a young and fairly trustworthy warrior called Cutha. We crept on all fours through a beastly wet patch of reeds and lay down on our stomachs to peer out the far side; but smells are very deceptive and the enemy were not as near as I had thought. We crept and crawled a full mile farther; I knew that the Count would not trust the evidence of my nose alone. The smell grew stronger, and I could hear the hum of many voices; then we waded, bending low, through a shallow but sticky mere, and carefully parted the reeds on the far side. Five hundred yards away we saw the Saxon army.

  Hengist was a cautious and painstaking leader, and had been well trained in his youth as an auxiliary with Roman troops. He had chosen a very strong position, on a neck of dry ground between two marshes; it was an obvious defile, and in the old days someone had dug an entrenchment across the narrowest part; the barbarians had strengthened this with a flimsy barricade of brushwood, for no trees grew in that marshy spot, and they were too lazy to fetch stakes from the nearest wood. I waited a few minutes, until I had impressed the whole picture on my mind, and then we both crept away as silently as we had come.

  I felt very grand when I told my news to the Count; but he had on his parade-ground manner at the time, and he made no effort to thank me. As a matter of fact the news was rather disconcerting, for we had never expected that the enemy would fight behind entrenchments; it meant that the skill in manœuvre that had cost us so much time and trouble would scarcely be called upon. The army was halted at once, for it was after midday, and we were told that we would not fight until the morning.

  It would be a head-on collision, favouring the fiercest rather than the best-trained troops. There had never been such a battle in the memory of any of our men; when Hengist was winning his Kingdom in Kent Vortigern had never rallied all southern Britain behind him, for the western Kings had held aloof. Neither side could afford to keep such great armies concentrated for long; Hengist had lost a whole season’s plunder, and his men would begin to drift back to Germany unless they could start raiding soon; the Count had told us that our supplies were running short; our two years’campaign had reached its climax. It was a filthy wet night, but men stood about talking in the rain, and it was difficult to get the army to go to sleep.

  Next morning we were given an unusually big breakfast, for whatever the outcome of the battle we would be marching all that night in pursuit or retreat, and our baggage might not come up with us for days. I remember that I was rather doubtful of victory, and ate sparingly so as to be able to run fast if it came to the worst; it is curious how the missed opportunity of a good meal lingers in the memory. Then the Count called all the officers to him, and made the usual Roman speech before battle. After expressing the sentiments appropriate to the occasion he came to his orders. I was relieved to hear that we auxiliary scouts would not be placed with the armoured men in the line of battle. He intended to make a straightforward all-out attack in dense column along the three hundred yards of firm ground in the centre, while my men and the Irish splashed about in the marshes to distract the barbarians, who are always nervous about their flanks. I should have a fine view of the battle, but the heavy going of the marsh would give me a bad start if things went wrong.

  My men were on the left flank, for the Irish, as Christians, had the place of honour on the right. We began to wade through the marsh, where the mud came up to our knees. Meanwhile the main army was forming up for battle; there was just room for three numeri to stand side by side in six ranks on the neck of dry ground, so the twelve numeri were in four lines, one behind the other; behind them were the peasant spearmen in one solid and disorderly mass, and the whole array made a very impressive column. There was nothing for the cavalry to do, and they were drawn up in the background; if we suffered a reverse they might cover our retreat, unless they preferred to ride off as soon as the battle went against us. I never trust cavalry; they have done great deeds across the Channel, but horses are hysterical creatures, and they infect their riders with their own panic.

  My men started rather too early, and we came within javelin-range of the Saxon entrenchments before the main attack had begun. The wind, which carried with it a thin summer drizzle, blew straight in our faces, and the enemy’s darts fell among us while we could not reply. I told my men to draw back out of range and carry on shouting their war-cries; the battle did not depend on us, and it was stupid to risk casualties.

  From where I stood, with the mud squelching round my thighs, I had a very good view of the whole course of the battle; I remember clearly my disappointment at the dingy appearance of the Saxon army. Our warriors of the comitatus always wore their best clothes and all their jewellery to fight in, so that if they met with bad luck they would be buried as persons of importance; but these Saxons were nearly all dressed in badly-woven dark blue cloth, which looked black in the penetrating rain, and many of their shields had not been painted for years. Shuffling abo
ut behind their brushwood barricade oil top of the entrenchment, they looked like a crowd of coloni at a hanging.

  But they did not fight like peasants. Our gaily-dressed and well-drilled column marched up to the ditch; of course, the best fighting-men were in front, including all the Kings and sons of Kings; when they neared the enemy the ranks began to get unsteady, as each leader raced forward to win the honour of striking the first blow. Count Ambrosius might tell us off into numeri, but we were still a collection of jealous comitatus; it was already a disorderly crowd of emulous rivals that plunged into the ditch and began to scramble up the slippery clay bank on the other side.

  Anyone who has to use even one hand to climb with is at a tremendous disadvantage against an enemy who can stand upright and keep his shield in the correct position. In that first assault our men had no chance, and I was not surprised to see them come tumbling back almost at once; in fact the clash was over so quickly that very few of them were hurt. I noticed Count Ambrosius at the rear, of the crowd, for he was the only man mounted in all the Roman column of attack. It was a strange position for the leader of the army, who usually has to go in front of the first rush; but I understand it is the old Roman fashion, and it would have occurred to none of us to reflect on his courage. Now he was shouting and waving his arms, though I was too far away to hear what he said.

  He managed to get them into line again, and I could see a lot of jostling and pushing, as though men were changing places. Presently the line advanced, this time at a slow walk, and when they descended into the ditch I realized that the composition of the front rank had been changed; for they all bent forward, with their hands pressed against the side of the bank and their shields on their backs, so that those behind could jump on to them and stab at the legs of the defenders; no King would turn himself into a beast of burden like that. The Saxon palisade was only an untidy heap of thorn-bushes, for barbarians are always slack in their fortification, and the Roman spears penetrated it quite easily; it must have been very awakward for the enemy, with sharp weapons digging at their knees just where their shields prevented them from looking down properly.