Being informed of the place where he was, he sent to him his master of horse, Caius Volusenus Quadratus, who knew the Atrebate, for they had been commissioned to reconnoitre together the coasts of the isle of Britain before Cæsar’s expedition hither; but Volusenus had not ventured to land. Therefore, by the command of Labienus, Cæsar’s lieutenant, Volusenus chose a few centurions and took them with him to the village where he knew Komm to be. He could rely upon them. The centurion was a legionary promoted from the ranks, who as a sign of his office carried a vine-stock with which he used to strike his subordinates. His chiefs did what they liked with him. As an instrument of conquest he was second only to the navy. Volusenus said to his centurions:
“A man will approach me. You will suffer him to advance. I shall hold out my hand to him. At that moment you will strike him from behind, and you will kill him.”
Having given these orders, Volusenus set forth with his escort. In a sunken way, near the village, he met Komm with his followers. The King of the Atrebates, aware that he was suspected, would have turned his horse. But the master of the horse called him by name, assured him of his friendship and held out his hand to him.
Reassured by those signs of friendship, the Atrebate approached. As he was about to take the proffered hand a centurion struck him on the head with his sword and caused him to fall bleeding from his horse. Then the King’s followers threw themselves upon the little band of Romans, scattered them, took up Komm and carried him away to the nearest village, while Volusenus, who believed his task accomplished, crept back to the camp with his horsemen.
King Komm was not dead. He was carried secretly into the country of the Atrebates, where he was cured of his terrible wound. Having recovered, he took this oath:
“I swear never to meet a Roman save to kill him.” Soon he learnt that Cæsar had suffered a severe defeat at the foot of the Gergovian Mount and forty-six centurions of his army had fallen beneath the walls of the town. Later he was told that the confederates commanded by Vercingétorix were besieged in the country of the Mandubi, at Alesia, a famous Gallic fortress founded by Hercules of Tyre. Then, with a following of warriors, Morini and Atrebates, he marched to the frontier of the Edni, where an army was assembling to relieve the Gauls in Alesia. The army was numbered and was found to consist of two hundred and forty thousand foot and eight thousand horse. The command was entrusted to Virdumar and Eporedorix of the Edni, Vergasillaun of the Averni and Komm of the Atrebates.
After a long and arduous march, Komm, with his chiefs and fighting-men, reached the mountainous country of the Edni. From the heights surrounding the plateau of Alesia he beheld the Roman camp and the earthworks dug all around it by those little dark men, who waged war with the mattocks and the spade rather than with the javelin and the sword. This seemed to him to augur ill, for he knew that against trenches and machines the Gauls were of less avail than against human breasts. He himself, though well versed in the stratagems of war, understood little of the engineering art of the Romans. After three great battles, during which no break was made in the enemy’s fortifications, the terrific rout of the Gauls carried off Komm as a blade of grass is whirled away in a storm. In the mêlée he had perceived Cæsar’s red mantle and taken it for an omen of defeat. Now he fled furiously down the track cursing the Romans, but content that the Gallic chieftains, of whom he was jealous, were suffering with him.
4
For a year Komm lived in hiding in the forests of the Atrebates. There he was safe, because the Gauls hated the Romans, and having themselves submitted to the conquerors they had a great respect for those who refused them obedience. On the river-bank and in the green-wood, accompanied by his followers, he led a life not differing greatly from that he had lived as the chief of many tribes. He gave himself up to hunting and fishing, devised stratagems and drank fermented drinks, which, though depriving him of the knowledge of human affairs, enabled him to understand those that are divine. But his soul had suffered a change, and it pained him to be no longer free. All the chiefs of his people had been killed in battle, or had died beneath the lash, or, bound by the lictor, had been led away to a Roman prison. No longer did a bitter envy of them possess him; for now all his hatred was concentrated upon the Romans. He bound to his horse’s tail the golden circlet which he, as the friend of the Senate and the Roman people, had received from the Dictator. To his dogs he gave the names of Caesar, Caius and Julius. When he saw a pig he stoned it, calling it Volusenus. And he composed songs like those which he had heard in his youth, eloquently expressing the love of liberty.
Now, it happened that one day, absorbed in the chase, having wandered away from his followers, he climbed the high, heather-dad tableland which commands Nemetacum, and, gazing thence, he saw with amazement that the huts and stockades of his town had vanished, and that in a wall-encirded enclosure rose temples and houses of an architecture so prodigious as to inspire him with the horror and fear caused by works of magic. For he could not believe that in so short a time such dwellings could have been constructed by natural means.
He forgot the birds on the moorland, and, prone on the red earth, he lay and gazed long upon the strange town. Curiosity, stronger than fear, kept his eyes wide open. Until evening he gazed upon the spectacle. Then there came to him an overpowering desire to enter the town. Beneath a stone on the heath he hid his golden torques, his bracelets, his jewelled belts and his weapons of chase. Retaining only his knife, hidden under his mantle, he descended the wooded hill-side. As he passed through the moist undergrowth, he gathered some mushrooms, so that he might appear as a poor man coming to sell his wares in the market. And in the third watch of the night he entered the town through the Golden Gate. It was kept by legionaries who allowed peasants bringing in food to pass. Thus the King of the Atrebates, disguised as a poor man, was readily enabled to penetrate as far as the Julian way. This was bordered by villas; it led to the Temple of Diana, the white façade of which was already adorned with interlacing arches of purple, azure and gold. In the grey morning light Komm saw figures painted on the walls of the houses. They were ethereal pictures of dancing girls and scenes drawn from a history of which he was ignorant: a young virgin whom heroes were offering up as a sacrifice, a mother in her fury plunging a dagger into her two children as yet unweaned, a man with the hoofs of a goat raising his pointed ears in surprise, when, unrobing a sleeping and reclining virgin, he discovers her to be at once a youth and a woman. And there were in the courtyard other pictures representing modes of love unknown to the peoples of Gaul. Though passionately addicted to wine and women, he had no idea of Ausonian voluptuousness, because he had no clear idea of the variety of human forms and because he was untroubled by the desire for beauty. Having come to this town, which had once been his, in order to satisfy his hatred and inflame his wrath, he filled his heart with fury and loathing. He detested Roman art and the mysterious devices of the Roman painters. And in all these census figures on the city portals he saw but little, because his eyes lacked discernment save in observing the foliage of trees or the clouds in a dark sky.
Bearing his mushrooms in a fold of his mantle, he passed along the broad-paved streets. Beneath a door over which was a phallus illuminated by a little lamp he saw women wearing transparent tunics, who were watching for the passers-by. He approached with the intention of offering them violence. An old woman appeared, who in a squeaky voice said sharply:
“Go thy way. This is not a house for peasants who reek of cheese. Return to thy cows, herdsman.”
Komm replied that he had had fifty women, the most beautiful of the Atrebates, and possessed coffers full of gold. The courtesans began to laugh, and the old woman cried:
“Be off, drunkard!”
And it seemed to him that the duenna was a centurion armed with a vine-stock, with such splendour did the majesty of the Roman people shine throughout the Empire!
With one blow of his fist Komm broke her jaw and serenely pursued his way, while the narrow passage of
the house was filled with shrieks, howls and lamentations. On the left he passed the temple of Diana of the Ardeni and crossed the forum between two rows of porches. When he recognized the goddess Roma standing on her marble pedestal, wearing a helmet, with her arm outstretched to command the peoples, in order to insult her, he performed before her the most ignoble of natural functions.
He was now coming to the end of the buildings of the town. Before him extended the stone circle of the amphitheatre as yet barely outlined, but already immense. He sighed:
“O race of monsters!”
And he advanced among the shattered and trampled vestiges of Gallic huts, the thatched roofs of which once extended like some motionless army and which were now degraded into less even than ruins — into little more than a heap of manure spread upon the ground. And he reflected:
“Behold what remains of so many ages of men! Behold what they have made of the dwellings wherein the chiefs of the Atrebates hung their arms!”
The sun had risen over the grades of the amphitheatre, and with insatiable and inquisitive hatred the Gaul wandered among the vast enclosures filled with bricks and stones. His large blue eyes gazed on these stony monuments of conquest, and he shook his long fair locks in the fresh breeze. Thinking himself alone, he muttered curses. But not far from the stone-masons’ yard he perceived, at the foot of an oak-crowned hillock, a man seated on a mossy stone in a crouching position, with his mantle thrown over his head. He wore no insignia; but on his finger was the knight’s ring, and the Atrebate knew enough of a Roman camp to recognize a military tribune. This soldier was writing on tablets of wax and appeared wrapt in thought. Having long remained motionless, he raised his head, pensive, with his style to his lips, looked about him vacantly, then gazed down again and resumed his writing. Komm saw his full face and perceived that he was young, and that he had a gentle, high-born air.
Then the Atrebate chief recalled his oath. He felt for his knife beneath his cloak, slipped behind the Roman with the agility of the savage and plunged the blade into the middle of his back. It was a Roman blade. The tribune uttered a deep groan and sank down. A trickle of blood flowed from one corner of his mouth. The waxen tablets remained on his tunic between his knees. Komm took them and looked eagerly at the signs traced thereon, thinking them to be magic signs the knowledge of which would give him great power. They were letters which he could not read and which were taken from the Greek alphabet then preferred to the Latin alphabet by the young littérateurs of Italy.
Most of these letters were effaced by the flat end of the style; those which remained were Latin lines in Greek metre, and here and there they were intelligible:
TO PHŒBE, ON HER TOMTIT
O thou, whom Varius loved more than his eyes,
Thy Varius, wandering beneath the rainy sky of Galata...
And the couple sang in their golden cage of gold.
* * * *
O my white Phoebe, with prudent hand give
Millet and fresh water to thy frail captive.
She sits, she is a mother: a mother is timid.
* * * *
Oh! come not to the misty Ocean’s strand,
Phoebe, for fear...
... Thy white feet and thy limbs
So nimbly moving to the crotalum’s rhythm.
* * * *
And neither the gold of Croesus nor the purple of Attala,
But thy fresh arms, thy breasts....
A faint sound ascended from the waking town. Past the remnants of the Gallic huts where a few barbarians, fierce though of humble rank, were still lurking in the trenches, the Atrebate fled, and through a breach in the wall he leapt into the open country.
5
When, through the legionaries’ sword, the lictor’s lashes and Cæsar’s flattering words Gaul was at length completely pacified, Marcus Antonius, the quaestor, came to take up his winter quarters in Nemetacum of the Atrebates. He was the son of Julia, Cæsar’s sister. His functions were those of paymaster to the troops. It was for him, also, to apportion the booty captured, in accordance with established rules. This booty was immense; for the conquerors had discovered bars of gold and carbuncles under the stones of sacred places, in the hollows of oaks and in the still water of pools; they had collected golden utensils from the huts of exterminated tribes and their chiefs.
Marcus Antonius brought with him many scribes and land surveyors who set to work upon the apportionment of lands and movable goods, and would have perpetrated many useless writings had not Cæsar prescribed for them simple and rapid methods of procedure. Merchants from Asia, workmen, lawyers and other settlers came in crowds to Nemetacum; and the Atrebates who had quitted their town returned one by one, curious, astonished, filled with wonder. The Gauls, for the most part, were now proud to wear the toga and to speak the tongue of the magnanimous sons of Remus. Having shaved off their long moustaches they had resembled Romans. Those who had succeeded in retaining any wealth employed a Roman architect to build them a house with an inner porch, rooms for the women and a fountain adorned with shell-work. They had paintings of Hercules, Mercury and the Muses in their dining-room, and would sup reclining on couches.
Komm, though himself illustrious and the son of an illustrious father, had lost most of his followers. Nevertheless he refused to submit, and led a wandering, warlike life in company with a few fighting-men who were addicted to plunder and rape, or who, like their chief, were possessed of a keen desire for liberty or of hatred for the Romans. They followed him into impenetrable forests, into marshes and even into those moving islands which occur in the broad estuaries of rivers. They were entirely devoted to him, but they addressed him without respect, as a man speaks to his equal, because they were actually his equals in courage, in the extremes of continual hardships, of poverty and wretchedness. They dwelt in trees or in the clefts of rocks. They sought out caverns worn in the friable stone by the water gushing down narrow valleys. When there were no beasts to hunt, they fed on blackberries and arbutus berries. They were excluded from towns by their fear of the Romans or by the vigilance of the Roman guards. In few villages were they readily received. Komm, however, always found a welcome in the huts scattered over the wind-swept sands which border the lazy waters of the Somme estuary. The dwellers on these dunes fed on fish. Poor, dishevelled, buried among the blue thistles of their barren soil, they had had no experience of Roman might. They received Komm and his companions into their subterranean abodes, which were covered with reeds and stones rounded by the Ocean. They listened to him attentively, having never heard any man talk so well. He said to them:
“Know who are the friends of the Atrebates and the Morini who live on the sea-shore and in the deep forest.
“The moon, the forest and the sea are the friends of the Morini and the Atrebates. And neither the sea nor the forest nor the moon loves the little dark men who follow Cæsar.
“Now the sea said to me: ‘Komm, I am hiding the ships of the Veneti in a lonely cove on my shore.’
“The forest said to me: ‘Komm, I will provide a secure shelter for thee who art an illustrious chieftain, and for thy faithful companions.’
“The moon said to me: ‘Komm, thou hast seen me in the isle of the Britons shattering the Roman ships. I command the clouds and the winds, and I will refuse to shine upon the drivers of the chariots which bear victuals to the Romans of Nemetacum, in order that thou mayest take them by surprise in the darkness of the night.’
“Thus spoke unto me the sea, the forest and the moon. And this I bid you:
“Leave your boats and your nets and come with me. You will all be chiefs in war and of great renown. We shall fight great and profitable battles. We shall win victuals, treasure and women in abundance. Behold in what manner:
“I know so completely the whole country of the Atrebates and the Morini that there is not a single river, nor pool, nor rock with the situation of which I am unacquainted. And likewise every road, every path with its exact length and its precise di
rection lies as clear in my mind as upon the soil of our ancestors. Great and royal indeed must be my mind thus to encompass the whole land of the Atrebates. But know that many another country is likewise contained in it — the lands of the Britons, the Gauls and the Germans. Wherefore, had it been given me to command the peoples, I should have conquered Caesar and driven the Romans out of this country. Wherefore we, you and I who speak, shall surprise the couriers of Marcus Antonius and the convoys of food destined for the town which has been reft from me. We shall surprise them without difficulty, for I know along which roads they travel, and their soldiers will not discover us since they know not the roads we shall take. And were they to follow on our tracks, we should escape from them in the ships of the Veneti, which would bear us to the isle of the Britons.”
With such words Komm inspired his hosts with confidence on the misty sea-shore. And he finally won them over by giving them pieces of gold and iron, the last vestiges of the treasure which had once been his. They said to him:
“We will follow thee wherever it please thee to lead us.”
He led them by unknown ways to the edge of the Roman road. When he saw horses grazing on the bush grass near the abode of a rich man, he gave them to his companions.
Thus he gathered together a body of horsemen which was joined by those of the Atrebates who desired to wage war for the sake of booty, and by some deserters from the Roman camp. The latter Komm did not receive, in order not to break the oath which he had sworn never again to look a Roman in the face save to slay him. But he had them questioned by some one of intelligence, and dismissed them with food for three days. Sometimes all the male folk of a village, young and old, entreated him to receive them as his followers.
These men had been completely despoiled by the tax-gatherers of Marcus Antonius, who in addition to the imposts which Caesar levied had demanded others, which were not due, and had fined chiefs for imaginary offences. In short, these publicans, after filling the coffers of the State, took care to enrich themselves at the expense of barbarians whom they thought a stupid people, and whose importunate complaints could always be silenced by the executioner’s axe. Komm chose the strongest of these men. The others were dismissed, despite their tears and their entreaties not to be left to die of hunger or at the hands of the Romans. He did not wish for a great army, because he did not wish to wage a great war as Vercingétorix had done.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 342