by Whyte, Jack
The following night, in the course of a well-attended dinner in the Officers' Mess, Britannicus publicly challenged Titus Cirrius, the Tribune of the First Cohort, to a match between his men and ours, man against man, squad against squad, formation against formation. The match would consist of athletic contests in the morning, and tests of military skill in the afternoon. The judging would be conducted by the Legate, assisted by officers from the auxiliary cohorts. Britannicus told me later that it was done in such a way that Cirrius could refuse neither the challenge nor the wager involved. Of course Cirrius, in common with everybody else, knew that his men had neither the training nor the discipline of ours, so Britannicus very nobly set the date for ten weeks in the future, around the Ides, the fifteenth, of October.
We whipped their tails, but not as easily as we would have done ten weeks earlier. Those lads made up a lot of ground in ten weeks of training; the word was out that there was gold riding on the match, and a lot of it was theirs. They drilled and marched and trained almost as hard as we did normally. In our cohort, all the jokes and sneers about our training rosters were forgotten and forgiven, and without anything being said, we stepped training up to a level that would have produced mass desertions a month earlier.
The magic had been performed. The Second Cohort had been transformed into a solid unit, pulling together for the honour and the gold they could win as a group, as a tight, disciplined, highly trained entity. A fighting force was born, and over the next few years it grew into one of the elite units of the garrison of Britain. The First Cohort kept on trying to beat us, but they didn't have a chance. We were too finely honed. And, four years later, there we were — an elite fighting unit stranded in the field, in a fortified overnight camp, surrounded by God only knew how many thousand howling savages drunk on victory and spilling southward around us like wine from a broken barrel.
By nightfall that first day following the Invasion, we were no longer able to estimate the numbers of men drawn up around the camp, just out of range of our arrows. The first party who had spotted our camp and had been sighted by our sentries, causing the first alarm we heard from the Tribune's tent, had sent back runners to summon help. From that point on, they had gathered like vultures.
We watched the hordes that first evening from the safety of our parapets, wondering when they would attack us. We had no illusions about their fear of us. After Hadrian's Wall, our little camp must have looked like a pimple on an elephant's arse to them. The Picts, we knew, were dawn fighters. They would sleep during the night and come at us in massed charges with the rising of the sun. The Scots, we believed and prayed, were similar, so the odds looked good for a quiet night before Hades came to earth with the morning.
Britannicus, however, had other ideas, and they involved me. On leaving his conference, I had called a meeting of all the centurions in the cohort. There were twenty of them, not including myself. I asked each of them to pick the five best all-round soldiers in his unit of fifty men (the days when a centurion commanded a hundred men had been gone four hundred years). It wasn't quite that tidy, because some of them came up with six or seven, but within half an hour I had the names of one hundred and twenty of our very best.
I set the clerks to the job of drawing up a roster for this new maniple and chose two centurions to command it, sixty men apiece. I promoted ten of those men to decurion rank, retaining two who were already decurions, and then detailed ten centurions to assemble all of these bodies in full gear against the wall of the camp closest to my tent within half an hour. Having done that, I went to tell Britannicus that his "special unit" was being prepared.
He astonished me by having one of the smiths from the regimental armourer's quarters set up an anvil and a hammer at the assembly point. I stayed in his tent with him, sharing the briefing he was giving to young Cato, one of the subalterns, whom he had promoted to command the new maniple. When a decurion stuck his head into the tent to tell us that the men were all assembled, Britannicus himself came with us to address them.
The new 120-man detail stiffened to attention as we approached. The two centurions had them drawn up into their two divisions of 60 men each; ten ranks by six files. Apart from the far-off whoops and yells of the enemy outside the camp, there was utter silence. Britannicus eyed them and, cool as a spring breeze, inspected each of them. When he had finished his inspection he returned to the front and faced them, picking up the hammer from the anvil and swinging it over his head to bring it smashing down onto the flat surface. He knew then that he had everyone's attention.
"Watch the hammer!" He swung it again. "It bounces back from the surface. Watch it!" Again he swung, hard.
"The harder the blow, the more complete the rebound. And anything between the surfaces gets smashed. Now. Watch this." He took off his cloak and held it up in front of him, in his left hand.
"I could swing a hammer at this all day and it would be a total waste of time and effort." He did so, and the cloth slipped easily over the hammer head. But then Britannicus put down the hammer and began to fold the cloak again and again upon itself, until it was reduced to a compact wad of wool that he held high in his left hand, taking the hammer again in his right. He let the wad drop, swung the hammer and knocked the cloak a good fifteen feet.
"When it is folded, as you just saw, it becomes solid enough for me to hit it and move it." He paused, waiting for the message to sink in, and then continued, his voice never rising beyond an intimate but very powerful pitch, audible to all of the soldiers of the new maniple.
"There are thousands of bare-arsed hostiles just outside this camp dreaming of slitting our throats. They are a rabble, an undisciplined mob. But they love to fight, and they think they know how it's done. They don't!
We are going to teach them how it's done. You are going to teach them how it is done. I have already taught you. You men are going to hammer these people until the concussion blinds them. You are going to hit them hard, compressing them and folding them back on themselves until the power of your blows is multiplied a hundred times by their density. Jam them together tightly enough, and you'll take away their power to strike back at you. Once you have them jammed together, compacted just like my old cloak here, you will hit them and rebound, just like that hammer head, ready to hit them again."
There was total silence in the ranks as he continued. "Before Julius Caesar reorganized his legions into cohorts, the maniple was the main striking force of the Legion. The maniple. A hundred and twenty men, just like you, fighting in twelve squads often men each. Each ten-man squad performed and manoeuvred just like a modern maniple, except that it was one-twelfth of the size." He paused and waited for his message to infiltrate the minds of the men listening to him. "Tonight, we are going to resurrect those tactics. Don't worry about it. You have been training for this for the past three years. You just didn't know it. Those heathen helots outside won't know what's hit them."
Another measured pause before he continued. "You will fight in three lines of four squads each, one behind the other, with gaps between the front line squads wide enough to accommodate the squads of the second line when it moves forward and the first falls back. As the front line falls back, the third line will advance at the charge to fill in the front line gaps. The first line, now in the rear, will then swing right and left to form the sides of a box, and you will then make a fighting retreat, protected by the mounted archers who will come out of the camp gates to cover your withdrawal. Nothing new — you've done it all before, in training. Just remember: Your purpose is to hammer. To deliver hard, unexpected attacks of short duration from any and all of the four camp entrances. Your intent will be to terrorize and demoralize the enemy.
"Remember, too, that your discipline makes you both unmatchable and unbeatable. The enemy fights in single combat. Every one of them is alone. You men, on the other hand, fight like a machine. There is little human about you. I expect you to get into their ranks quickly, hit them hard and then get back to the safety
of these walls. Intact." His eyes moved from face to face.
"Upon re-entering the camp, you will rest for an hour and then hit them again from the other side." Again he paused before going on. "This is not an easy assignment, but each of you has been chosen as the best man in ten. You'll be tired by dawn, but you will be relieved of daytime duties. Remember, your prime purpose in this exercise will be to confuse and panic the enemy, to undermine his confidence." He stopped and looked them over carefully. "Is there any man here who does not want this duty?" Silence.
"This is your last chance."
Nothing.
"Very well, then. Hammer them!" He spun on his heel and stalked off. The new commander cleared his throat. Britannicus had not introduced him. The men were watching him. He coughed again.
"My name is Cato. I am now in command of this maniple. We will reassemble here in full armour half an hour before midnight. Centurion, dismiss the men."
I did, and they broke up gradually, talking among themselves. In five minutes I was alone, looking at the hammer and the anvil. Well, Britannicus's plan for the hammering worked. It worked so well that first night that in four raids we lost only three men, all three wounded and none seriously. The men were exhausted and slept all morning, the company clerks having rearranged the duty rosters to free them for "special services." When the enemy attacked at dawn, the "Hammers" were already under blankets, and there they remained. The rest of the cohort had little trouble holding off the attacks; our walls and ditches were high enough and deep enough to discourage all but the most foolhardy attackers, and they were easy pickings for the bowmen on our walls. The second night, about an hour before midnight, Britannicus split our cavalry into two groups of thirty and sent them off in opposite directions from the east and west gates of the camp, with orders to gallop at full speed through the enemy, keeping the camp walls within easy reach. The effect was magnificent. Each group charged out of the darkness, trampling bodies and creating chaos that hardly had time to settle before the second squadron arrived from the same direction. Each squadron made one and a quarter revolutions of the camp, re-entering by the gate beyond the one from which they had left. They lost four men.
No sooner had the peace begun to settle after that exercise than the Hammers went out through all four gates simultaneously, quietly and viciously, thirty men to a group. They stirred up panic on their own, hitting hard and drawing back before any resistance could be organized. An hour later they went out again, through the north gate, in full force. An hour before dawn they went back out again through the same north gate.
By the third night of the siege, the enemy was trying to kill the darkness with bonfires. But there is no wood on the high moors; in order to feed the flames, they had to work hard. We hit them with only one four-group raid from all gates that night, in the dark just before dawn.
Britannicus was banking heavily on the lack of discipline within the enemy ranks. They had numbers, but they had no co-ordinated leadership. No general. No Britannicus. And by the end of the fourth day they were leaving by the hundreds in search of easier targets.
When dawn came on the fifth day, we were alone and victorious on the moor. Thank God we didn't know that morning that we were the only fighting force of our size still active in the entire north of Britain. Britannicus, however, suspected that things elsewhere had gone very badly wrong. His initial suspicion that this incursion might be a long and hard-fought affair proved to be depressingly accurate. On that first evening of the stand-off at our camp, he summoned Luscar, senior clerk of the cohort, and instructed him to keep an accurate record of everything that occurred, and to maintain the record as a daily log from that time on. That turned out to be a command that was easier for poor Luscar to accept than to observe. It took us almost a year to win back to a real Roman fort in Derventio, and we had to fight almost every step of the way. By the time we got there, we had eaten our oxen and our horses. We had one rickety handcart to hold our meagre supplies, and Luscar had used up every available scrap of papyrus in recording our odyssey. He carried hundreds of tightly rolled sheets in the pack on his back as we crossed the countryside haphazardly in a fruitless search for signs of Roman authority. For almost a year we found nothing but ruined and abandoned villages, towns and military installations. The few local people we did see flocked to us in the beginning, thinking we could help them, but eventually, as our appearance degenerated and our condition grew more desperate, they avoided us, running into hiding as we approached.
We were assembling after breaking camp on a hillside, early on a July morning of the following year, when our look-outs sighted a squadron of Roman cavalry in the valley below us.
Of the eleven hundred-odd souls of the Second Millarian Cohort of the Twentieth Legion, three hundred and seventy-one were still alive, and forty-two of those were men we had found, survivors from different units. Besides myself and Britannicus, we had four more officers and twelve centurions.
IV
The cavalry patrol bunched up immediately as the sound of our cheering floated down to them from the hilltop. We saw the pale ovals of their faces peering up at us, and then, to our consternation, they swung their horses around and galloped away in the direction they had come from. Shouts of welcome and happy recognition changed in the men's throats to howls of outrage and disbelief, which lasted until Britannicus had claimed everyone's attention by climbing on to the boulder closest to him and facing them calmly. When the men had grown absolutely still, he spoke, in an almost conversational tone.
"I know you are soldiers." His emphasis produced frowns of confusion on many faces. We waited throughout a long pause as he stared at us before going on. "And you know who you are." He raised one arm and pointed down into the valley that was now empty of life and beginning to fill with the shadows thrown by the strengthening morning sun. "But those men have run for reinforcement. They have run to report the presence of a large band of hostiles and, depending upon how far away their camp is, they will return in strength, deployed for battle, in a matter of hours." He paused again, allowing his silence to register his message, and then his voice grew stronger, and he hammered his words at us as though they were nails.
"When they return, be it in one hour or ten, they will find — and they will see — the soldiers of the Second Cohort of the Twentieth Legion." As his meaning became clear, we began looking at one another, seeing ourselves for the first time as we had doubtless appeared to the patrol below. We saw men who bore little resemblance to Roman soldiers. What remained of our armour was dull, scarred, battered and long unpolished. Our tunics and cloaks were scabrous and tattered. Only our weapons were keen and burnished — our weapons and our Eagles.
One of the men, bolder than his fellows, raised his voice to point out to Britannicus that the riders below must have seen our Eagles, but he was cut short.
"Trooper, " Britannicus snapped, "how many dead Romans have we seen in the past year? How many Eagles do you think might, across this entire country, have been captured by the Celts?" He broadened his address to take in all of us. "What those men down there thought they saw was a rabble of Celtic heathens carrying captured Roman standards... trophies of war! That is what they firmly believe. When they come back, they will find us, and by that time we will have found ourselves. We may not have the finery, the uniforms, or the trappings expected of Roman troops, but by the Living God, we have the pride and the discipline and the dignity to appear as what we are — soldiers of the Empire!" The men agreed with him. I could hear truculence, grievance and angry shame in their murmuring among themselves — feelings that I shared, because I, too, felt demeaned and belittled by this lack of recognition. Britannicus issued his next orders over the murmur of voices, and we moved in response down from our hilltop at the double, and spent the next hour and more in determined ablutions by the stream in the valley. By pooling the bits and pieces of armour that remained in usable condition, we were able to equip almost a full squad of men as recognizable standard-
bearers, and these formed a vanguard behind Britannicus, myself and the other officers as the rest of the men assembled in disciplined ranks to await the return of the patrol and the forces they would bring with them.
We did not have long to wait. Only slightly more than an hour after we had taken up our positions at parade rest on the floor of the valley, before we really had time to grow uncomfortable under the strengthening July sunshine, our outposts signalled the approach of the Roman forces. There were two full cohorts, more than a thousand men, in the battle force that came to meet us, and it took almost half an hour for their advance guard to draw close enough to make us out clearly. It quickly became evident that they were surprised by our positioning on the valley floor, and disconcerted by our obvious discipline. That they suspected some kind of elaborate entrapment was also obvious, evidenced by the protracted comings and goings of officers and messengers between the advance guard and the main body of the troops. We could not even put their minds at rest by signalling them with a trumpet, because we had lost our last surviving trumpeter and his instrument in a skirmish two months earlier. I heard Britannicus sucking air between his teeth in an almost silent expression of annoyance at the dithering we were witnessing, but he said nothing and we remained motionless.
Finally, in response to our own lack of activity, a small group of mounted officers, accompanied by a squadron of mounted bowmen, approached us hesitantly and drew up within hailing distance, whence they demanded that we identify ourselves.
Britannicus turned to me, his face fixed in an expression that masked any signs of disgust or disapproval. "Varrus, " he murmured, "oblige me by walking to our friends and telling them who we are. I have no intention of shouting like a market huckster to allay the fears of a nincompoop." I was grinning to myself as I walked forward, but as I drew closer to the newcomers I found myself becoming more and more conscious of the sorry figure I presented — unkempt and bearded and wearing the tattered rags that had once been my centurion's uniform. I looked nothing like a Roman centurion, and, as I approached them, I could see hostility and suspicion in the stares with which they catalogued and analysed my appearance. I eventually came to a halt directly in front of them, looking up at their shining splendour and having to remind myself forcibly not to salute them. I was no supplicant junior, I was a Senior Centurion, pilus prior, of the Second Millarian Cohort, and all of these youngsters were junior to me. I drew myself to attention and spoke.