by Ken Parejko
And so history set out on its terrible course. One fine summer morning of the thirty-sixth year of Augustus’ reign, thirty-eight years and some months ago the army of three legions and six auxiliary units, constituting nearly thirty thousand men, marched through the heavy oak gates of Vetera, the very gates I pass through on a daily basis. Following them was a trailing army of servants and mistresses, common-law wives, prostitutes, tradesmen and victualers. It took nearly two weeks to ferry them, their horses, oxen and wagons and all their impedimenta across the river. The front of the column was a week’s march into the Teutoberger forest before the end finally set foot onto German territory.
Julius Caesar was the first, after a battle, to draft enemy survivors into our service. He put it to them simply: now you are ours. You can join us. Or, you can die. Half and sometimes more chose death. Those who chose instead to live were given an oath of allegiance and inducted into the auxiliaries. There is risk in this, of course. To keep tabs on their loyalty we must weave a tangled web of spies and counter-spies.
One Cheruscan chief who came over to our side had an especially promising career, a career which carried him all the way to the capitol, to the Illyrian mountains where he fought alongside Tiberius and finally to Syria where he met and befriended Quintilius Varus. On their return to Rome this one-time Hermann, who had taken the Latin name Arminius,was invited to live with Varus. When his host was given command of the legions of the Rhine Arminius followed Varus north. Once again in the land of his birth Arminius’ intimate knowledge of the German languages, landscape and tactics proved invaluable to his friend.
Arminius was one of Varus’ closest confidantes, with whom he shared intimate strategical details. For a time their stars rose together. Armenius married a Cheruscan girl named Thesnulda, settled into the daily routine of army life, and apparently having thrown off his barbarian roots, had a promising future.
But sometimes life is not what it seems, the thin ice an illusion about to crack. Arminius and Thesnulda's father had a falling out, and as the great army headed eastward into the German forest, the old man overheard Arminius plotting against Varus. He repeated what he’d heard to Varus, whose narcissism had grown such deep roots into a soil rich with self-deception that he scoffed at the idea of betrayal. Why, it’s all in your imagination, he laughed, or a dream you’ve had after drinking too much of that awful barley-wine your countrymen swill.
But the truth was more terrible than he either knew or imagined. Arminius had laid a terrible trap for the Roman legions, his spies communicating the army's every move to tribal chiefs gathered into a sprawling army secretly growing in the thick forest. Thesnulda’s father tried again to warn Varus. Counterspies planted in Arminius’ units stood alongside him and verified that there was clearly something afoot. But Varus would have none of it.
The legions knocked for weeks ineffectually about the north German woods, unable to find the terrorists. The few straggling Germans they captured were tortured and brutally executed. Day after long, hard day they slogged through swamps and bogs, much of their time spent laying log roads for the heavy ox-carts carrying their gear and the belongings of the shadow army tagging after them. The summer dragged on, wet, insect-ridden, a waste of time and effort. Caesar had had sense enough to turn around. Only when the days grew shorter and summer was waning did Varus reluctantly swing his unwieldy army homeward.
It was then the trap was sprung. A century of Arminius’ men rode noisily off to the north in a mock desertion. Varus turned his entire army after them, directly into the gathered German forces. Before they knew what was happening, Varus’ legions were locked in bloody combat with forty thousand foes. The thick forest echoed for miles with the clash of swords and the screams of the wounded and dying. Knowing how important the legions' communication lines were, Arminius had his men cut down the centurions and their trumpeters. With the standards in disarray the legions lost the advantage of disciplined tactics, which anyway were designed for open-field fighting. Here in the forest thickets the now-headless Roman army thrashed about like a body in its death-throes. Maniple by maniple the infantry were mown down, ala by ala the cavalry slaughtered.
Remnants of the legions fled to escape. But bogged down by a mayhem of carts, pack animals and straggling women, children and servants, escape was not so easy. Every westward mile was bought with the lives of a century of soldiers, harried and brought down by the lighter, more mobile Cheruscans. After three full days of battle a long heavy rain began, turning forest soil into deep mud and making roads impassable. The smell of absolute catastrophe hung in the air when the last remaining cavalry, under Numanius Vala, deserted helter-skelter homeward. Without them the lumbering infantry was left completely exposed and their fate sealed. But even their cowardly flight could not save the cavalry. In the end fewer than a few score survivors, of nearly thirty thousand, made their way across the Rhine and straggled into Vetera’s stockade to tell their tale to disbelieving comrades. Legions XVII, XVIII and XIX had been cut apart, and all the battle-standards lost, in unbelievable carnage.
Varus took the least-dishonorable course and threw himself onto his sword. The victorious Germans swarmed the battlefield. For days afterward they wandered the woods, collecting their booty and gathering the heads of their dead enemies, from which they seared off the flesh and running ropes through the skull’s eye-sockets, draped these trophies over their horses' necks. As at last they rode away from the battlefield the heads of their enemies rattled ominously. Officers’ heads were given special treatment, embalmed in cedar oil and carried away in wooden chests to be shown off as the Germans recounted the story of their victory in one village after another. This was the fate of the most prized trophy of all, the head of legion commander Quintilius Varus, until as a final gesture of defiance Hermann had his old friend’s head presented to the emperor.
It was said that on many nights, even years afterward, Augustus would awaken out of a nightmare to cry out to the terrible visage of the general’s head hovering over him: “Varus!... Varus!... Give me back my legions, Varus!"
Rome was terrified by the defeat and heaped Jupiter Optimus Maximus’ altars high with sacrifices. Holocaust followed holocaust, the acrid smoke rising in great black billows into the city’s sky. The loss of thirty thousand men was an unbelievable tragedy. But the loss of their battle-flags and standards was an even greater insult. Legionary flags, the vexillae and papilione they set up around camp and especially the silver and golden standards carried into battle were kept in their own chapel, and treated with an almost religious reverence.
To leave the bodies of the men unburied and the sacred standards of the legions in the hands of the barbarians was to court the wrath of the gods. After the initial shock of the massacre faded, the Senate voted to send expeditionary forces to find the battlefield, bury the dead, and retrieve the standards. The first attempts at locating the site of the massacre were unsuccessful. Six years after the battle Tiberius asked his nephew Germanicus to lead an army into the Teutoberg forest and avenge Varus' defeat. Germanicus’ first victory was easy, the massacre of thousands of Germans gathered in a sacred grove for a religious festival. Indiscriminately his men slaughtered children and women, and as a final gesture cut down the sacred trees. As they marched eastward, they killed all Germans they encountered, and burned and razed entire villages. After weeks of wandering his army finally stumbled on the site of the ambush. What he and his men saw there would be the stuff of soldiers’ nightmares for generations. Bones of the legionaries were windrowed like debris on a beach, left where the waves of Cherusci had slaughtered them. They found low stacks of stones, the remains of rough altars where our prisoners had been tortured before being killed. The trees themselves were decorated with Roman skulls. Germanicus and his men spent long, macabre days gathering up the bones and dumping them into mass graves. But they found and retrieved only a few of the legion’s standards.
Burying their slaughtered comrades was a solemn but
serious business. The unburied dead were caught in a kind of limbo, their souls never able to enter heaven. Each armful of bones, each shovelful of soil scraped from under the canopy of ancient trees hardened the army’s resolve to find and destroy the Cheruscans. Fate provided them their opportunity. As they worked, Arminius and his army suddenly appeared from out of the woods. It was said Jupiter Optimus Maximus and Thor themselves were seen locked in a titanic battle high in the sky, and the roar of thunder was the sound of their swords and the sparks they made fell as great bolts of lightning. By the end of the day Thor was seen to fall out of the sky in a blaze of apocalyptic fire, and as the sun set we had won the field. Arminius was dead, and Thesnulda and their infant child taken captive, to be dragged back to Rome in triumph.
It was a sweet revenge which for a time assuaged the Roman anxiety about unburied legionaries and lost battle-standards. But doubts arose as to how thoroughly Germanicus’ men, interrupted in their work, had searched the battlefield, interred the dead, and searched out our standards. Highly-placed relatives of officers lost in the massacre lobbied Corbulo to send another search party out and verify that the Roman dead were properly buried and as many standards recaptured as was humanly possible.
I was deep in the writing of my version of the Varus defeat. I'd set a high standard for my Germanic Wars-- to write the truth, and as much of it as possible, and to write it well. I'd chosen to write in the simple style of Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and kept at my side a copy of his De Analogoia. Though Caesar never hesitated to mold the truth to fit his political needs, of all the historians none wrote with as lean or powerful a style as he. Here was an opportunity I could not pass up. One evening over wine I asked Corbulo’s permission to be the one to lead an excursion party to search for the Teutoberger site.
Like Caesar, Corbulo was an effective general and a practical politician. By laying to rest any lingering doubts about unburied remains left in the German forest he could strengthen his ties with Senators whose family members had fallen in the massacre. Reluctant as he was to expose any of his men to the dangers of the eastern wilderness, he agreed. He allowed me to choose the thirty or so cavalrymen who would accompany me. And he made it absolutely clear we were to return to Vetera within three weeks whether we'd found the battle-site or not.
It had been eight days since we set out, following the eastward road built by Varus' doomed troops along the Lippe. But deeper into the forest where there was no road things grew more complicated. Here it was as though nature herself had turned against us. Because they provide us shelter, fuel, fruit, clothing and furniture, to me trees are nature's greatest gift to mankind But these trees were unlike anything I’d seen before, some of them with trunks six men could not get their arms around. Trees whose roots entangled with each other to form great archways men could ride under. Trees whose tops seemed to reach up and touch the moon. Trees which, compared to those of the Italian countryside, seemed part of a nature out of balance, gone wild, and of a savage not human scale.
Two days ago we’d crossed the Ems and entered a region of low hills and ridges separated by mucky lowlands. With neither road nor known landmark to navigate by our progress slowed and we realized we were in danger of becoming completely lost. The unusually wet spring had filled swamps and marshes to overflowing. Our horses, struggling through the insect-infested marshes, would suddenly fall up to their haunches in deep smelly muck and could hardly be made to go on. To our east loomed the great Hercynian forest, according to Caesar a sixty-days' march wide, utterly unknown and uncharted. For four days we'd ridden through a cold, foggy drizzle. I’d led my men, the best I could find, as a tiny contingent deep into enemy territory. The sudden crash of every elk or bison running off through the woods brought visions of a German ambush. We’d grown anxious, wet, hungry and tired.
Escape, if we needed it, would only come by retreating westward. But heading west was no longer a simple thing. For nearly two days we’d marched south along the eastern edge of a vast impenetrable swamp, and zigged and zagged around so many ridges and bogs I wondered if we could ever retrace our steps out. Now I too began to doubt the wisdom of this excursion.
Perhaps the time had come to turn back. The farther south we went, the more we were committed to the impenetrable forest. I chose four of my best to reconnoiter ahead while the rest of us waited atop a small rise at the edge of a swale. I set a quartet of sentries. The rest of the men relaxed, pulling up swamp grass to feed their horses, climbing trees to look for birds’ eggs or trying to nap on the soft moss while swatting and swearing at the swarms of biting bugs. Lucius had picked a handful of long grass-blades which he was weaving into a pretty pattern. A half hour or so had gone by when from the direction of the scouts came the sound of shouting, horses screaming, and the loud clatter of swords. We threw ourselves onto our horses and hurried as best we could through the mucky thickets, stopping now and then to listen. But now all was silent, and we moved more cautiously, uncertain what lay ahead.
Aulus’ horse was the first we saw, as it walked out from behind a big oak, forlornly watching us approach. Aulus had been my first choice for the expedition. I’d seen this stocky bear of a man lift a full barrel of wine over his head and set it back down as gently as an ordinary man might set down a cup. He sported a bear's-claw necklace, the claws of a massive animal it was said he’d killed in single combat. But strong as he was, he was quiet and gentle, fierce in battle but a calming influence in camp, a man who played the flute like Orpheus himself, rode his horse well, and could put a javelin through a foot-wide hoop at twenty paces. To me this Aulus was almost a brother, the brother I'd had but never had, the unspeakable one, my own little brother Aulus.
We found his body not far from his horse, pierced a dozen times, one arm lying across his chest almost severed. He'd not gone down easily. I dismounted, touched Aulus’ gore-spattered face. All around in the broken brush and bloody grass lay signs of a great struggle. We found the body of a German, the hides he wore in complete disarray, his head hanging by a few tendons. Another, one leg chopped clean off, had crawled a short way into the woods and died. A third left a trail of blood through the underbrush. In the small clearing lay the three bodies of my other men. I ordered my men to fan out and search for enemy survivors, keeping a sharp lookout for ambush. I wanted prisoners brought alive. Meanwhile Lucius and I would follow the bloody track which led off into the thicket. We were to meet here by Aulus’ body within an hour.
We set off following the gory trail through the thickets, walking our horses slowly and cautiously. When a grouse flushed out from under a fir it lit the fires of fear in our hearts. The creak of a branch in the wind brought us stock-still. We followed the clots of blood leading us into the woods. Now the man whose track we followed was no longer walking, but had dragged himself across the forest floor, leaving tracks where his feet cut into the soil, and between the tracks a steady trail of gore. He’d made his way to the banks of a small stream where he turned to drag himself upstream along the bank. A few yards ahead of Lucius, I had my sword drawn. Coming over a small rise in the woods I caught sight, at the edge of the stream, of a length of a man's intestines. I signaled Lucius to stay behind with the horses.
With one slow step at a time I moved across the soft moss-matted forest floor. On top a big rotting log which lay halfway in the stream was a clot of gore and on it, like a dark and bloody snake, another length of intestine. The intestine still worked in slow, dutiful spasms. From it rose a sharp stench.
Holding my breath I gripped my sword and peered over the log. The young man, dragging his innards behind him, had crawled to this pool at the headwaters of the stream and fallen face-first in the water where his open eyes stared cold and fish-like into the stream’s source, as though searching there for salvation.
I thought it was likely he’d come here not just to quench the thirst of his death-agonies, but to die in a sacred place. It was said that where water sprang out of the earth was holy, and a good pla
ce to die. Lying in the pool alongside the warrior were small wooden figures, some human and some more grotesque, thrown there as gifts to the local cults. The sound of the water bubbling over the rocks as it poured out of the earth reminded me of my home at Comum, where a spring rose and fell three times a day in regular rhythm, and where after a meal my father, mother, sister Plinia and I would sometimes relax for a drink of cool water. It seemed odd that here, deep in the wilderness, with signs of death all around me, I should remember just that scene, so sentimental and comforting.
Now after hiding for days the sun broke through an opening in the clouds, pouring its light down out of the leaves, sparkling on the pooled water and bringing the air into a clear vibrancy. All was silent and calm but for a few flies which had already begun to gather around the dead man's wounds.
A branch cracked behind me, jerking me from my thoughts. But it was only Lucius.
I bent and lifted a wooden flute floating away from the man’s shoulder. A soldier and a musician, I thought. I handed the flute to Lucius.
“Give it to Aulus. He’ll...” I started to say, then stopped mid-sentence: Aulus no longer had breath for playing the flute.
Swaying in the current of the stream, clutched in the man’s hand, was a small deerskin bag. I pulled it loose and opened it. Inside was a crudely-carved wooden eye. Many of my men carried such talismen. Many had a bulla tucked away in their field-kit, a phallic good-luck stone; some had small ivory or stone gods and goddesses. Gauls under me trusted in Rosmerta, Cocidius, or Epona, while our own Italian men carried Mars, Fortuna, and Victoria. I had yet to see any evidence that these talismen protected their bearers; it seemed to me that men fell haphazardly on the battlefield, with or without the protection of their gods.
I shook the contents of the bag into my hand. A few dried berries, a handful of mushrooms. I held one near my nose, inhaled. Though mushrooms were a favorite food, I didn’t recognize these. They might be food, or medicine, or even poison. I emptied my hand into the spring where the berries danced for a moment in little circles before heading off down the current. I handed the empty bag to Lucius, who tied it to his belt.
