Marching With Caesar: Conquest of Gaul mwc-1

by R. W. Peake

  I do not want to paint a picture that Caesar suffered no setbacks of any kind, because that is not the case, and one of those setbacks was more of personal betrayal, at least as far as we were concerned. Labienus, who commanded the 10th most of our time in Gaul and was the Legate in charge of our camp at Narbo, defected to Pompey. I cannot speak for Caesar, especially given his public reaction, yet to a man the 10th took this as one of the bitterest blows of the whole civil war. From our viewpoint, Labienus owed all that he was to Caesar but he obviously did not see it that way. In fact, as we were to learn over the next several months, according to Labienus it was the other way around; he had made Caesar the man he was. I will grant that Labienus was a good general; he knew how, and more importantly when to fight and when not to, but he was not even a full shadow of the leader that Caesar was. We respected him, but we did not love him the way we loved Caesar and there was more than one man in the army who would have slit his gullet wide open if he thought he could get away with it. However, Caesar made no public, or private as far as I know, comment against Labienus and indeed, ordered that all of his baggage, including all the loot that he was awarded by Caesar, be sent after him. For his part, Labienus never made any kind of sign of gratitude for that gesture, but the gods always have a way of evening the scales, and Labienus’ day of reckoning was waiting down the road. At the time, however, his actions brought a stain of dishonor to the 10th, at least as far as we saw it. Thankfully, Caesar did not feel the same way.

  Caesar’s move through Italy was so rapid and his conquest, albeit bloodless, so complete that Pompey, the Senate and all of those aligned with them, having first abandoned Rome, now made to abandon Italy, with Pompey marshaling his army at Brundisium for shipment to Greece. Caesar set off in hot pursuit with the 8th, 12th, 13th, and a new Legion he formed out of the Cohorts from Transalpine Gaul that he named the 5th Larks. Whether they were so named because he authorized them to wear those feathers as crests for their helmets, or they wore the feathers in their crests because of what he named them, I never knew. Pompey may not have been the boldest general, at least now that he was older, but he was a master of logistics, and I do not think it is insulting to Caesar or his memory to acknowledge that Pompey’s organization and skill at moving large numbers of men was unparalleled. These qualities enabled him to withdraw his entire force almost completely intact, despite the fact that Caesar and the army arrived at Brundisium several days before the evacuation, making several attempts to stop the crossing. Only two ships were lost, run aground on booms that Caesar ordered constructed in an attempt at cutting off the harbor while Pompey, his supporters and the rest of his army made it away safely. More importantly, Pompey took the entire merchant and military shipping with him, leaving Caesar nothing with which to pursue. He would have to buy and build a fleet of his own, and that task would take months. During the week that Caesar and Pompey were in close proximity to each other, Caesar made several attempts to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Pompey, in a last-ditch attempt to avoid a full-blown and bloody civil war, but Pompey steadfastly refused. Therefore, Caesar was left standing on the shore, watching Pompey run away. There was nothing left to do at that time but go to Rome.

  As interesting and as much of an impact on my, and the Republic’s, future all these events were having, I still found it hard to devote my full attention to matters. Gisela tolerated the hard journey, along with the tension between Vibius and me on the way back, about as well as one could reasonably expect and she gave no signs of distress in the days leading up to the birth of our child. Nevertheless, a full week before the midwife, the soothsayers and the medicine men from Gisela’s people had said, she woke me one night by punching me full in the chest. Jerking awake, I found her sitting up, gasping in pain, her knees up. My heart started hammering; I had no idea what to do. We had arranged for the midwife to begin her vigil, staying at our house, but she would not start that for a couple more days. Fumbling around, I managed to get a lamp lit, then just sat there dumbly at the edge of the bed, looking at her. There was a stain of something wet spreading on the mattress from between her legs and I felt my stomach lurch, the sight of it rooting me to the spot, paralyzed.

  “Titus, you idiot! Don’t sit there like a useless lump. Go get Thuria! Then have the boy go get the midwife. My time has come!”

  I still did not move; I do not know whether I did not want to believe that the moment had arrived or what, but there I sat. “But…but it’s not your time! It’s not supposed to be another week!”

  “Well, apparently,” she said through clenched teeth, “he has other ideas!”

  Even through my panic, that one word penetrated through. “He? What do you mean he? How do you know?”

  “Because only a man would cause me this much pain,” she howled before slapping me, hard, across the face.

  That got me moving, I can tell you. Everything after that is a blur; Thuria did her best to calm the both of us while we waited for the midwife, but finally my anxiety was too much and I was banished to the outer room, for which I was eternally thankful. The midwife arrived, and she was the only one of us who did not appear to think this was unusual. I remember confronting her about what it meant that the baby was early, which she shrugged off.

  “It might not be,” she replied. “Maybe there was a miscalculation of the date. Or,” she said over her shoulder as she walked into our bedroom, “it’s early.”

  That was not a great help. The labor lasted gods only know how long; afterwards Gisela told me very surely that it lasted more than four full watches, and I imagine she would know. What I remember most vividly of that night and day was the fear, a fear that I never mentioned to Gisela, but one that she learned from Valeria, that my baby would do the same thing to Gisela that I did to my mother. After all, I killed my mother because of my size, so I had to believe there was a chance of the same thing happening again. I sent for Vibius, who sat with me, doing all he could to take my mind off of my worry, and he was a great help. Even so, the waiting was an agony, but finally in the middle of the afternoon we were rewarded with what sounded to my ears, at least at that moment, like a cat that just had its tail cut off. Vibius and I looked at each other before leaping to our feet and rushing over to the bedroom door, almost bowling over a tired but happy looking midwife who was coming to get me.

  “Salve, Centurion. Come meet your new son.”

  There are moments in one’s life that are frozen in memory, vivid pictures that can be recalled simply by closing your eyes, summoning that day to be savored, all over again. The moment I held my son is one of those. He was like any other newborn, I suppose, yet at the same time, was something I had never seen before. Even as inexperienced as I was, I could tell that he was a large baby, his weight both heavy and unbearably light at the same time. Heavy with the implication of what I was holding, a new life, one that Gisela and I created, yet less than a shield, barely more than a sword, and more fragile in some ways than either. Looking up at Gisela, shimmering there, resting against the headboard, my tears made her dance in front of me, yet even through the tears I could see her smiling at me, and I have never loved a moment, or any other human beings, as much as I loved my family at that moment.

  “His name is Vibius,” I said hoarsely, and she did not look surprised in the slightest. I walked over to her, bent down, kissed her forehead and told her, “Thank you.”

  She laughed, “You’re welcome. Now, go show Vibius his namesake.”

  I was surprised. "How did you know he was here?”

  She favored me with that half-amused, half-scornful look that it seems only women can give men they love, and retorted, “Where else would he be? I knew you couldn’t do this by yourself.”

  I did not reply; as usual, she was right. Carrying my son out of the room, I studied him, as he did the same to me. He was very pink, and very wrinkled, and he smelled horribly, but I thought he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Pushing the door open, I saw Vibius stan
ding there, his face a mixture of happiness and what I realized was regret; by rights, this should have been he and Juno, and I should have been the one waiting. It’s funny, and cruel, how life works at times.

  “Vibius, meet your namesake. Vibius, meet your godfather.”

  And I handed him over.

  Life as a father of a newborn babe was strange, wonderful and extremely trying all at the same time. I think my relationship with my own father in an odd way played a huge role in how much I was involved in the life of young Vibius more than most fathers are, because I was bound and determined that my son would never have the kind of doubt about his father’s love that I had suffered and that I would play a part in his life and make him a man in whom I could be proud. Quite naturally, I took a fair bit of ribbing about this attitude from my friends, yet I bore it with as much good humor as I could muster. One thing that helped was that Vibius was just as doting on the babe as I was, and every day, the moment our duties permitted we would find ourselves walking quickly back to my home to listen to Gisela brag about the boy’s latest achievements. Frankly, at that point his only accomplishments concerned the prodigious amount of cac that he generated on what seemed to be a constant basis. He was a greedy little piglet as well, always hungry, a trait that Gisela laid squarely on my shoulders, which I could not deny. As pleasant as this time was, we all knew that it was just a brief pause in the gathering storm, and young Vibius was just a few weeks old when we were finally given the orders to march, joining up with the bulk of the army. The word was that we would be heading back home to Hispania, where the Pompeians Petreius and Afranius held the province with what we were told was a large and veteran army consisting of some of Pompey’s toughest Legions. To prepare ourselves, we picked up the intensity of our training, beginning with forced marches of increasing length and frequency, trying to shake off the rust of the almost two years of relative inactivity. Now that I was Pilus Prior, I had been forced to relinquish my post as training officer, but I kept up my own personal training regimen. What I could do was to make sure that the men in my Cohort were pushed as hard as they could go, and I heard many muttered imprecations aimed at me, which I took as a sign that I was doing what needed to be done. Of course, I had to deal with Celer at every turn, as he did what he could to stir up trouble among the men. He was smart about it, I will give him that; he never openly questioned my orders, instead taking on the role of the sympathetic Centurion, willing to listen to the griping and moaning of some of the men, promising them that he would do what he could to stop the excesses of my training program. Naturally, he did not speak to me once, something that only served to raise the antagonism of the men because they believed that I was refusing to alter my approach. In fairness, I doubt that I would have softened at all, but it would have been good to know that men were complaining. Meanwhile, other preparations intensified as equipment was readied. The artillery was refitted, the axles of all the wagons greased, supplies of grain and chickpeas came rumbling into the camp in a never-ending train. Caesar would eventually join us, but not until we had already moved across the Pyrenees into the eastern part of Hispania. In command of our march was Fabius, stepping into the role previously played by the traitor Labienus as Caesar’s second in command. The army was together almost two weeks before all the Centurions were called to the forum to receive orders, and they were what we had been expecting for days.

  “We march tomorrow for Hispania,” Fabius announced once we were all quiet.

  Despite knowing what was coming, a ripple of excitement still passed through the group of hard-bitten veterans. Fabius waited for the buzz of conversation to die down before continuing, but we only listened with passing attention, since it was the normal drivel that officers tell men in the ranks about glory, honor, duty and the like, and we were much too veteran a group to be taken in by such nonsense. Fortunately, Fabius was a good officer and knew to keep such blather to a minimum, understanding that we were more concerned with the practical considerations of getting our respective Cohorts prepared for movement than anything he could say. Therefore, quickly enough we were dismissed to go about our business.

  There is one event that happened before our orders to move out that I feel important to relate, and that was the retirement of the group of men who had formed the backbone of the 10th when we first enlisted. Included in this group was none other than the Primus Pilus Gaius Crastinus, their decision prompting the resulting shuffle in the ranks as men were promoted. I for one was sorry to see Crastinus go, and frankly was a bit surprised that he opted to retire, but when I talked to him, he was adamant.

  “I’ve had enough Pullus,” he insisted. “I’m ready for a little peace and quiet. Besides, I don't feel like fighting our own.”

  I laughed at the idea, but he was serious. Still, when we parted I predicted that our paths would cross again, and I was right.

  So this was the situation in those hectic days, just before the storm descended that would wrack the Republic and all its citizens for the next several years. We were marching into an uncertain future, but most of us were resigned to the idea that there would be no solution to Caesar's dilemma without blood being shed. Where some of us differed was how much of it would soak into the soil before matters were resolved, one way or the other. Men that I respected a great deal, Scribonius chiefly among them, were optimistic that perhaps after one or two battles, where the great men saw the terrible cost their ambitions would incur on the Republic and the Legions, some sort of accommodation would be reached. But as much as I respected Scribonius, I was not so inclined; I believed that only after rivers of blood were shed would either side acquiesce, and my only real hope was that it would be Caesar who prevailed. Because now it was not just myself I had to worry about; I had a family who looked to me to protect and provide for them, and it was a worrying feeling that twisted my stomach. Even as we marched away, I could feel that burden with every step I took, moving us farther away from my new family, and down a road with too many twists and turns ahead for me to easily see the end of the journey.

  Now I must stop to rest, for which poor Diocles is favoring me with a look of almost pathetic gratefulness. There is still much to relate; more marching, fighting, killing and dying to be done, and more history to be made. However, I am now an old man whose energy fades and I need my sleep so I beg your indulgence, gentle reader. Once refreshed, I will pick up my tale again, for old I may be, but I am still Titus Pullus, Legionary of Rome, and I still have a duty to perform.

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