by R. W. Peake
Marching With Caesar – Civil War
( Marching With Caesar - 2 )
R. W. Peake
R. W. Peake
Marching With Caesar — Civil War
Chapter 1- Campaign against Afranius and Petreius
These are the words of Titus Pullus, formerly Legionary, Optio, Pilus Prior and Primus Pilus of Caesar's 10th Legion Equestris, now known as 10th Gemina, Primus Pilus of the 6th Ferrata, and Camp Prefect, as dictated to his faithful former slave, scribe, and friend, Diocles.
I am dictating this in my 61st year, three years after my retirement as Camp Prefect, in the tenth year of the reign of Augustus, and 489 years after the founding of the Roman Republic. I have more than 40 military decorations, including three gold torqs, three set of phalarae, two coronae civica, three coronae murales, and a corona vallaris. I have more than 20 battle scars on my body, all of them in the front, and my back is clean, never having been flogged in my 42 years in the Legions, nor have I turned my back to the enemy. Although my record is not as great as the revered Dentatus, I am well known in the Legions, and I have given the bulk of my life and blood to Rome.
My goal is straightforward; with these words, I plan to record all of the momentous events in which I participated as a member of Rome’s Legions, during a period that changed the very foundations of Rome itself.
Now that I have recovered and refreshed myself, I pick up my tale where I left off. The conquest of Gaul is over, Caesar and his armies triumphing in the greatest campaign in Roman, or I suspect, world history. However, his success has roused great jealousy by those men, small in every measurable way, who call themselves the boni. Using Pompeius Magnus as their stooge, they are doing everything they can to destroy our general, ignoring his popularity with the people of my class. Caesar, given no choice by the boni, has crossed the Rubicon with just the 13th Legion. However, the rest of his army, including my own 10th Legion, is preparing to march. Matters between my childhood friend and long-time comrade, Vibius Domitius, are growing increasingly strained because of the situation with Caesar, since Vibius is a strict Catonian in sentiment. Making matters more difficult for me personally, I am forced to leave behind my wife and newborn child, Vibius' namesake, whom we call Vibi. I have been the Secundus Pilus Prior for some time now, but I still have to worry about my nemesis, Secundus Pilus Posterior Celer, who constantly seeks to undermine me. Although none of us are looking forward to facing fellow Romans, we are all prepared to do our duty, even Vibius, if for no other reason than for the men standing next to him in the ranks, if not for Caesar and his dignitas.
Caesar’s army was a mixed lot of veteran and new Legions; there was us, the 7th, 9th, and 14th from the Gallic Army, and also two new Legions that Caesar had raised in Italy, the 21st and 30th, full of raw tirones. This army marched west to confront the Pompeian forces, heading through the Pyrenees and sweeping aside the Cohort-sized Pompeian units that guarded the passes through the mountains, suffering few losses. Once across the mountains, we moved towards the spot where our scouts had located Pompey’s Legions, in the northeast around the town of Ilerda, on the other side of the Sicoris River. Gathered there to face us was the most veteran of Pompey’s army, the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th Legions, veterans all, and from whose ranks our cadre like Crastinus and Calienus had originally come. They were led by two stalwart Pompeians, Afranius and Petreius, one of whom we would have cause to hate with an abiding passion, but that was in the future. However, the Pompeian Legions’ veteran status also meant that their discharges were due, just as they had been for Crastinus, meaning there was some question about how steadfast they actually were in their devotion to Pompey and his cause. At least, that was what the Legates and the good young men tried to tell us. Nevertheless, they were Spanish Legions like us and we held little illusion that they would not fight when the time came, a fact that bothered us a great deal, because there were friends and kinsmen across that river that we might have to kill. Little else was discussed around the fires at night, none of us liking the prospect a bit, but also knowing that when the time came, we would do what needed to be done, no matter how distasteful it might be. I could not help wondering if they felt the same way, staring across at us from the other side of the river.
During the period in which we were waiting for Caesar, Fabius put us to work constructing two bridges, about four miles apart. One was on the upstream side of the river from the town, and the other was on the downstream side. The construction of these bridges was contested hotly by the Pompeians, with fierce fighting around the bridge sites, but we managed to get them built despite the resistance. With the bridges built, we waited for Caesar to arrive. He was supposedly coming with about 900 cavalry he had gathered to replace the ones who defected with Labienus. Also, Fabius sent messengers laden with gold across the river and behind the Pompeian positions, bribing the surrounding towns to close their gates and to refuse any aid to Afranius and his troops, instead giving what food they could spare to us. In order to get to what food these towns had to offer, we were forced to send foraging parties out in force across the bridges to get to them.
During one of these forays, a potentially disastrous event struck the 14th and 30th Legions, the former being the reconstituted 14th full of green troops, and the latter being one of the new Legions Caesar had commissioned after crossing the Rubicon. Once they were on the other side of the river, a storm in the mountains higher upriver hit, creating a flash flood downriver. The flood sent a wall of water, accompanied by a maelstrom of wind. It then hit the bridge that the Legions had marched across, sweeping it away and sending the debris downstream. The presence of that debris alerted Afranius that something was afoot, whereupon he sent scouts out who reported to him that there was a part of our force upstream stranded on the Pompeian side of the river. Afranius immediately sent a force out to trap our men on the wrong side, prompting a sharp fight where the Legate in charge of our foraging party, Plancus as I recall, shook his men out into an orbis on a small hill, forcing Afranius to reconsider any headlong charge. While Afranius was deploying his men into a standard assault formation, our commander Fabius sent a relief force consisting of the remainder of our cavalry, along with the 9th, across on the remaining intact bridge to come to Plancus’ aid. Seeing the standards, Afranius called off his attack after a brief skirmish that claimed few casualties on either side, and once relieved by our force, Plancus marched back across the remaining bridge. It was a close call, and easily could have been a disaster if Afranius was a bolder commander like Caesar and had risked an all-out attack on green troops, but as usual, even by proxy, Caesar’s luck held.
A couple of days later, Caesar arrived with his 900 German cavalrymen, and the tempo of our operations immediately picked up. The day after he arrived, he left some Cohorts behind to guard the original camp, marching the rest of us across the nearer bridge to shake us out in a triplex acies facing the Afranius camp. This camp had been thrown up a few hundred yards from the walls of the town. Afranius linked the two together by a ditch where supplies could be carried from the town to allow men to move back and forth. Consistent with Roman practice, the camp of Afranius took advantage of high ground and Afranius sent his own forces out to face ours on the slopes of this hill. That was as far as it got, however; he seemed content to let his men stand out in the hot sun, meaning that we had to do the same. The sun moved slowly through the sky, and only through the discipline and experience of countless other days spent in identical circumstances was this day bearable.
There we stood, veterans on both sides, staring across the plain, our men looking up the hill, theirs looking down onto the valley floor, each of us occupied with
our own thoughts. It was not lost on any of us that there were men we knew, and indeed may have been related to by blood, standing across from us, waiting for the order to move forward and kill each other. Honestly, despite the boredom, none of us felt particularly eager to head up that hill to start killing men we knew, if not intimately at least by virtue of our common heritage and place of birth. We were all men of Hispania, and professionals and veterans that we may have been, we had no real desire to slaughter or to be slaughtered by such men as these. Consequently, there was little grumbling at the waiting and finally, when the sun had passed over the midday point, it became clear that Afranius was not going to move, whereupon Caesar commanded the back line of the formation to fall out to begin the construction of a camp. Since we marched out in battle order, we did not have the stakes for the palisade, so the men were put to work digging the ditch first. Because our first two lines remained in formation, the work was obscured, meaning that when the order was given to withdraw, we caught Afranius by surprise when, instead of retreating across the bridge to our original camp, we pulled back across the ditch and the earthworks to settle down for the night.
The next day saw a repeat of the same as the day before, except that Caesar kept a part of the army behind in the camp to finish the job of fortifying it. For once, we regretted not drawing the short straw to be left behind in camp, because as monotonous and tiring as fortifying the camp may have been, it was still better than standing motionless in the hot sun. However, this time was a little different, since Caesar allowed us to relax, having taken the measure of Afranius and being certain that he would not take action. At least, it appeared that way on the surface, when he gave the order that either we could sit down or mingle within our immediate area, as long as we were within a few paces of our grounded gear. I believe that he was doing his best to goad Afranius into action by having us appear lax and as if we were ripe for attack, so perhaps Afranius was not as foolish as we thought. It was in this manner that the second day passed uneventfully, and we plodded back into the almost completed camp at least as tired as our comrades working on it. On the third day, Caesar ordered the extra stakes that were gathered brought over from the original camp, along with the baggage, brought under the guard of the Cohorts left behind. This was done, with the three Legions who had worked on the camp the day before now taking their turn out on the plain, while we finished what remained to be done in the second camp. In the same manner as the first two days, this one passed uneventfully as well, with both sides staring at each other, waiting for the other to make their move.
On the fourth day, Caesar grew tired of waiting and decided to act. Taking the 9th, the 14th, and the 21st, he made a move to secure a small mound roughly halfway between our camp and the slopes of the hill that Afranius’ camp was occupying. The position of this small hill was such that it would allow us to interpose ourselves between Afranius’ camp and the town, thereby cutting them off from resupply. The distance from our camp to the mound was about halfway between the two camps, in the middle of a plain about 300 paces wide. As usual, Caesar was counting on his speed of action and I believe he was emboldened by the seeming hesitance that Afranius had shown over the course of the previous three days. This allowed us to build and fortify a camp on his side of the river, almost literally under his very nose. However, this time Caesar was the one to be caught out because Afranius almost immediately determined what he was up to, and rushed several Cohorts out the gates of his own camp, reaching the mound before Caesar could. There was a brief battle for the mound, and during this skirmish, for the first time, we witnessed the peculiar style of fighting practiced by Pompey’s Legions. Cheering at the sight of our men seemingly sweeping the Pompeians off the mound with almost contemptuous ease, we would soon learn that this was nothing more than a ruse. When our men charged to the top of the mound, they were suddenly beset on three sides by the original guard Cohorts, along with some of the other Cohorts that Afranius had sent out. The Pompeians came at our men with a rush, but the moment our men engaged, they broke off and retreated down the hill.
“What in the name of Pluto’s thorny cock are they doing?” demanded Priscus with some indignation. “That’s not how Romans fight.”
“I know,” I agreed, with not a little trepidation.
We were watching from the ramparts and, despite being safe, all of us felt as involved as if we were standing in the line on the hill. Before our eyes, the Pompeians darted back and forth at our lines, until finally the Primus Pilus of the 14th, the first Legion to the mound, gave the order to rush after the Pompeians the next time they fell back, exactly what the Pompeians wanted. The instant the 14th charged, they were surrounded, now by at least two Legion’s worth of Afranius’ troops. In the space of a few heartbeats, the scene was completely obscured by the dust of thousands of feet, a bad sign on its own. Our anxiety increased as we tried to determine what was happening by the sounds, our experienced ears telling us that it was not going well.
The 14th was deployed on the left, with the other two Legions arrayed so they were closer to the Afranius camp, with the 9th on the right and the 21st in the middle, the traditional spot for green Legions. This time it did not work out the way Caesar had hoped, because the men of the 21st started showing signs of panic as the fighting that started with the 14th spread to envelop them. Afranius fed more men into the battle, sensing that he had achieved the rarest of feats: catching Caesar off balance. Even as we watched helplessly, the unease of the 21st turned to panic, the rear ranks beginning to turn for the safety of our camp. At first, their Optios were able to beat them back into the line, then something happened, although I do not know what, but whatever it was triggered a panic. Now the men in the rear were braving the swats of their Optios to push past them, oblivious to anything but the thought of getting back to the safety of the camp. Not all of the men of the 21st panicked, but enough did to cause the center of Caesar’s line to start to collapse, and only the sheer bulk of the 21st kept the 14th from being completely surrounded. Now that was about to change, as more men of the 21st began to slip past their Optios to head back towards us in the camp. Caesar then called on the 9th to come to the rescue, which they did, but not before getting into trouble themselves.
From their spot on the right, the 9th had to run parallel across the lines to try to stem the tide of the retreat started by the 21st. By this time, the 21st had crumbled completely, running in a large mass for the camp. Those of us on the rampart hurried to grab our javelins should Afranius’ troops be foolhardy enough to get that close in their pursuit. As spirited as their chase was, I have no doubt that some of Afranius’ men would have ventured too close, but as it was, their headlong run put them in an untenable position of their own making. By pursuing the 21st, their cohesion was completely gone and that, coupled with the fact that the 9th was now bearing down on their left flank, suddenly put them in mortal danger. The 9th slammed into the Pompeians, who had just a matter of a bare moment to realize the danger, meaning that only a precious few had stopped their pursuit and turned to face the new threat. These men were rolled up like a carpet. In almost a blink of an eye, a disaster of the first proportion turned into at the very least a chance to create a stalemate, depending on how well the Pompeians reacted, and at this point, those tactics that we had witnessed when the 14th took the hill once again showed their effectiveness. Instead of trying to mount a defense, the Pompeians simply melted away in front of the 9th, beginning their own retreat back to the town, which at that point was closer to them than their own camp.
The 9th began a headlong pursuit, but like the 14th, found to their hazard that the retreat of the Pompeians was not a retreat as much as it was a tactic. Once they reached the slope of the hill leading up to the town, the Pompeians immediately turned. Then, with a speed and efficiency at which we could only marvel, they re-formed to launch a countercharge directly into the 9th, who had just reached the lower slopes of the hill. Immediately the tide turned and now the 9th
was on their back heels, trying to maintain their formation while fighting desperately. Standing on the rampart, we could only watch the small individual battles break out, as usually two Pompeians would leap forward to try to engage one of our own men before quickly falling back if they did not see an immediate advantage. Soon enough, the dust obscured the fight near the town and we were forced to turn our attention back to the 14th, who had finally extricated themselves from the mound and now were falling back, leaving the small hill littered with bodies.
The 21st had recovered their composure to a degree; at least, they had fallen back into formation, but they too were still moving backwards, although they did not appear to be under that much pressure. However, the retreat of the 21st and 14th further isolated the 9th, and Afranius was quick to see this. He began sending fresh men from the camp through the ditches to the town walls, where they could launch their javelins down onto the heads of the 9th. Now their existence was threatened, and Caesar chose this moment to launch his cavalry in a bid to rescue them.
Despite the slope and the rugged terrain, Caesar’s Germans wedged themselves between the lines of the 9th and the Pompeians, allowing the 9th to retreat down the hill. The 14th and 21st had halted their withdrawal to wait in support of the 9th, their presence keeping those Pompeians who took the small hill from turning their back to our two Legions in order to harry the 9th as they withdrew. In this manner, our three Legions managed to extricate themselves. Caesar’s attempt to take the small hill had failed; it belonged to the Pompeians.
Our losses were much heavier than any of us had thought they would be; the Primus Pilus of the 14th had fallen. Fulginus was his name, as I recall, a victim of his headlong rush down the hill in the early stages of the battle. In addition, the 14th lost about 70 men, the 9th almost as many, and the 21st about half that. It may not seem like many men when compared to the strength of a Legion. However, it must be remembered that veteran Legions like the 9th, and the 10th for that matter, were nearing the end of our enlistments. We had been fighting and dying for a long time, meaning that every loss at this point whittled us down even further. Our only consolation was that we inflicted at least twice as many casualties as we suffered, so the Pompeian Legions were in much the same state as our own, and could ill afford their losses as well. Still, even with that, the overwhelming topic of conversation that night concerned the strange tactics we had seen the Pompeians employ. The reason for our surprise was that while we expected tribes like the Lusitani to act in such a manner, it was completely unexpected to see men wearing our uniform acting as if they were barbarians.
