Turning slowly, he took in the situation. Despite the loss of a number of horses due to the unpleasant tactic of the enemy, the Gauls and Romans were winning out. Few of the enemy remained and at a shout they disengaged and ran to their beasts. One of the decurions called an order to chase them down, but it went unheeded in the chaos. No one had the urge or the energy to follow.
As Varus watched, the Germanic warriors remounted in a smooth jump and, gathering the reins of the unmanned beasts, left the scene with every horse they had brought. Varus looked at the remaining twenty-odd men. He’d lost two Romans and about fifteen Gauls.
With a cry of the sheerest agony, he yanked loose his neck scarf and pushed his broken arm into it, forming a temporary sling. His eyes streamed with the pain and he had to bite down on his lip with every movement that rubbed the raw wound on the rusty-coloured wool. With a wince and held breath, he retrieved his fallen sword and gestured with it.
“Mount up and move — two to a horse if you have to. Let’s get back to Piso.”
As one of the Roman riders closed, he reached down and helped haul Varus onto the back of his steed, trying not to jostle his bad arm in the process.
Perhaps Fronto and his bleak mood had been right about today.
Piso had done a sterling job of consolidating the Gallic forces as they converged on his wolf standard. Each bolstering unit of three hundred horses and riders had joined the massed ranks, sitting in ordered rows, the front lines with their spears levelled and ready, the rest with the tips raised safely.
Varus watched as he hurtled across the grass with his small battered unit, twenty two men sharing only fifteen horses. The Germanic tactics had been brutal and horribly effective. What it said about tribes that were supposed to hold the honour of individual combat in the highest esteem, he couldn’t say. It was apparently dishonourable to fire an arrow at an enemy, or sling a stone, but to gut his horse from under him and then pick off the downed rider seemed perfectly acceptable.
The ranks of near five thousand horsemen were drawn up in their alae of three hundreds, with only a little manoeuvring room between the units. Piso had carefully withdrawn from his original position to the most open area of fields with no fences or ruined buildings to hamper his cavalry. It was a sensible, safe tactic.
The Germanic attackers had abandoned their missile troops somewhere above the tree line, where the sling-wielding peasants were probably already running for their tribes’ camps. Now, the barbarian horsemen had drawn up in groups to three sides of the Roman forces.
Varus’ initial estimate had been roughly accurate. There couldn’t be more than a thousand of them. And they’d herded the Roman forces back into a group at the centre, but left open a side for the cavalry to escape?
Clearly they did not expect to crush the overwhelming superior forces, then. So what? Frighten them? Do enough damage to make Caesar stop and consider their offer? Anything was possible with these crazed people.
Even as they rode, putting pressure on the tired horses with the extra riders, Varus watched the barbarians sweep forward and realised what they’d done.
As the Germanic warriors reached some hundred yards distant from the Gallic spear tips, they vaulted smoothly from their moving horses like athletic dancers on a Greek vase, landing lightly and already running, their heavy swords in one hand and their now free hands going to their belt to withdraw their horse-gutting knives.
The slaughter was going to be appalling. The barbarians had driven the Roman cavalry to withdraw into their tight ranks. It was a standard tactic against enemy cavalry, but once the enemy warriors got in among the press of men, they could merrily move about gutting anything above them and the Gauls would hardly have room to plunge down with a spear or swing a sword within their own massed ranks.
Piso clearly didn’t know what to do, and Varus felt for the man. What could a commander do against such a strange tactic, and Piso hadn’t seen it happen yet; had no idea what was to come. He was simply stunned by the strangeness of cavalry dismounting and running at him. Ridiculously, the cavalry would have been better off in a traditional Gallic grouping, rather than the ordered ranks of Roman organisation that would turn the lines into a slaughterhouse.
In a desperate move, the Aquitanian chieftain shouted an order in Gaulish and then Latin, which was relayed by the man with the horn and by the dipping and waving of the silvered wolf standard.
The front ranks of Piso’s cavalry charged, their spears lowered and ready to thrust, or raised overhand, ready to throw. Shields were gripped tight. Shafts were launched almost instantly, as soon as the front rank broke; the enemy had already got too close to make any sort of charge effective. The cast spears came down haphazardly, only one or two finding a useful target, their throwers already drawing their long blades ready to swing from horseback.
But the Germanic warriors had no intention of meeting the charge.
As the Romano-Gallic cavalry reached them, the enemy warriors hurled themselves to one side, rolling and coming up running, or ducking beneath swings. A few met the spear points or blades of Piso’s men, but far more slipped between the charging horses, more lithe than any hairy barbarian had any right to be. And suddenly Piso was faced with perhaps eight hundred warriors closing on his ranks of horse from three sides, his charges foundering as the riders tried to turn their mounts to follow the attackers back to their own lines.
Varus was closing on the chaos as he watched the true horror and carnage unfold.
Just as he’d predicted, as soon as the enemy managed to get into the tight mass of horses in the Gallic lines, their work became the simple, brutal job of slaughtermen. It was not a fight — it was a massacre; and he’d been wrong about the numbers. In fifteen or twenty minutes, the eight hundred or so remaining enemy warriors could gut the entire Gallic force, finishing off the stricken riders at their leisure.
Something had to be done.
Turning to Afranius, riding the horse next to him, Varus pointed and raised his voice to be heard over the approaching din.
“We need to get them out of here. Get to the standard bearer and musician and have them sound the call. We’ll form a wedge to push through.”
Afranius nodded and turned, relaying the orders to the other men of Varus’ small band, just as they reached the press of men. The scene was horrendous. The turf had lost every blade of grass, churned to mud that sucked at hooves and feet, coloured a rusty red by the gallons of blood that had been mixed in.
Horses bucked and thrashed, their flailing hooves breaking the legs of others and smashing the skulls of men who floundered in the mud trying to pull themselves upright. Screaming Gauls lay trapped under convulsing horses. And among it all — the stamping and thrashing legs, the screaming and bucking — moved the enemy warriors like some sort of crimson demons, coated to the waist in blood, seemingly uncaring whether they lived or died.
Varus and his men pushed into the mass, the commander jumping from the back of the horse he had shared and gripping his sword in his good arm. As he landed a jolt ran up his body, forcing him to clench his teeth as the agony from his shattered arm roared like white fire up to his brain. Around him, the extra riders who had hitched a lift across the valley dropped from horseback and ran alongside, swords at the ready. The small force of dismounted men stayed in close support of the horsemen, preventing the underhanded Germanic tactics from destroying their small attack with their gruesome tactic.
Here and there in the press, as Varus and his dismounted men clambered over bodies both wounded and dead, beast and man, they found one of the enemy warriors gouging a fallen Gaul or shredding a horse’s belly to stop it rising again. Individually, in a straight fight, these barbarians were no match for Varus’ regulars and fell like wheat before their blades.