“Good for him that he’s getting all the glory, but we’re the reason he’s getting it,” Vibius declared as we walked back to our area. “And what do we get for it? Nothing, that’s what.”
As much as I did not wish to argue with Vibius, I could not let that go unchallenged. “Gerrae! What do you call the fact that he’s splitting the proceeds of those slaves with the entire army?” I argued. “He didn’t have to do that, but he did.”
“I’ll give you that,” Vibius admitted grudgingly, “but there’s other ways to show your gratitude, isn’t there?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, but I know there’s something he could do,” Vibius retorted.
I knew better than to keep arguing about it, so I just sighed and rolled my eyes. Some things would never change, I thought as we continued in silence back to start our workday.
The other event of note was that Caesar, Pompey and Crassus renewed their agreement, which some people called the Three Headed Monster. The Consuls for that year were Gnaeus Marcellinus and Lucius Philippus, and it was now the beginning of the third year of campaigning in Gaul. The winter passed uneventfully, at least as far as we were concerned, although there were elements among the Gallic tribes that were very busy indeed, most notably our friends the Belgae. They had not taken their defeat well, and were even now plotting revenge, yet they knew they could not beat us without help, so one more time Gauls looked across the Rhenus to their more savage cousins for help. The news of their plotting made its way to Caesar’s ears down in Illyricum, rightly causing him concern. As if this was not enough trouble, at the same time down to the south, Crassus and the 7th were running into problems with the Veneti, that tribe going so far as to seize two agents sent by Crassus to arrange for grain to supply the Legion. There were whispers of uprisings springing up all over, forcing Caesar to move from Illyricum the instant spring arrived. Deeming the situation in the south to be the most extreme since the Veneti were openly opposing young Crassus and Rome, Caesar hurried to that area, making his headquarters in what is now known as Portus Namnetus, though it was still known as Namneti for the tribe that founded it at that time. Labienus was sent with about half the cavalry up to a spot on the Mosella (Moselle) River, which empties into the Rhenus, doing such an excellent job of picking a spot for a camp that it is now known as the town of Augusta Trevorum. Quintus Sabinus was sent with the 8th, 9th and 14th Legions to the northwest of Portus Namnetus into the territories of the Curiosolites, Venelli, and the Luxovii, with orders to stop them from joining with the Veneti. The rest of the army, with the exception of two Cohorts of the 11th, who were sent to Crassus as reinforcements, stayed with Caesar at Portus Namnetus while he planned the campaign. The future traitor Decimus Brutus was given the task of both building and acquiring a fleet, since the Veneti were a seagoing tribe whose strength was in their ships. Caesar worked with his usual speed, and we were barely arrived in Portus Namnetus from our winter camp when we were given orders to march. The distance to the territory of the Veneti was perhaps 50 miles, a distance that normally could be done in a Caesar-paced two days. However, we quickly discovered that the Veneti possessed a secret ally in the terrain. It was flat enough, but after the first day’s march on our move towards the coast, we had to make several halts because our line of travel would have taken us into a tidal marsh, or an estuary of some sort. It became especially bad after we crossed a river that marked the boundary to their territory, where the ground was soft and spongy, the wagons finding the going hard as their heavy load pressed them into the turf. Caesar planned on his usual speed to surprise the Veneti, except it seemed that the earth itself was conspiring against us.
Making matters worse were the Veneti themselves, in the way that they situated their defenses. Constructing a series of forts to protect their harbors and the towns surrounding them, they placed them in such a way that, despite our best attempts, we could not carry them and thereby gain entrance to the towns. The forts were not much to look at; it would take only scaling ladders and a few of our artillery for us to get over the wall to subdue the men inside, but it was where they were built that was the problem. The Veneti would find a spit of land that projected into the water, of which there were countless inlets, coves, estuaries and such in that region to choose from, where it was only accessible during low tide. At high tide the finger of land that connected the fort to the mainland would disappear, and we tried a number of different ways to deal with this. Finally settling on a method, Caesar simply had us throw a foundation of stone dragged from nearby quarries and the like, followed by enough dirt to the point that a mole was built that we could march out on to assault the fort, but this would be where the second advantage of the fort would become apparent, with the garrison simply boarding the Veneti ships and sailing away to the next position. It was in this manner that we began subduing the Veneti, except it was incredibly time consuming, and in our view, tiring and frustrating. Each day would see us caked in mud and filth from the tidal pools, mud flats and marshes that served as our source of raw materials, with not even the most vigorous scrubbing completely removing the stench of salt and decay that oozes from the ground in that part of the world. Very quickly we developed a healthy hatred for this region, and for the Veneti, who continued their tactics of delay, moving from one fort to another. I do not think we killed a hundred men during those weeks, merely playing a kind of a game of chase, moving from one inlet to another. Tempers grew short around the fire as the summer passed, a summer that was the least profitable in every sense since we started campaigning in Gaul.
“No battle, no booty, no women, nothing but this cursed mud and trying to fill in the ocean,” griped Vellusius one night, somewhat surprising me since he was not the sort to make comments like this, but it told me that the mood was getting grim.
Vellusius was only saying what the rest of them are thinking, I told myself, while yet again I was confronted by the paradox of command, because essentially I agreed with them. I could not say it, however, because it was my job to keep this kind of talk confined to the interior of our tent or around our fire, as long as it was not too loud or too sharp. All soldiers complain; we consider it a right given to us by both Mars and Bellona, although I have heard some soldiers laughingly suggest that the right to carp and complain has to come from the female god of war and not the male. In that moment, I could see the heads nodding at Vellusius’ comment, so automatically I looked at Vibius, waiting for him to speak, but I was surprised because he said nothing, instead contenting himself with looking vacantly at the fire while gnawing a piece of bread, spitting out the kernels of grain that had escaped being ground down. By this time we had just “taken” our fifth fort, if by taking one means that we occupied its vacant space once the Veneti had embarked on their ships, and all we knew at the time was that the orders were to march the next morning.