Continuing to move south towards Gorgobina, once again Caesar did not want to leave an enemy in his rear, so we besieged the town of Noviodunum. More accurately, we began the siege, then very quickly a group of men came scurrying out to beg for mercy. Yet again, Caesar granted it, but only on the condition that the men of the town were disarmed, to which the elders agreed. A contingent of Centurions was designated to handle the confiscation of the weapons, and it was while this was happening that some of Vercingetorix’s cavalry appeared from the south, their appearance giving the Bituriges, the people occupying the town, the delusion that they might yet win their freedom. Suddenly, there was a mad scramble as men tried to retrieve the weapons they had already discarded in one of the designated wagons, but of all the people that a Gaul wants to trifle with, a Centurion of Caesar’s army should accordingly be the last on their list. Drawing their swords, the Centurions held the townsmen at bay, managing to withdraw safely without losing a man. The same cannot be said for Caesar’s cavalry contingent, unfortunately, consisting mostly of Gauls from the few tribes that were not in revolt, and they took heavy casualties from Vercingetorix. However, after seeing the valor of them in action against the Usipetes and Tencteri, Caesar called for some 400 Germans and it was these men he sent forth. They came sweeping onto the field, brushing aside Vercingetorix’s cavalry with contemptuous ease and minimal loss. With the situation now in hand, the Bituriges came back out of the town to finish their surrender. I can tell you that it did not set well with Caesar’s veterans that we did not put the town to the sword for their treachery, and I am one of those who disagreed with Caesar’s decision to show clemency. However, orders are orders, so they were left unmolested for the most part.
Still marching further south, we stopped to besiege the town of Avaricum, and this marked a turning point in the tactics of the Gallic chieftain. Admittedly, after a series of setbacks Vercingetorix reacted quickly to try to forestall what we believed to be the inevitable, the submission of all of Gaul to Rome. Recognizing that he could never hope to match our might, Vercingetorix instead decreed that the entire countryside must be laid to waste. The young Arverni was powerful enough of a leader that his people followed his orders, despite knowing it meant that their families would starve. Accordingly, he also decreed that even the towns must be put to the torch, and none of them defended by the warriors in his army. He was determined to make the countryside a desert, and by doing so, force Caesar to turn his immense army southward to the Province for supply, giving the Gauls their freedom. As I have said, the Gauls are an argumentative lot, so it was not an inconsequential feat to get the vast majority to follow orders to lay waste to the land. Yet there were bound to be dissenters, and in this case it was the Bituriges, who had already lost one town, while we were laying siege to another. They did not openly disobey Vercingetorix as much as ask that an exception be made, pointing to the overall wealth of Avaricum, and more importantly, its defensibility. In this at least, they were correct; the town is almost completely surrounded by extremely marshy ground, with only a narrow strip of land where the one road leading into the town is the only practicable approach. Supposedly there was a great argument, the Bituriges more or less throwing themselves on the mercy of their fellow Gauls, begging that Avaricum be the one spared. I will give them this much, it was a wealthy town, and while I normally did not much take notice of such things, Avaricum possessed a certain air of beauty about it that marked it as different from all the other towns we either marched past or destroyed. Even as this matter was being debated, the other Gallic tribes were following the orders of Vercingetorix, putting to the torch not only their fields, but their towns and homes as well. One could make one full revolution of the horizon without a pall of smoke ever leaving their line of sight, the Gauls putting more than 20 towns to the torch. However, the Bituriges prevailed, with Vercingetorix reluctantly bowing to the will of the majority, deeming that Avaricum should be defended.
Because of the nature of the ground around Avaricum, we could not effect a circumvallation in our normal manner. Setting up our camp directly on the opposite side of the strip of solid ground leading into the city, we began the work of preparing the ground for the siege. Because the lay of the land, it was not feasible for us to concentrate our efforts to take the town just using this narrow strip of land, since it was barely wide enough for one Legion to march across at a time, thereby negatin our superiority in numbers. This is what kept Avaricum safe from investment by any of the Gallic tribes, yet they were not the engineers we were. Caesar looked at the marshy ground, and instead of throwing up his hands then hurling us one at a time across the dry ground in a bloody assault, he simply decided to fill in the marsh at certain points. At selected spots directly across from every wall, we began the process of filling in the marsh, not just throwing dirt in, but constructing a terrace similar in construction to the ramp I described previously so that our heavy artillery and the towers we were constructing could roll safely, moving up a ramp about 80 feet high where it touched the wall. Avaricum's walls loomed some 20 feet above that, these easily being the highest and strongest that we were ever up against. The height was partly because the city sat on the top of a small hill, with very steeply sloping sides, but the walls themselves were exceptionally high. What was astonishing to us was how the Gauls could build a wall that high without it toppling over; Caesar gives a detailed description in his Commentaries, so I will not go into it in any detail other than to say that despite ourselves, we were impressed.
“If they ever learned how to conduct a proper siege, we’d be in trouble,” the Pilus Prior observed after we got a look at their walls up close. This time we did not face any of the same derision or ridicule that we had in the past when building our siegeworks. Our reputation was well known, so it was nothing but anxious faces looking down on us from the walls of the city as we worked.
This was going to be the largest, most involved siege to date, and it was clear that we would be here for the next few weeks, which actually played into our enemy’s hands. The tactics of Vercingetorix were beginning to be felt, with our foraging parties forced to go farther afield than normal, only to be ambushed by the Gallic forces. To combat this, we had to send out larger foraging parties in order to bring back anything at all. Then, they began to return empty-handed, as well as in smaller numbers than when they went out, causing our supply situation to become very serious. We began subsisting on the livestock that the foraging parties came back with, in lieu of bread. Once again I quietly thanked the gods that such a diet did not disagree with me the way it did with many of my comrades. It seemed that whenever our diet switched to mostly meat, men began suffering all types of intestinal problems, and it was not unheard of for men to fall seriously ill and die because their systems could not tolerate it for whatever reason. One thing I remembered from my childhood was Gaia’s absolute insistence that the meat be thoroughly cooked, and I did notice that the men who seemed to have the most problems were the ones that were the most impatient, snatching their share off the fire before it was fully roasted. Now that I was Optio, I could enforce on the whole Century the practice of thoroughly cooking their meat, and while this was met with some resistance at first, once it was clear that we had less men ill than the other Centuries, I no longer had to order the men to do so, they happily did it on their own. Still, there was much grumbling about the absence of bread, yet it was the dim prospects of fixing that problem that worried us the most.