“Dig. Starting where those stakes are marking out. Pile the spoil on that side,” Pilus Prior Vetruvius pointed. “The ditch has to be twelve feet deep and fifteen feet wide.”
We all nodded, since this was the standard for fortifications we constructed for Caesar, but despite our understanding of the simple requirements, what was escaping all of us was….why? We were not building a camp; we had done that the day before. This was, at least to our eye, in the middle of nowhere. However, this was to be the first of the defensive fortifications for which Caesar would rightly become famous, an 18 mile wall that began at the shores of the huge lake that the locals call Geneva, to the base of the Jura Mountains. Since we never saw maps and were too lowly ranked to be in any of the officers’ briefings, we had to wait to learn from the Pilus Prior exactly why we were standing in what was nothing more than a long line of Centuries, half of them fully armed and standing watch, with the other half like us being told to show up with our digging gear. The Helvetii were out of room; this much we knew, and once the Pilus Prior sketched out a rough map in the dirt, it became clearer what their problem was. They lived in a narrow strip of land, with the huge lake to one side, and a range of small but rugged mountains on the other. If facing south, the direction they wanted to march, that lake was to their left, and behind them, hemming them in even further was the Rhenus (Rhine) River, roughly a week’s march away. Furthering their problems was that apparently the Helvetii had not been good neighbors to the tribes surrounding them, and I believe it was this knowledge that prompted Caesar to reject their request to pass through the lands to their south. Not trusting them to obey his command, he ordered us to dig a defensive ditch, of the dimensions I previously mentioned, to block the 18 mile gap. Topping the earthen wall were the palisade stakes, for which a large number of trees had to be felled and the stakes fashioned from them. Because we were the first Legion to arrive, it fell to us and a scratch force of Legion strength that was pulled from the garrisons and towns of the province. It is only now that I realize that many times when we were not told the larger reasons for our actions, it was actually in our best interests, although I would have been just as vocal protesting that idea as anyone back then. However, if we knew what we would be expected to accomplish, while we certainly would not have mutinied, there would have been considerable hard feelings. As it was, we were still none too happy, grumbling at the folly of digging a ditch and wall for only the gods knew what here in the middle of nowhere.
Originally, we started on the project at a midway point, in what we thought was an attempt to screen our intentions from the Helvetii. It is still astonishing to me, even having seen it happen as many times as I have by now, how quickly an organized, motivated and well-led group of men can achieve something of the scale as the Geneva Wall, as we came to call it. The wall took only two weeks plus a day, despite one or two attempts on the part of the Helvetii to disrupt the work. Once it was finished, Caesar spread all of his available troops along the walls, concentrating most of them at the point closest to the river, whereby we could man the walls to repel any attempts to scale it, not that there was a huge threat of this. Because it was the entire Helvetii tribe moving, what we faced was not a fast-moving, far-ranging group of warriors, so that scaling the wall would only do them limited good. It had to be breached, in a number of places, with each opening having to be at least as wide as their largest wagons. The spot that bore the most watching was where Caesar put us, the section of wall where it made a junction with the confluence of the river and the lake; the scratch troops were distributed along the rest of the way. Our wall was constructed so that part of it actually ran parallel to the Rhodanus, which is fed by the lake, for the length of a mile, giving anyone foolhardy enough to try slipping by and landing on our side of the river exposure to not just our javelins but to the artillery, the bulk of which Caesar ordered to be concentrated in this area. And if anyone was fortunate enough to make it to the point at which the wall stopped, facing them was a camp filled with men with orders to kill whoever made it that far, no matter what their status. Despite all of this, there were such attempts every night the first two or three nights; at least none of them were insane enough to try to go by in the day. Even with the cover of night, however, the passengers who slipped through on the one or two boats that made it past the initial fortifications were quickly dispatched. Fortunately, our Cohort was stationed further up; while I would have obeyed orders the same way I had obeyed such orders in the past, I certainly did not mind missing the opportunity to slaughter women and children.
The blockade achieved the desired effect, though not for long. Since the Helvetii had already taken the drastic step of burning down their homes, farms and anything else of value, they were for all purposes camping out in their own land. Their tribal elders made the decision that instead of trying to force their way past the wall, they would instead lead their people to the opposite end of their lands to the north, then cross to the west through a gap in the mountains there. Since this was much, much larger than an army that they were trying to move, they could not accomplish anything with any real rapidity. Nonetheless, they moved much faster than we would have thought possible before seeing it with our own eyes, when we awakened one morning to a large cloud of dust hanging in the air to our north. During the impasse at the wall, they had camped within our sight as their elders debated what to do, the fires stretching for as far as the eye could see, so despite ourselves, we were impressed by how quickly they were able to move that mass of people, even if it was just a few miles. Caesar immediately spotted the danger, and knowing that one Legion, no matter how good we were, would not be enough, ordered us to move to join the 7th, 8th and 9th, who had marched from Aquileia into a blocking position. I know we felt the same way, because when we were told that Caesar was heading that direction, not only to hurry the other three Legions along, but to raise two more nobody, not even Vibius, complained about it. The Helvetii could make perhaps ten miles a day, if that; this gave us perhaps a little short of three weeks to stop them at the crossing place between the mountains. Militarily speaking, it was important to meet them in the mountains, where the narrowness of the roads and trails could negate the advantage of their huge numbers. We were told they had more than a 100,000 warriors, and that was a daunting number, no matter how confident we were in ourselves or in Caesar. Caesar left us under the command of Titus Labienus, the man who would end up becoming our de facto commander for the next few years. While the command is supposed to rotate among all the Legates, Caesar was not one to let tradition get in the way of doing what was best with his army. It would not be fair to say that we liked Labienus, but he had our grudging respect. This was partially because like Caesar, he had shown that he would share our same hardships and living conditions, and also because he demonstrated a good head on his shoulders that did not panic. I believe that more than intelligence, or tactical brilliance, the ability to keep one’s head when everyone around you is losing theirs, especially when it is happening literally, is the key to military success. Once our commanders were assured that this was not some attempt on the part of the Helvetii to trick us into prematurely removing us from the wall, we were given the command to march. Caesar left orders that the scratch force would now take our place, taking the reasonable risk that if the Helvetii were to turn tail and come back to the wall, it would not be in the 18 mile stretch between the river and the mountains, but where they might have the greatest chance of success. As was usual for Caesar, he was right; the Helvetii did not give it a backward glance, throwing the dice in the direction they were headed, hoping that they could steal a march on us.