We walked out of his tent and into the two longest years of my life.
III
It galls me to admit it, but even today as I write this, the young men who make up our own forces here in the Colony are so involved with horses and cavalry tactics that they have little or no idea of the composition of the classic Roman legion. Consequently, I have to accept the fact that some explanation will be necessary if those who read these words in years to come are to understand what happened in those days to the Roman armies.
Before the growth of cavalry forces and tactics, the Roman legion was an infantry force made up of ten cohorts. Two of these Cohorts held ten maniples each, and the other eight each held five. A maniple consisted often, eleven or twelve ten-man squads, so that a legion at full strength numbered not less than six thousand men. In addition, each of the eight smaller cohorts had a squadron of thirty cavalry attached to it. Cavalry at that time were no more than mounted bowmen, skirmishing troops whose job was to provide a mobile defensive screen out in front while the legion was drawing up into battle formation.
The First and Second Cohorts of every legion were the Millarians, double cohorts of one thousand to twelve hundred men with sixty cavalry attached. Theirs was the honour and responsibility of holding the right of the line of battle. Only battle-hardened veterans were assigned to these cohorts, and their officers and warrant officers were the finest, having won their posts by exemplary conduct and outstanding ability. Ours was a Millarian Cohort. Just before the start of the Invasion, as it came to be known, we had been on duty in the garrison town of Luguvallium, hard by Hadrian's Wall. Units of the Twenty-fourth Legion stationed there had fomented a violent, short-lived mutiny. Our task had been to eradicate the mutineers, using the experience we had gained in Eboracum. The exercise had been drastic and unpleasant, but we had completed it and were on our way to join up with two of our own auxiliary cohorts in Mamucium when the enemy came over the Wall. To this day nobody knows how many Roman soldiers died that day, and how many simply deserted into the hills, or even joined the barbarians. The invaders overran all of the north country and most of the south-east. There were even barbarians in Londinium! Ours was one of the very few units that survived, and we had Britannicus and his old-fashioned ideas — leavened with more than a bit of sheer military genius — to thank for it. Britannicus was one of those rare officers who was like a god to his men. He was the toughest, most bloody-minded disciplinarian I'd ever served under, and the men would have marched into Hades for him. Once again, any future reader of these words may not understand that to be able to say that about any commander of Roman forces in those days was phenomenal in itself. The old days of the Republic and of Empire triumphant were centuries gone. By the beginning of the fourth Christian century, the eleventh century of Rome, senior rank was held, in the main, by horses' arses rich enough to buy it. And ninety out of every hundred of those leaders were afraid to antagonize the men they ostensibly commanded.
The average soldier in the armies of the Empire was a joke. Every one was a Roman citizen, by imperial decree. Black, white, yellow, brown or painted with blue woad, they were all Roman citizens. There were Germans, Numidians, Egyptians, Armoricans,' Phoenicians, Greeks, Vandals, Huns, Thracians, Dacians, Franks, Saxons, Scots, Levantines and Jews. We taught them how to fight, instructed them in battle techniques and strategy, and equipped them, and then they deserted in their thousands to their home territories to organize resistance against the Roman succubus!
Everyone knew what was happening. We knew we were training our own adders to bite us. It was a fact of life, and it was aggravated by the fact that, while they were in the army, they all had their "rights." It had become normal for garrison troops to be excused from wearing breastplates and carrying shields at all times. They were too heavy for the men! The results were preordained. The debacle at Hadrian's Wall was a micro-cosmic example of the state of the whole Empire.
Britannicus, following in the steps of his own father, would have none of this. He had a stony row to hoe at first, because his methods were as out of date as those of the Republic he admired, but he had the courage of his convictions and he was willing to lay his own balls on the line. He expected his men to make a twenty-five-mile march every week in full gear. That meant seventy pounds of helmet, armour, two spears, five javelins, scutum (the infantryman's heavy shield), leg greaves, cooking pots, rations, canteen and two palisades (long, pointed poles to be used in setting up the camp's defences each night).
Every night on the march, or on manoeuvres, the men built a fortified camp, surrounded by a ditch and palisaded walls and gates. Only then were they allowed to relax and eat their evening meal sitting down. Breakfast was always consumed standing or on the move.
Britannicus did everything he expected his men to do. He marched at the head of the column, on foot and carrying full gear. He could out march, out run, out jump and out fight any man in his cohort at any time of the day or night.
When he first took command of the cohort, the men were appalled. By their own lights, they were already crack troops, second only to the First Cohort. By his lights, they were rabble whom he was determined to make into soldiers second to none. They hated his guts, and he fed them back their own vomit. He used the full authority of his rank and the Empire to punish them, harshly, every time they asked for it. Every time he so much as imagined defiance he ground their faces down into the dirt. And the more they hated him and resented him, the rougher he was. Eventually they discovered that if they were going to beat him, it would have to be on his own ground and by his own rules, so they tried that. And they failed. And then, somewhere along the line, they began to develop a pride in themselves, in their toughness, and in their rotten, whoreson, bloody-minded, miserable commander. And only then, and only very slowly, did they begin to realize that for every fault they could find in him, someone else, somewhere in the cohort, could point out something that was not too bad, or something that you had to respect, or something that you even had to admire.
They began to realize that they had no bad officers. At least, they said, not bad compared to what the other cohorts had to put up with. Britannicus had cleaned out his officer corps within weeks of his arrival, and now it seemed that any new officer in the Second Cohort was quickly made to shape up, or move out. No officer ever took advantage of an enlisted man in the Second Cohort; punishment was swift, severe and certain, but victimization was unknown.
The men discovered that they were always well fed — far better fed than the other units around them, where officers had other things to consider ahead of the diets of their men. Britannicus, it was observed, put the welfare of his men — their food, their equipment and their billets — above everything else.
The cohort had been under his command for two years when Aaron Flavius, pilus prior and thus my opposite number in the First Cohort, came to me late one afternoon and asked me to arrange an interview for him with Britannicus on what he termed "a personal and confidential matter." Too surprised to demur, I took Aaron's request directly to Britannicus. He had been in a foul mood all day long and was clearly uncomfortable with such an unusual request. His frown darkened to a forbidding scowl immediately, and he growled, "What does he want to see me about, Centurion?"
I spoke to a point in the air above his left shoulder. "I don't know, Tribune." We were being very formal that day.