We had travelled back to Britain together, and by the time we disembarked at Lemanis in South Britain, each of us had a sound measure of the other's capacities. I was comfortable with the relationship we had established — one of Staff officer and trusted subordinate — and I felt confident that Britannicus was, too.
From Lemanis, we rented horses and made our way directly north to Londinium, the administrative centre of South Britain. There we reported to the Military Governor, to present our papers and gain official acknowledgement of our arrival. No one in Londinium had any time to waste with us. We were sent on our way — almost without rest — with a package of personal dispatches, a thirty-strong squadron of light cavalry under the command of a senior decurion, and an infantry detachment of one hundred and twelve replacements with six junior centurions. All of these the Tribune was instructed to deliver to the senior Legate in Deva, the fortress headquarters of the Twentieth Valeria Victrix for more than three centuries. We had expected to be sent directly to Eboracum where the Second Cohort of the Twentieth had been stationed on temporary duty for several years. The official military mind, however, continued to function in its own peculiar way.
Deva lay in the hill country to the north-west, in Cambria. It had been built around 70 AD, during Julius Agricola's campaign to complete the conquest of Britain. Its site had been chosen because it dominated the territory where the lands of three warlike tribes — the Brigantes, the Deceangli and the Ordovices — came together. However, after three hundred years of the Pax Romana, Deva's original strategic importance had long been forgotten. Its location was now no more than damnably inconvenient. It took us five days of hard marching to make the journey there by road from Londinium.
As a fortress, Deva was impressive and seemingly impregnable, exactly as one would expect after three hundred-odd years of continuous occupation by one of Rome's proudest and oldest legions. We had less than one day to absorb it, however, before our orders took us back to the road again.
We learned immediately upon our arrival that our initial intelligence —
acquired in Africa — had been accurate. The Second Cohort of the Twentieth lay at Eboracum, on temporary duty with the Second Legion, the Augusta, another three days' march to the north-east. The Legate who accepted our formal reporting for duty was surly and ill-tempered. He excoriated both of us mercilessly for having taken so long to get there —
apparently we had been expected the previous week — and sent us on our way with ringing ears. My admiration for Britannicus grew as I watched the uncomplaining manner in which he accepted the injustice and the inefficiency and inconvenience being heaped upon him by incompetent superiors.
From the outset of our relationship Britannicus invariably treated me with military correctness, slightly warmed by courtesy and consideration. I found him to be just, temperate, and dispassionate in his dealings with the men under his command. But he could be awesome in his wrath when provoked by incompetence or malfeasance. A rigid disciplinarian, he was implacable once he had decided that punishment was in order. And never, at any time, did he show any capacity for suffering fools gladly. In those days, Britain had been at peace for many years. Legionary duties consisted, in the main, of road-building and maintenance, policing the province, and maintaining civil order. The army was, as it always was, the enforcing power behind the law. Few circumstances called the troops in Britain out to spill blood: occasionally, raiding bands of Picts from Caledonia or Scots from Hibernia would make incursions into provincial territory and would have to be repulsed, or, much less common, uninvolved units would be called out to put down an army mutiny bred of anger, dissatisfaction, lack of discipline and the tedium of garrison life. The Second Cohort's posting to Eboracum had come as the result of a mutiny. The rebellion had been a deep-rooted one. and the thousand-man Second of the Twentieth, the only uncontaminated cohort in Eboracum, had been detained there by an apprehensive praesidium for almost two years.
Tribune Britannicus was ordered by the ill-mannered Legate in Deva to take command of the Second Cohort, get it out of Eboracum, and march it sixty miles south to Lindum, to relieve a unit of the Fourteenth Legion posted there. So he and I came together into the life of the Second Cohort, the new Tribune, Caius Britannicus, and his new pilus prior, Publius Varrus. And together we began to reshape it in the image of Caius Britannicus. It was fitting then, that almost two years later, we should be together when we first came face to face with the unthinkable — the opening action of a chain of events that was to alter all our lives, forever. According to the official report, it happened in the hour before dawn on the first night of August in the year of our Lord 367. The frontier bastion known as Hadrian's Wall in the north of Britain was overrun by a federation of hostile tribes from Pictish Caledonia, aided in the east by a seaborne invasion of Saxons and in the west by a similar invasion of Hibernian Scots. That's all it says. Roman historians do not write eloquently of Roman defeats.
Be that as it may, the dimensions of the disaster were appalling. Hadrian's Wall was eighty miles long. At no point in that length was it less than fifteen feet high, and it was fronted along its entire length by a V-shaped ditch ten feet deep and thirty wide. It had a mile castle at every mile of its length, with two small, fortified watch-turrets between each pair, plus a series of sixteen fully garrisoned forts, spaced approximately six miles apart. It was defended at all times by a force of not less than three thousand — regular auxiliary infantry from time to time, depending upon local conditions and the availability of manpower, but mainly local conscripts, citizen farmers and mercenaries. Always mercenaries. And the whole thing collapsed in one hour on that black August night. The scope, the timing and the co-ordinated swiftness of the operation are difficult to visualize, let alone describe. I only arrived at a perspective of my own — a very personal and probably flawed measure of the events —
long afterwards, by comparing the eyewitness reports of the few survivors I met from time to time in the years that followed. Without exception, these men were still amazed, bewildered and confused, years afterward, by what they had encountered that night. Each was still surprised to have lived through it, and each could only recall reacting to the events and the immediate circumstances that affected him personally. Of all these men, the most articulate was Marcus Gallifax, a garrison centurion who escaped and managed somehow to join up with us later, as did a couple of others.
I spoke with Gallifax many times over the months that followed, and his recollections of that night were memorable and precise. They never varied either in detail or in delivery, so that, lying supine in my hospital cot, searching for ways to relieve the tedium of inactivity, I had no difficulty recalling either his face or his words. ...
Hadrian's Wall, 367
It was his third tour of duty on the Wall, and he. hated it more than he had on his first assignment. Marcus Gallifax held his cloak firmly across his lower face and leaned out between the battlements, his eyes screwed almost shut against the outrage of the wind as he scanned the darkness below and in front of him. He saw and heard nothing but blackness and the howling gale. The noise in his ears as the wind roared through the earflaps of his helmet made it impossible to hear anything else, but he couldn't even see the movement that he knew was out there: the writhing, whipping torment of the clumps of rank grass, bracken and gorse that carpeted the ground. His eyes teared rapidly and he grunted a curse and pulled back into the protection of the battlement on his left, wiping his streaming eyes as the frustrated wind howled by his shelter. The wind that seemed to blow endlessly from the north at this time of year had a malevolence, a concentrated hostility, that made it different from any other wind in the world. It came buffeting and blistering south out of the hills, its force twisted and compressed by their contours, and slapped hard against the fifteen-foot-high surface of the Wall, to be sucked down like cataract water into the ten-foot ditch below and then spewed back up and over and between the battlements with an erratic violence that could panic a man by snatching the air out of his mouth as he tried to breathe. Gallifax made a virtue of his hatred, using its virulence to keep him on his toes so that his men were always, always vigilant. They thought he hated them and that he was always trying to catch them out in dereliction of duty. They were wrong. He didn't hate them. He hated that godless, savage frontier where nothing ever seemed to move except the demented wind that made progress along the Wall possible only in a series of leaps from one battlement to the next, the traveller having to brave each open gap and then huddle in the tiny protection of the next battlement before moving on. He leaped again, throwing his shoulders flat against the stonework, and made out the shape of a sentry huddled against the Wall less than four feet from him. The man had been expecting him, and Gallifax guessed at, rather than saw, the salute of greeting. A particularly fierce shock wave broke between them, and Gallifax waited for the gust to die down and then crossed to stand beside the sentry.