The Helvetian Affair Read online

I did. The lorica moved a bit but stayed on.

  “Always test your fit,” Strabo said. “When you are moving quickly, you don’t want this thing shifting and exposing nice, tempting targets to your enemy, like your throat, crotch, or armpits. Now, the rest of you cockroaches suit up!”

  While I was helping Felix into his rig, Strabo went back into the supply tent. I just about had Felix squared away when Strabo returned, followed by a couple of the supply clerks carrying what looked like wide strips of chainmail. They piled these on a piece of canvas lying on the ground in front of us.

  When they had gone back into the supply tent, Strabo called, “Gather around me, blattae!”

  We did, and Strabo held up one of the chainmail stoles. We then noticed it had leather straps. “These are your chlamys, your shoulder-armor rigs. You inspect the chainmail the same way that I showed you with the loricae. It attaches like this . . . Get over here, Pagane!”

  I walked over, and Strabo adjusted a chlamys around my neck and over both my shoulders. “You attach the chlamys to the back of the lorica with these two straps first,” Strabo instructed, strapping my shoulder armor down. “Then you close it with these straps. Be sure the sudarium is up above the edge so the chainmail doesn’t chafe your neck while you’re moving, which, for a Roman soldier, is always. Then, come around front and attach these three straps . . . Bene! Pagane! Sali!”

  This time, I didn’t question Strabo. The chainmail rig moved a bit as I jumped, but settled back smoothly on my upper body.

  Strabo continued, “That’s how a well-adjusted lorica should move on your body . . . smooth . . . no gaps . . . Stop jumping, Pagane! Now, there’s a hook here on the front of the chlamys . . . It should be positioned about the middle of your chest . . . This is to hang your galea, your helmet, when the centurion lets you remove it during the march.”

  Strabo bent over, picked up one of our helmets, and hung it on my rig.

  “Fits like that!” Strabo said. “Any questions?”

  There were none, so Strabo said, “Bene! Get yourselves rigged out in these chlamydes, then helmets on and strapped!”

  When we were all in our loricae and lined up in our two files, Strabo announced, “You’re beginning to look like Roman soldiers, but you’re not there yet . . . not by a long shot . . . But from now on, you will act like Roman soldiers . . . That means you’re in your loricae and galeae from first trumpet in the morning until seventh hour every duty day . . . longer when there’s an enemy near . . . Bene! It’s still early . . . We can get at least a ten thousand-pace march in before chow!”

  Strabo shouted, “Contubernium . . . STATE’!”

  “Ad dex’ . . . VERT’!”

  “Promov . . . ET’!”

  “Gradus . . . Bis . . . mov . . . ET’!”

  Off we clinked and clanked at the double toward the Porta Decumana at the rear of the camp. And, Strabo was good to his word. From that day, we did everything like Roman soldiers, in full armored rig: conditioning marches; weapons training; even “buckets.”

  Our first phase of weapons training was with the infantry sword. Strabo double-timed us to a training field along the Via Principalia near the Porta Dextra of the camp. From Macro’s drills with the pugio, I immediately recognized the palus erected in the ground. Those drills, although only six months earlier, seemed a different world to me. Strabo gathered us at the edge of the field and drew his sword from the scabbard on his right hip.

  “Audit’ me, vermiculi!” he yelled holding up the sword to us. This is the gladius hispaniensis, the Spanish short sword, the basic weapon, best friend, and only true and faithful lover of a pedes Romanus. Like a good woman, if you take care of her, she’ll take care of you! The gladius is a carbon steel, double-edged sword with a tapered point for stabbing during combat. The blade is nine palms in length and one palm wide at its widest point. The gladius weighs just less than three librae . . . Pustula! You cockroach! Listen up! . . . The gladius possesses a solid grip provided by a ridged, wooden hilt wrapped in leather and secured by metal wire. It has a knobbed hilt which prevents your hand from sliding forward onto the blade—regardless of how much guts and blood has slicked your sword hand. It also has a knobbed pommel, which prevents the sword from being ripped from your hand when the blade gets stuck in the bone and gristle of some hairbag mentula you have dispatched to the ferryman. The pommel is also weighted, to give the gladius perfect balance, which, when you sorry excuses for Roman soldiers are properly conditioned and trained, will make the gladius feel weightless in combat. This sword in the hands of a trained and motivated Roman legionary—which you maggots-in-chainmail are not—is the finest weapon ever to be introduced onto the field of battle. Had Alexander the Great and his armies had these swords, we’d all be speaking Greek today. Do you bestiolae have any questions?”

  “N’abemus, Optio!” we answered in unison.

  “Bene!” Strabo continued. “The gladius hispaniensis is a stabbing sword, not a slashing sword. Barbarians, cavalrymen, and pissed-off wives slash. Roman soldiers stab. In this field, you will learn the proper technique for using a legionary’s gladius on the field of battle. However, until you maggots prove to me that you are worthy of the title milites Romani, you will not put your meat hooks on real steel!”

  Strabo dramatically sheathed his sword. He bent over and picked up a wooden replica of the gladius, which he held up for us to see.

  “You will be learning your combat sword techniques using a rudis,” Strabo announced. “The rudis is made in the exact dimensions of a gladius, but it’s heavier than the real thing by almost two librae. This is to condition your arms and shoulders so that when the army finally has enough confidence in you maggots to give you real swords, they will feel like feathers in your hands. Before we start, each of you will file through the tent to my rear, where you will be issued your training swords. You will keep these rudes with you at all times. Awake! Asleep! Coming! Going! Walking! Running! Your rudis will either be in your hands or in your belts. They will be so much a part of you that, if some night you dream that a five-headed hydra pounced on you from out of your mommy’s closet, you will be able to kill that scaly, slimy maggot with your rudis. If I ever see any of you without your little wooden swords, you will be cleaning merda out of latrines until you begin to enjoy it. Do you have any questions, me’ blattulae?”

  “N‘abemus, Optio!” we shouted.

  So, we began our gladius training. Strabo abbreviated the daily conditioning marches to ten thousand paces, but we were now doing them in armor and double-timing at least half the distance. We were back in camp by the fourth hour and on the stakes until the sixth. Chow. Rest and cleaning. By the eighth hour, back on the stakes, where we remained until the tenth—eleventh if Strabo didn’t think we were “motivated” enough. The training was familiar to me. I’d been through it already with Macro. The only difference was the size and weight of the rudis.

  Strabo was true to his word, and we always kept our practice swords with us. Lentulus left his on his bunk at the end of the day when he went to take a shit. When he got back to the tent, Strabo was waiting for him. As Strabo was beating Lentulus on the shoulders and upper arms with his discarded practice sword, he reminded Lentulus that a real soldier never walks away from his sword. Then, Strabo put Lentulus on latrine-cleaning duty. But, so that Lentulus wouldn’t miss any training, or burden his contubernales by missing his guard shifts, he had to clean the shitters at night, when everyone else was sleeping. I remember the morning Lentulus stumbled back into our tent, less than an hour before the end of the fourth watch and the beginning of our training day, smelling like the merda he’d been scraping out of the latrines all night.

  Strabo didn’t spare the rest of us either. He told us no contubernalis would ever let a mate walk away from his sword. That endangers the man and the unit. He had us suit up in our armor, and until the end of the first watch, we had to double-time around the intervallum, the open space between the camp’s wall and th
e soldiers’ living quarters.

  After two weeks of sword training, Strabo introduced us to the second basic legionary weapon, the scutum. Since we were tirones, we were not given the real thing, but a weighted wicker shield Strabo called the vimen, the “basket.”

  To my surprise, in the hands of a trained Roman soldier, the scutum was as much an offensive weapon as it was a defensive one. Using a palus, from which hung a sack of sand, Strabo taught us to “punch” an enemy with the umbo, the iron boss of the shield, a fighting technique he called percussus. On one of the padded training stakes, Strabo demonstrated how the left hand grasped a padded, metal handle welded to the back side of the umbo, and turning through the hips and shoulders, smashed the iron boss into an opponent. After striking the bag of sand a few times, Strabo “asked” for a volunteer to attempt the technique and immediately pointed to Minutus, “Tiny.”

  The weighted vimen looked like a dinner tray in Minutus’ mitt, and the first time he attempted the percussus, the training pole seemed to shift a bit in the ground.

  But, that didn’t satisfy Strabo. “Is that all you got, tu puella?” he shouted at Minutus. “You little girl! Hit that pole like you have a pair!”

  Minutus’ face reddened a bit, but he hit the palus again, harder this time. I heard him grunt and thought I heard the stake crack.

  “My baby sister hits harder than that!” Strabo taunted. “Hit it again, me’ puella!”

  Minutus looked hard at Strabo. For a second, I wasn’t sure whether his next percussus was going into the stake or into our training officer. The stake lost. Minutus smashed it with a grunting shout and the stake split at ground level; its shattered fragments flew back at least three paces.

  We were stunned. Even Strabo was rendered speechless for a few heartbeats.

  Finally, Strabo announced, “That’s the way a Roman soldier executes a percussus!”

  He took the vimen from Minutus. We could all see that its iron umbo was crushed. Then, something happened that we had never seen in all our training. Strabo, staring down at the crushed iron boss, finally looked up at Minutus, who was panting a bit and standing next to the shattered palus, and said, “Minutus! Return to quarters! You have the rest of the afternoon off!”

  As Minutus double-timed down the camp street, Strabo turned to us, the shattered vimen still in his hand, and shouted, “What are you maggots staring at? Pick up your baskets! Find a pole! Get to work!”

  We spent the rest of that day, until well past the tenth hour, punching sandbags with our training shields. Despite Strabo’s shouts of “encouragement,” none of our repeated blows as much as shifted the training stakes. When we finally got back to the tent, our shoulders and arms had no feeling left in them at all.

  Minutus was on his cot, sleeping like a baby.

  II.

  Hostes apud Amicos

  ENEMIES AMONG FRIENDS

  Mensis Martis, the month of the god of war, Mars, arrived, and activity in the castrum of the Tenth Legion picked up. Rumors had it that the tribes up in Gallia Comata, long-haired Gaul, were again on the move. The snow would soon be melting in the Alpine passes, and Caesar Imperator would be summoning his legions for a summer campaign against them.

  The regular infantry cohortes of the legion were now regularly in the field on conditioning marches and training exercises. The immunes, soldiers with special skills who were exempted from fatigue details, remained in camp and worked daily, cleaning and repairing equipment for the expected campaign.

  Strabo was pushing us hard to be ready. Our training day rarely ended before the eleventh hour, and with the change of season lengthening the hours, we tumbled into our cots every night totally exhausted, only to be roused in a matter of hours for a tour of guard duty.

  In a practice field just outside the Porta Sinistra, Strabo had us working daily on combat techniques for the battle line with our rudes and vimenes. He constantly drilled us in two techniques: the close-order defense and the open-order advance.

  The basic infantry combat formation of the centuria was a column of contubernia, one squaddie behind another, with each contubernium in the centuria lined next to each other. Typically, the distance of one gradus, a little less than three pedes, separated one soldier from another, so sword and shield were unencumbered. Soldiers typically measured the distance as an arm’s length between men across the front line. The exception to the “three-pedes rule” was the gemini pairs. The partner of the man on the front line positioned himself at a distance to support his geminus. Because we didn’t make up a full eighty-man centuria formation, we simulated with a four-man front line in gemini pairs. For most of our training, I was paired with Loquax. At times, I was on in front; at other times, he was.

  The close-order defense, or the murus scutorum, “the shield wall,” as the veterani called it, was used when defending against a determined assault from a numerically superior enemy. The goal of the murus was to hold a position or to relinquish ground as slowly as possible. In this formation, the contubernia were aligned in “close order,” about half a gradus between men across the front line—so close that shields could be interlocked, forming a wall facing the enemy.

  Initially, the primary role of the geminus of the front-line man was to place his shoulder into his partner’s side and dig his hobnails into the turf so his mate isn’t bowled over by the initial impact of the enemy assault. Then, as the front-line squaddies stabilized and sustained the shield wall, the geminus ensured that no one got to the front-line man by stabbing at him over or under his shield.

  To practice this, Strabo detailed about a score of legionary slaves to charge at us, usually down a hill with us at the bottom. If Strabo was in a really perverse mood, he’d find a nice patch of mud for us to form our murus in. Half the slaves would be carrying sacks of sand to give their charge some momentum and produce a significant shock when they hit our shields. The others would carry blunted stakes. After the first wave of slaves crashed into our wall with their sand bags, the ones with the stakes would keep our back-line boys busy defending as they poked at us over the shield wall.

  The first time we practiced the murus, Strabo had us formed in the mud at the bottom of a ridgeline. When the first wave of slaves, the ones with the sandbags, hit our shield wall, the feet of our first-line men went out from under them, and they went down, taking the second line, the gemini, with them. The first wave of slaves followed their own momentum over our falling bodies and ended up in the mud with us. The second line of slaves, the ones with the poles, tried to stop, but had too much momentum from charging down the slope, and with no footing on the slick muddy ground, they piled on top of the already struggling scrum.

  Strabo watched this muddy pile of arms and legs for a while to see if we could extricate ourselves. Finally, he began dragging individual bodies out of the pile by their muddy arms and legs. When he eventually had us untangled and back in some semblance of a military formation, he congratulated us for being the first Roman military unit ever overrun by a pack of slaves armed with sandbags and sticks. He then double-timed us back to our tent, telling us we had one hour to prepare for a complete inspection of our kit, living quarters, and persons—and we would not be permitted to eat, sleep, or drink anything until he could not find one speck of mud or dirt anywhere.

  Finally about halfway through the second watch of the night, we were permitted to sleep—at least those of us who weren’t on guard duty.

  The slaves got a charge out of knocking us flat. Typically, legionary slaves were good eggs; serving with a legion was a good deal for them. Although they were the property of the res publica, they got plenty to eat and were worked no harder than the soldiers were. After twenty years of service, they were freed, given a pilleum, the “liberty cap,” and the franchise. In many ways, they were better off than most citizens, and they knew it. But, there was one rule they were never allowed to break. Ever since the slave insurrections down in Sicilia and Italia, no slave was allowed to hold a weapon.
The penalty was crucifixion.

  There was an old war story that went around the camp about a fight in which the enemy had breached the Roman line. A squad of legionaries from the tertius ordo, the “forlorn hope” of any legion, was the only thing keeping the barbarians from breaking through to the rear of the Roman formation. A contubernium fought alone until there were none left standing; every squaddie was either killed or wounded. That was when an army slave picked up the gladius of a wounded legionary and fought the enemy. He not only saved the lives of his wounded comrades, but he saved the army as well. After the battle, the legatus legionis, the commander of the legion, awarded the slave the Civic Crown for saving the lives of Roman citizens and standing his ground against overwhelming odds. He then immediately ordered the slave to be crucified for daring to take up arms.

  Even Strabo snorted at that story. He said the Civic Crown would never be awarded to a slave. Besides, if it were true what the slave had done, single-handedly stopping the enemy and saving the lives of Roman soldiers, the legion would not tolerate his being executed—even if some pumped-up, patrician legatus ordered it.

  The other formation that Strabo drilled was the open-rank advance, which was used against a numerically inferior enemy or one whose battle line had been broken but was not yet fleeing. The purpose of the open-rank advance was to gain ground quickly without losing the integrity of the legionary battle line. For this, our battle line assumed an “open” formation, double spacing between each man in the front line. To measure this, we’d raise our arms and align ourselves fingertip to fingertip with the men on either side. The second pair in each contubernium would maintain the same interval but would align themselves in the gaps between the front-line pairs. So, the centuria would advance in what looked like a checkerboard pattern, in quincuncem dispositi, deployed in the oblique, Strabo called it.

  The individual combat technique used in the advance was what Strabo called the “Roman one-two punch,” a combination of a forward percussus with the scutum followed by a full forward thrust with the gladius. The movement started with the right foot forward, facing the enemy. The percussus was executed when the legionary stepped forward with the left foot, punching the shield’s umbo into the enemy’s head, face, or chest. This was immediately followed by stepping forward with the right foot, stabbing forward into the enemy’s throat, abdomen, or groin with the short sword. The mulus repeated the technique until the advance was halted or he was relieved by his geminus or there was no one left in front of him to kill.