“I have come to study the art of war under a famous commantler,” I said. “I was tired of the riding exercises in Rome.”
“There are no glossy horses and silver shields here,” said Aulus briskly. “No hot baths or skilled masseurs either. There is nothing here but the war cries of blue-painted barbarians in the forests, daily fear of ambush, an eternally running cold, an incurable cough, and permanent homesickness.”
And he was not exaggerating all that much, as I was to find out in the two years I spent in Britain. He kept me on his staff for a few days to have my descent confirmed, to hear the latest gossip from Rome and with the help of a relief map to teach me the shape of Britain and the positions of the legionary camps. He also gave me leather clothes, a horse, weapons, and some friendly advice.
“Look after your horse well or the Britons will steal it,” he said. “They fight with chariots, so their horses are small and are not good for riding. As Roman war and politics here are based on our treaties with the British tribes, we also have several chariot auxiliaries. But never trust a Briton, and never turn your back on one. The Britons would like to have our large war-horses to start up their own cavalry. Claudius’ victory here was due to his elephants, which the Britons had never seen before. The elephants tore up their wooden barricades and frightened their horses. But the Britons soon learned to aim at the elephants’ eyes with their spears and to scorch them with burning torches. And the elephants could not stand the climate either. The last of them died of pneumonia a year ago. I’ll send you to Flavius Vespasian’s legion because he is my most experienced soldier and most trustworthy commantler. He is dull but never loses his head. His descent is humble and his habits crude, but he is an honest man who thus will probably never rise to greater heights than that of legion commantler. But you will learn the art of war from him, if that is what you want.”
I met Flavius Vespasian on the shore of the flooded river Anton, where he had dispersed his legion over a wide area and had had wooden fortifica- tions built far apart from each other. He was a man of about forty, powerfully built, his forehead broad and with good-natured lines around his stern mouth. And he was not so insignificant as one would have thought from Aulus Plautius’ superior description. He liked to laugh loudly and also to joke about his own reverses, over which a weaker man might have despaired. His presence alone gave me a sense of security. He looked at me slyly.
“Is fortune coming our way,” he said, “now that a young knight from Rome comes of his own free will to the damp dark forests of Britain? No, no, it’s not possible. Confess what you have done at once and what boyish pranks you have fled from into the protection of my legion’s Eagle, then we’ll get on better together.”
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When he had questioned me minutely on my family and friends in Rome, he said that I would be neither a credit to him nor the contrary. Good-natured as he was, he decided that I should gradually get used to the filth and crudity and trials of military life. At first he took me with him on one of his tours of inspection so that I should get to know the country, and he dictated to me his reports to Aulus Plautius because he himself was too lazy to write. When he had made sure I really could ride and did not trip over my sword, he handed me over to the legion’s engineer to learn how to build fortifications.
Our isolated garrison did not even make up a full maniple. Some of us went hunting for provisions, others felled timber in the forest and a third contingent was building fortifications. Before leaving, Vespasian exhorted me to see that the men kept their weapons clean and that the guards were awake and not idle, for carelessness with weapons was the mother of all vice and weakened discipline.
After a few days I grew tired of wandering about the camp, listening to the barefaced gibes of the old legionaries. I took an ax and began to fell trees in the forest. At the pile-driving, I too, with dirt in my eyes, took a hand at the rope and joined in the song. In the evenings I stood both the centurion and the engineer some wine, which one could buy at an outrageous price from the camp trader, but often I joined the scarred old under-officers around the campfire and shared their porridge and salt meat. I grew stronger, coarser, cruder and I learned to swear, no longer minding about being asked how long I had been jveaned.
There were a score or so of cavalry men from Gaul attached to our garrison. When their commanding officer realized I was not competing for his command, he decided it was time for me to kill my first Briton, so he took me on a provisioning raid. After crossing the river, we rode a long way to a village where the inhabitants had complained that a neighboring tribe was threatening them. They had hidden their weapons, but the veterans, who had come after us on foot, were used to finding weapons in the earthen floors of the round huts and in the heaps of manure outside. After finding the weapons, they plundered the village of all the corn and some of the cattle and mercilessly killed the men who tried to defend their property, on the theory that Britons were not even any good as slaves. The women who had not had time to escape into the forest, they raped as a matter of course and with friendly laughter.
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