I found in myself a level of brutality I had not dreamed of, and was not proud of, but even so, every marched step was taken grudgingly, every salute was wooden, with a perfect blankness in the eyes that hid the hate we all knew was there. I could drill them to a mechanical perfection, but it felt as if I pushed each man with my mind, and it was as exhausting as anything I had ever done.
They were united in their loathing of us, so that by the end of the first year we had two legions: the new men who made friendships amongst themselves, and we who were the veterans, to whom they never spoke a word unless they must.
Tears and Horgias had the worst time of it, for each of them had been allocated one of the new intake as his shield-man and didn’t know from moment to moment if he was going to be shielded or stabbed in the gut.
Horgias was paired with a bull of a man, rightly named Taurus; a volunteer from Herculaneum with skills as an engineer who had been sent to us as his first posting and who, I thought, might one day become another Proclion if he could only get over his sullen ill temper. Tears was likewise protected, if that’s the word for it, by Macer, a hard-bitten Athenian who had been sent to us from the VIIth and resented every breath taken in the company of the XIIth.
For four years we drilled, and made mock battles against the IVth, and those of us who remembered the XIIth as it had been prayed nightly that we might see some real action, enough to weld us into a fighting unit, if not to forge the bonds of friendship that might make us something stronger.
Our chance came in the thirteenth year of the Emperor Nero’s reign. By then, Corbulo had crossed the Euphrates and back, done battle with Vologases and forced the King of Kings to a truce that seemed likely to hold.
By now, the general’s standing had risen so high in the east that if he had marched to Caesarea and declared himself emperor, every legion under his command would have followed him to the gates of Rome to unseat Nero and place their hero on the throne. Knowing this, Nero recalled Corbulo to Greece and sent Gaius Cestius Gallus to take his place as governor of Syria and general of the Syrian legions.
When I tell you that Gallus was a senate-climber cast from the same mould as Caesennius Paetus, you will know how hard it fell on the veterans of the XIIth who had fought at Rhandaea, but we suffered his generalship believing that it was transient and he could do us little harm.
And then a band of Hebrew rebels broke into an armoury in the desert south of Jerusalem, armed themselves and took the city, crushing the garrison that had kept order there for as long as anyone could remember. Overnight, our entire world was ablaze with insurrection.
By all accounts, the Hebrew king had abandoned his people at the first hint of violence. Certainly he arrived with us in Antioch barely behind the news, bringing with him a train of family and retainers all of them bearing tales of men armed with Roman weapons and fighting in Roman style; of a mint where men struck Hebrew coins swearing they would never be paid in taxes to Rome; of a god which threw off Roman gods, and would not acknowledge Caesar as its superior.
Cestius Gallus was no soldier, but faced with that kind of provocation he had no choice other than to hurl the legions at the Hebrews like a bolt, sending us in hard and fast before winter ended the fighting season and rendered a positive outcome impossible.
We saw our chance; how could we not? The governor had to choose between the IVth and the XIIth to spearhead hisattack and even the most hardened naysayers amongst our men believed that we were the better legion. Overnight, men walked with more life in their step than I had seen in four fighting seasons. They began to mend things without being told. They lined up on parade with a crispness I had come to believe was impossible. They didn’t smile, they didn’t hate us any less, but by heaven they wanted to fight.
But then so did the men of the IVth, who had the same difficulties and as much to prove: they, after all, had not even attempted to hold Lizard Pass.
As camp prefect, Lupus held our future in his hands; to him fell the job of persuading a weak man that we were his strength. There’s a rumour that he knelt before Gallus, begging that we be allowed to march against the new enemy. Nobody believes that, but whatever he did, it worked: we were given our wish.
Three cohorts each from the IVth and the VIth accompanied us, with substantial numbers of allied foot and horse, so that forty thousand men marched out of Antioch in the end. But we of the XIIth, made up to full strength, trained to battle fitness and straining to be let off the leash — we were the only legion to march whole, entire, intact from Syria into Judaea to put down the Hebrew revolution.
In the beginning was no honour. From Zebulon in Galilee to Joppa in Judaea, we picked off the cities as we came to them, without ever having to resort to the siege towers and catapults, the sapper’s kit and the ram that the mules pulled behind us every day.
We went in hoping for a battle and we came out disappointed. We lost two men of the second cohort to falling masonry in a city we demolished and one of the fourth to an unlucky slingshot when he removed his helmet in the heat of battle, but other than that we faced no more resistance than the pitifuldefences of old men and women, for the young men had all run to the mountains, or so we were told by those few whose lives we spared.
They lied, although we only discovered that later: in truth, the young men had all gone to Jerusalem to swell the ranks of the Hebrew rebellion.
I don’t think it would have made any difference had we known that. We marched twenty, thirty, forty miles a day, crushing the countryside and all who lived there in an orgy of devastation that left us sour-mouthed and irritable.
When, finally, there was nothing left to burn, we turned towards Jerusalem, taking the narrow, difficult pass they call Beth Horon that cuts from west to east through the mountain ranges north of the city and was said by our guides to be the most direct route. If we baulked at its difficulties, they assured us we could expect to spend ten days or more in detours to reach the same end, by which time, most assuredly, the winter rains would be upon us.
Like every other Hebrew who claimed to help us, they lied, but we didn’t find that out until a long while later, either. At the time, our main concern was to find a means by which forty thousand men, their weapons, fodder, food, wagons and siege engines might pass through Beth Horon.
The local guides said that a lightly armoured man could run through from the western entrance to the eastern mouth of the godforsaken pass in a morning. Horgias and Tears came back after trying it and said that a fully armoured legionary could, indeed, do it at a fast march in half a day, but that there were places where the path wound along the lee of the mountain and was barely wide enough for an ox cart.
They said it would take us a full two days to cross; three or four if we took the ballistas, catapults and siege towers we had brought with us, for they must be dismantled and loaded on to carts. The ram, they thought, was impossible to take.
We didn’t have three or four days to lose, not when Horgias had already killed two Hebrew scouts and they were only the ones he had seen; we all knew there were others and none of us wanted to come out of a nightmare of a pass to be met by a Hebrew rabble that had already annihilated the Jerusalem garrison.
After some discussion, we left the bulk of the siege engines at the wide westerly mouth of the pass, guarded by three cohorts of the IVth legion who had orders to wait three days and then begin to dismantle them, ready to move them across in stages if we needed them.
We took with us three light ballistas that fired stone shot the size of my head or smaller, half a dozen catapults with enough bolts for three days’ shooting, and one siege tower that took us half a day to dismantle into numbered pieces and load on to the mule carts.