Few of us slept much that night. We lay awake, listening for trumpet calls from Hades, then nodded off just before dawn. I woke early and rose while it was still dark, stiff and snuffle-headed. The rest emerged too. After a cold drink and some biscuit to brace us, we packed, brought the horses, and then set off in a close group to make a morning call on our colleagues' camp. At dawn, it managed to look even lonelier.
This was no Vetera. It was a field army's camp, and a large one. Though intended as a temporary construction, it stood in its isolation with an air of permanence. There were no signs of siege warfare. Decay, however, clung tenaciously. Apart from the rich clothing of brushwood on the outworks, some of the towers had lurched and the palisades collapsed. We could see now that further along from us the actual breastwork was broken down.
We battered a path to the gatehouse. One of the great wooden doors lay off its hinges. We edged just inside, no more. A spider the size of a duck's egg watched us entering.
The vegetation was dramatic. Everything within the ramparts was wrecked.
'Sir, was there a fight?'
'No bodies left, if there was.' Helvetius, alone of us, dismounted and wandered forwards to explore. Even he had no intention of going far. He stopped and picked up a small object. 'I don't think the place was abandoned,' he murmured in a puzzled voice.
He began to make his passage further in, and this time we followed him. It would have been a tented camp, so there were large tracts of open ground where the long leather 'butterflies' would have been pitched in rows. But wherever the legions stay for any length of time, the storehouses and the Principia are made from permanent materials. These should have been evident, in their familiar locations, as squares where only a low covering of thin weeds grew, because of their solid floors, yet rotting old timbers and mounds of other wreckage occupied their sites.
'What's your verdict, centurion?' Justinus asked. He was white-faced from the early hour, lack of sleep and anxiety.
'It was an empty camp-but not dismantled normally.'
'They had left for the winter,' I said. I spoke with some confidence. The shrine and strongroom, built of stone, still stood erect. There were of course no standards and no eagles in the shrine. I had seen the gold eagles that once flew here. I had seen them in the Temple of Mars in Rome.
Helvetius looked at me. He too knew what we had found. 'That's right. The buildings were all left here. Bad practice, but they expected to come back, of course.'
He was deeply upset. I turned to the others to explain. 'You all know the rules when you leave a marching camp.' The recruits listened attentively, looking innocent. 'You pack everything reusable in the baggage train. You take, for instance, all the staves from the palisade to use at your next stopping-point. Every soldier carries two of them.'
We all stared back. On the fortified ramparts behind us, stretches of the wooden defences lolled across the patrol track, still partly laced together, like estate fences that had suffered in a huge gale. Other pieces must have rotted; so had the stairs. Time had done this, no other force.
'You burn the rest,' Helvetius said. 'You leave nothing an enemy could use-assuming you think you have an enemy.' He was turning the remains of an old storehouse door. 'This was an empty camp!' he exclaimed, almost protesting at the breach of etiquette. 'It's been trampled pretty thoroughly, by looters, I'd guess. The camp was built by Romans, Romans who stupidly believed the area was so safe they could go out like householders, leaving their door-key under the gatehouse mat:' The centurion was burning with a slowly increasing wrath. 'The poor bastards hadn't the slightest inkling of how much danger they were in!'
He strode back to us, clenching his fist around the item he had taken up.
'Who were they, sir?'
'The three legions who were massacred in the forest by Arminius!' Helvetius raged. 'There was a fight-dear gods, there was-but there are no bodies because Germanicus came afterwards and buried them.'
He held up his find. It was a silver coin. It carried the special mint mark which P. Quinctilius Varus had used on his soldiers' pay.
Not many of those ever circulate in Rome.
XLVI
Somewhere in this area had to stand the burial mound. The one whose first turf Germanicus had laid with his own hands-against the rules of sanctity, since he was at the time also holding office as a priest. Here he would have been a soldier first. Standing here, we understood. We too were overwhelmed by our emotional response.
We did not search for the mound. We did not even raise an altar as we had done at Vetera. We honoured them in silence. All of them: the dead, and those who had made it a duty to find them. Gripped by the past, all of us must have wondered whether, if we were killed here in this forest, anybody who cared for us would ever even hear our fate.
We left the camp in the mist by way of its broken Praetorian Gate, on the tough old relics of its exit road. It was easier riding than any other route through the forest, and we wanted to cover distance fast. Our forebears' road did eventually become overgrown. We made the usual complaints about useless engineers, though after sixty years without maintenance some potholing and weeding-over could be excused.
We kept going. Like the army of Varus, we were moving south. Like theirs, that was where our destiny lay in wait. The only difference was: we knew.
It was impossible not to keep churning over the history. Even Justinus had now joined in: 'We know Varus was heading for winter quarters-either the forts they had built on the banks of the Lupia, or possibly right back somewhere along the Rhenus. He must have left that camp wrongly believing he had secured the territory, and all set to return there the next spring.'
'Why couldn't they stay there in winter, sir?'
'Too far from supplies to sit it out. Besides, I expect his troops were nagging for a break somewhere civilised.' The tribune's own troops thought about his solemn remark, then slowly grinned.
'And this is the way they went,' Helvetius said. He was really feeling it. He loved to dramatise; he loved to speculate. 'Everyone believes they had hit the ridge when it happened, but why not here, much further north? All we really know for certain is that Germanicus found them somewhere east of the River Ems.'
'Sir, sir-' Now they had left the lost camp the recruits felt braver and more excited. 'Will we find the famous battleground?'
'It's my belief,' Helvetius answered heavily, as if he had just worked something out, 'the battlefield is all around us. That would be why Germanicus had such trouble finding it. You don't cut down twenty thousand men-veteran campaigners, after all-in a space like a backyard.'
I agreed. 'We think it was quick, but the engagement may have lasted. No-it must have done. Clearly Arminius fell on them and did much damage. But after the first shock, the hardened soldiers would have made a stand.'
'Right, Falco. No choice. We know they did, anyway. Germanicus found whole heaps of bones where they had fought back in groups. He even came on the remains of some who had struggled back to their camp and been slaughtered there.'
'The camp we found?'
'Who knows. After all this time-and Germanicus clearing it as well-you'd have to spend days there to find any clues.'
'So after the initial assault,' I said, 'they faced a drawn-out agony. There were even survivors. Arminius took prisoners: some were slung up on tree branches to propitiate the Celtic gods, but some were held in gruesome pits.' We found none of those, I'm glad to say. 'Some eventually got home to Rome. A few poor sods even came back here with Germanicus.' Every war produces masochists. 'But agreeing a surrender is not the point for the tribes. It was a Celtic fight-to kill and take heads. Any legionaries who tried to make a getaway would have been hunted through the woods. Just like in Britain when the Boudiccan tribes rose.' I heard my voice growing husky with old pain. 'The chase is part of the terrible game. Blood-crazed warriors happily whooping after victims who know they are doomed:'