Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (16 page)

While General Fabius led the 10th and his two other legions from Narbonnne to Spain to pave the way for Caesar, another three legions were ordered to head for Spain from Italy, crossing the Alps and then the Pyrenees on their march. There they were to link up with the advance force. Meanwhile, the six-hundred-year-old city of Massilia, modern Marseilles in southern France, had closed its gates to Caesar’s emissaries, and Caesar dispatched a further three legions to lay siege to the city, led by General Gaius Trebonius. At the same time, to make up for the loss of Labienus’s three thousand cavalry, Caesar couriered dispatches to all the subject tribes of Gaul, instructing them to send their best mounted fighters to Spain to join his army there, giving each a specific quota and even naming individual nobles of the tribes as men he required to serve.

The upshot of all this was that the 10th and its two fellow legions marched rapidly west and easily cleared the Pyrenees passes of Pompeian guards left there, and as spring blossomed, six legions and three thousand Gallic cavalry congregated in eastern Spain with General Fabius, waiting for Caesar to arrive from Rome to take over operational command. These legions, in addition to the 10th, were the 7th and the 9th, brother Spanish legions of the 10th, plus the 14th, another of Caesar’s veteran units from Gaul, as well as the 21st and 30th, two newly raised Italian legions that hurried over the Alps from Italy ahead of Caesar’s arrival. To handle the siege of Marseilles, it seems that Caesar allocated his experienced 11th Legion to head the task, supported by another two new legions, almost certainly the 22nd and the 23rd. The last of Caesar’s original legions, the 16th, appears to have been left on garrison duty in central France, with the daunting task of keeping all of Gaul in check.

By early spring Caesar was in Rome, and between April 1 and 3 he held a meeting of the much-reduced Senate, appointing a number of new senators to replace the hundreds who had departed the capital with Pompey. During this sitting Caesar settled affairs of state to his satisfaction, including the appointment of governors and military commanders to various regions.

While his focus was now on Spain, Caesar was concerned by reports from the Balkans. Towns in the province of Illyricum, just across the Adriatic, which he’d governed now for a decade, had closed their gates to his officials. Some towns had been taken over by Pompeian supporters, others by local “bandits” professing a desire for independence. So before he left c08.qxd 12/5/01 5:18 PM Page 78

78

C A E S A R ’ S

l e g i o n

the capital, Caesar set in motion an operation that would send Mark Antony’s younger brother Gaius with the new 24th Legion and half the new 28th Legion to make a surprise amphibious landing on the coast of Illyricum and restore Caesar’s control of the province. The number of troops involved in the operation, about seventy-five hundred, seems to have been dictated by the number of ships Caesar’s supporters could rake together for the landing.

As preparations were set in train for the Illyricum operation, Caesar put Marcus Lepidus in charge at Rome and gave command of all troops in Italy to Mark Antony, who based himself at the key road junction of Pla-centia, modern Piacenza, on the southern bank of the Po River in central Italy. The legions under Antony’s command were strategically placed at Brindisi on the southeastern coast and towns in the Puglia region.

Caesar now set off for Spain. Precisely how long it took him to make the journey we don’t know. His journey from Rome to Córdoba carried in a litter in 61 b.c. had taken him twenty-four days. But now he was riding, accompanied by his now constant companions, the three hundred men of his mounted German bodyguard. On one occasion in the past, driving his own chariot, Caesar had made the trip from Rome to southern France in eight days, so, it’s likely he reached the Pyrenees within two weeks of leaving the capital. There, holding the passes in expectation of his arrival, were six hundred of Labienus’s troopers who had been detached to General Fabius at the beginning of the winter and who had remained loyal to Caesar. Adding these men to his fast-moving cavalry column, he crossed the mountains and advanced into eastern Spain to join General Fabius and his legions.

For some time after the event, Caesar was unable to bring himself to admit that three thousand of Labienus’s cavalry had defected to Pompey in Italy and were now in Greece with Labienus and Pompey. Everything points to Caesar dictating many of the chapters of his account of the civil war within days or weeks of their taking place, and to cover up the loss of Labienus’s cavalry he initially inflated the number of cavalry he had at his disposal in Spain by three thousand. Later, when dealing with the war in Albania and Greece, his memoirs talk for the first time of Labienus and his German and Gallic cavalry fighting for Pompey.

Riding in with his nine hundred cavalry, Caesar found General Fabius at the Río Segre, the Sicoris River, in northeastern Spain, facing an army of five Pompeian legions. Overall, against the six legions Caesar had sent to Spain were six of Pompey’s veteran legions and a seventh, which was hurriedly drafted on the 10th Legion’s home turf, the province of Baetica, c08.qxd 12/5/01 5:18 PM Page 79

and called, unimaginatively, the Indigena—the Native or Home-Grown Legion. These Pompeian heavy infantry units were supported by five thousand locally raised cavalry and large numbers of local auxiliaries. Initially in three separate armies, Pompey’s forces were now concentrated into two forces. The Indigena was left in western Spain with the governor of Baetica, the famous writer Marcus Terentius Varro, together with the 2nd Legion. The 2nd was one of Pompey’s original legions, dating back, like the 1st, to 84 b.c., when it was personally founded and funded by Pompey in the Picenum region of eastern Italy. More recently it had been reenlisted in Cisalpine Gaul.

To meet Caesar in eastern Spain, an army of five legions marched under the mature, plodding General Lucius Afranius and his deputy, hot-tempered General Marcus Petreius. Afranius was an old friend of Pompey’s, hailing from the same home territory, Picenum in eastern Italy. He had served under him in Spain and the Middle East at the height of Pompey’s military successes in the 70s and 60s b.c., before becoming a consul in 60 b.c. and governor of Nearer Spain in 55 b.c. And he was determined to do his best to defend Spain for Pompey.

General Afranius’s legions were the Valeria, another of Pompey’s originals, recruited in these times in Cisalpine Gaul; the 3rd, also from Cisalpine Gaul, and the 4th, 5th, and 6th. The latter three were all veteran Spanish legions, whose legionaries, aged between thirty-three and thirty-six, were due to receive their discharge this year, as their sixteen-year enlistments were now up. The 6th was the same legion that had served on attachment with Caesar’s army in Gaul in 52–50 b.c., loaned to Caesar by Pompey at the height of the Vercingetorix Revolt, before returning to eastern Spain.

General Afranius decided that the best territory in the northeast for infantry operations was around the town of Lérida, or Ilerda, as it was then known, in the present-day region of Catalonia about eighty miles west of Barcelona. Sitting on a hill, the town was on the right bank of the Segre, not far from where it joined the Ebro River. Moving his forces into the area, Afranius occupied the walled town and also built a fortified camp nearby. By the time Caesar reached General Fabius at the Segre in the second half of April there had already been a number of skirmishes between the two armies, but no major engagements had taken place.

Caesar crossed two bridges over the Segre just completed by General Fabius and marched the army to confront the Pompeian forces outside Lérida, where over the next seventy-two hours his legions built a fortified camp. He then led three of his legions on a surprise mission to seize a c08.qxd 12/5/01 5:18 PM Page 80

80

C A E S A R ’ S

l e g i o n

small hill that lay between the town and General Afranius’s camp, with the objective of dividing the Pompeian forces. Two of the legions involved were the 9th and the 14th. The identity of the third is unknown, but from subsequent events it was probably one of the new, untried Italian legions.

Realizing what Caesar was up to, General Afranius quickly dispatched his on-duty guard cohorts, which occupied the hillock before Caesar’s troops could reach it. Afranius soon brought up several legions in support.

Caesar’s advance guard was beaten back, and then the understrength 14th Legion, occupying one of Caesar’s wings, coming under sustained attack and taking casualties, failed to hold its ground and retreated. This caused panic among the ranks of the raw recruits of the other legion, and Caesar had to personally lead up the 9th to stabilize the situation. The charge of the 9th sent Afranius’s troops reeling, and the men of the 9th chased them all the way to a ridge at the foot of the hill on which the town of Lérida stood. There, Afranius’s troops regrouped, and in a surprise move swept around the flanks and encircled the 9th Legion. The men of the 9th found themselves cut off on the ridge, which was just wide enough for three cohorts to form up side-by-side.

Over the next five hours Caesar tried to fight his way through to the 9th with infantry and cavalry reinforcements, while the men of the 9th fought desperately to hold their ground and not be overrun. Eventually, Caesar’s cavalry managed to climb the slope and inject themselves between the 9th and the other side, allowing the men of the 9th to withdraw before the cavalry also pulled out.

Afranius claimed the day’s fight as a victory for his side, and messengers hurried away to Italy with the news that Caesar had been bettered.

Caesar was to admit to seventy dead in the first encounter at the hillock, including a first-rank centurion of the 14th Legion, as well as more than six hundred wounded, but he didn’t reveal how many men he subsequently lost in the five-hour fight outside Lérida. He claimed that the Pompeians lost more than two hundred legionaries that day.

Two days later, a storm brought the heaviest rainfall in memory to the region, washing away the two bridges behind Caesar, over which he was supplied. Afranius then led a raid in Caesar’s rear, inflicting more than two hundred casualties on a column bringing up supplies and reinforcements. After failing to repair the bridges because opposition troops occupied the opposite bank, Caesar had his men build light, flat-bottomed boats, of a kind he’d seen in Britain, and was able to spirit troops across the water in the night and drive Afranius’s men away from the bridge site.

Once he was in occupation of both banks he was able to bridge the river and once more link up with his supply columns and foraging parties.

c08.qxd 12/5/01 5:18 PM Page 81

Slowly, as weeks passed, fortunes began to change at Lérida. Caesar’s cavalry cleared the countryside of Afranius’s foragers, and the Pompeian troops, locked behind the walls of camp and town, found themselves cut off from resupply, with dwindling resources. On the other hand, with five tribes of the region now voluntarily providing him with supplies, Caesar was sitting pretty. Rather than be starved into submission, Generals Afranius and Petreius agreed that they had to break out and make for the mountains to the north, where tribes loyal to Pompey would supply provisions and reinforcements.

The Pompeians discreetly made their preparations, and then one day in July, carrying enough rations to last them twenty-two days, they took Caesar by surprise and succeeded in their breakout. Initially, Caesar could only harry the column with his cavalry, but, as always, he reacted swiftly, and soon set off after it with five legions. Marching at a cracking pace, he overtook Afranius five miles from the mountains. Both sides built camps, but Caesar then worked his way around, across rough country, giving the appearance of a withdrawal but in reality aiming to skirt Afranius’s position in a wide arc and place his forces in the other side’s path at the foot of the mountains.

When Afranius saw Caesarian troops between him and his destination he quickly left his camp and marched his troops for the mountains at the double, leaving behind much of his equipment, but Caesar’s troops won the race and formed up ahead of him. A force of two thousand auxiliaries subsequently sent by Afranius to take high ground for him was cut off and wiped out by Caesar’s cavalry, and the Pompeian army withdrew to the protection of its last camp and regained its equipment.

While Afranius and Petreius were away from their camp, supervising the digging of a line of entrenchments to safeguard their water supply, troops from Caesar’s 10th, 9th, and 7th Legions began to fraternize with their fellow Spaniards of the 4th, 5th, and 6th Legions on the other side.

Many were fellow townsmen, some were even related, and before long men from Caesar’s legions were in the Pompeian camp, sitting and talking and sharing food and camaraderie with their countrymen, all agreeing that it was crazy that they should be fighting each other. Officers from the Pompeian camp even went to Caesar and proposed setting up talks to negotiate the surrender of their army.

When they heard about this, Generals Afranius and Petreius hurried back to their camp. An assembly was called, and Petreius led the army in swearing an oath reaffirming their loyalty to Pompey and vowing that they would not give up the fight. Petreius then ordered men who had troops from Caesar’s army in their tents to produce them at once. Those c08.qxd 12/5/01 5:18 PM Page 82

82

C A E S A R ’ S

l e g i o n

who were given up, men of the 10th Legion among them, were put to death on the parade ground in front of the assembled Pompeian legions.

Generals Afranius and Petreius now conferred on their best course of action. It was obvious that Caesar was not going to let them reach the mountains. One alternative was to try to reach the port of Tarraco, modern Tarragona, on the east coast, where Pompey’s fleet could supply them from vast grain supplies being held at Gades, present-day Cádiz, farther south, which was still firmly in Pompeian hands. If need be, they could even be evacuated from Tarragona and join Pompey in Greece. But Tarragona was at least a week’s march away under present conditions, and while their legionaries still had a few days’ rations, their auxiliaries had already exhausted all their supplies. The generals knew that many of the Pompeian troops were simply not up to a week’s march. They had left a little grain back at Lérida, and the other option was to retrace their steps there. This was a short-term option, as once that grain was exhausted, they were no better off. But this was the option the generals agreed on.