Blood Forest Page 30

  Cries of alarm rang out from the Roman prisoners who had witnessed the act. The body of men pushed and crowded together like sheep stalked by hungry wolves, no man wanting to be on the unprotected outside.

  Arminius called something in German, and his men moved forward to begin separating the rank from the file, pulling centurions and tribunes away from the common soldiery.

  Following the prefect’s example, many marched out with their shoulders back and heads held high. Others were dragged from the body of men like screaming toddlers.

  ‘You said they would be slaves,’ I protested.

  Arminius placed his hand on my shoulder as if I were a naive child. Perhaps, after all that I had endured, I still was.

  ‘These people are a disease, my friend. An infection that must be cut out, as if we were surgeons. The soldiers I can spare, but the officers will never overcome this defeat. Shame will push them to act, and to encourage dissent amongst the ranks. For some to survive, the leadership must die.’

  I wanted to find fault in his words, but I had seen enough of war, and man’s ways, to know that he was right. Perhaps if the executions of the Roman officers had been clean and merciful, like the surgery Arminius claimed it to be, then I would have stood firmly by his side through all of the coming storm.

  But they were not.

  In all the horrors that I have seen, little can compare to those moments following Arminius’s order to kill the officers. The German warriors fell on the assembly of prisoners with glee, dragging away those whose rank and station were given away by the ostentation of their uniforms.

  The screams began moments later.

  Tribesmen pinned centurions to the dirt as their comrades sawed tongues from crying mouths. Bodies were hacked into pieces as if they were logs for a fire. Heads were cut from shoulders, gathered into grotesque piles and taken to the forest to be nailed on to trees. Seeing this horror, some Roman officers took their own lives rather than suffer the drawn-out torture – I saw one split open his skull with the very chains that bound his wrists, grey jelly spilling from his smashed eye socket as he collapsed into the bloody dirt.

  ‘Stop this, Arminius,’ I finally hissed as my vision swam. ‘Stop this!’ I shouted, taking hold of the prince’s arm.

  He met my look. There was no pleasure in his eyes at the suffering, only a grim acceptance that his men had endured their own hell in the forest, and that now they would make their enemy suffer for every freezing night and bloody skirmish.

  ‘Please stop it,’ I begged.

  Arminius looked away, and I knew then that I had been a fool. Not because I had thought the Roman Empire was corpulent and cruel, but because I had thought that it could be replaced with something better. Something just. As I watched the blades chop into the screaming Roman faces, I saw laughter, terror and confusion. I saw the face of power through bloodshed, no matter the uniform, language or banners. I saw that all I had endured, all I had fought for, had been pointless, a horrifying ordeal that offered no end, only the promise of more suffering.

  And so I had only one last thing to ask of Arminius.

  One last thing to beg for.

  ‘Just kill me. Please. Just fucking kill me.’

  ‘Why would I kill you?’ he asked, bemused.

  I threw out my arms at the horrors that were unfolding about us. ‘Roman emperor or German prince, it’s all the fucking same!’ I cursed him. ‘Look at this! This isn’t war!’

  ‘It is war.’ Arminius shrugged, and the shrieks of the tortured Roman officers added weight to his words.

  ‘It’s fucking murder!’ I shouted into his face, and saw his bodyguards bristle at the open hostility towards their leader. ‘It’s fucking murder, Arminius! It’s what you said we would stop!’

  ‘It’s war,’ he said again, his tone low. ‘And you can either accept that, Corvus, or you can’t.’

  I spat at his feet. ‘I can’t accept it. I won’t accept it. So just fucking kill me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Berengar!’ I shouted at the brute, who was eyeing me as if I had gone mad. ‘Kill me!’

  The giant shook his head.

  I wanted to call them both cowards, but how could I? I was the coward. I was the man who could not stomach war.

  And so I sank to my knees in the mud.

  ‘I won’t kill you, Corvus,’ Arminius told me as he saw the fight flee from my wretched body.

  ‘I can’t be a part of this,’ I murmured.

  ‘You can. You just need a rest. Then you’ll see things clearly.’

  ‘I do see things clearly,’ I breathed, watching as another Roman head was hacked from its shoulders, blood pumping from the stump of the neck in violent spurts. ‘I’ve seen too much, clearly. I don’t want to see clearly! I just want to die!’

  My words were pathetic. Pathetic words, from a pathetic creature. Arminius looked me up and down then, doubtless wondering how he could ever have considered me a worthy ally.

  ‘I can’t kill you.’ The prince shook his head out of sympathy. ‘But our journey together ends now.’ He turned to Berengar. ‘Put him with the other common soldiers,’ he ordered in Latin, and then turned back to face me, the blue of his eyes alight with bitter disappointment. ‘You had your chance to stand with me, my friend. It hurts me that you turn your back now, when our work has begun, but I cannot kill you for it. As you refuse to throw off the chains of Rome, you will become a slave, Corvus. It pains me, but you will become a slave.’

  I could see that his words were heartfelt. So too were my own. ‘Fuck you,’ I spat.

  Berengar’s huge backhand swatted me a split second later, and I rolled on to my face in the filth. When I looked up, Arminius was gone.

  Two German warriors pulled me to my feet and shoved me in the direction of the herded Roman soldiers. I swear I could almost smell the panic.

  ‘Here, brother,’ a veteran of the Nineteenth Legion offered, helping me to my feet once the tribesmen had dumped me. ‘You talked to their leader.’ There was astonishment in his voice.

  I wiped blood from my mouth. Berengar’s blow had knocked free a tooth. ‘Yes,’ I managed, and felt accusing stares from the soldiers about me. Those who could still care. I had to cover myself. ‘I knew him from Pannonia, when I served with the Eighth.’

  The explanation did something to dispel the suspicion, and the troops withdrew into their own misery. Exhausted and fearful, the mass of men were silent but for the ever-present chorus of muttered prayers, curses and crying.

  I had no wish to be idle. I had left Titus and chests of coin to find my friends, and so I called out: ‘Second Cohort, Seventeenth Legion? Second Cohort, Seventeenth?’ I repeated, and looked at the German warriors who acted as our wardens. They showed little interest in me. Unarmed and emaciated as I was, that was no wonder. I was not a threat.

  ‘Second Cohort, Seventeenth Legion?’ I shouted again.

  ‘Over here!’ came back from behind the wall of men.

  I pushed my way through the soldiers towards the voice, calling again, and was answered.

  ‘Second Century,’ I greeted the man whose eyes sought me out.

  ‘Fourth,’ he acknowledged with a grunt. ‘Have you seen any of my boys?’ he asked, daring to hope that some of his comrades yet lived.

  I shook my head, and asked him the same.

  ‘Over there.’ He jabbed a thumb across his shoulder.

  I gave the man my thanks and pushed hastily on, stepping over men who had collapsed from exhaustion. Despite their proximity to death and their imminent enslavement, some even snored in the mud.

  ‘Second Century, Second Co—’ I began.

  ‘Felix!’ A plaintive voice cut me off. ‘Felix!’

  I half turned and saw Stumps struggle to pick himself up from the dirt. My heart beat faster to see him, and I pulled the soldier into a tight embrace.

  I wanted to say something – I’m sure that he wanted to say the same things – but neither of us spoke. Ho
w could we? A look was enough. A look to confirm that, despite the misery and the horror, we still had a brother amongst the chaos.

  ‘Titus?’ he asked finally, swallowing in anticipation.

  I could not speak. Stumps was already battered emotionally and physically to the edge of his limits and beyond, as every man was. If he knew that Titus, his leader, his friend, had abandoned him …

  ‘Dead,’ I muttered. ‘Titus is dead.’

  The soldier dropped his head on to my shoulder, trying to weep tears from eyes that had long since run dry.

  ‘Titus, Chicken, Rufus, the boy,’ he choked. ‘I don’t know where Moon is, Felix. I don’t know where he is, or Micon. I think they’re dead. I think they’re all dead.’

  ‘There’s hope,’ I promised him, and meant it.

  How could I feel that way? Strewn across the forest was the carcass of three legions. The soldiers’ bodies were condemned to be pulled apart by animals, their bones bleached by sun and rain. It was the worst defeat a Roman army had suffered in longer than living memory, and I knew that Arminius would not stop here. This battle was a statement of intent, a declaration that Rome was not invincible. It was the beginning of an age of war.

  And what would be my part in it? Which mask would I wear? Which standard would I carry? For Rome I had been a soldier, and called a hero. Against her, I had been a turncoat, and a rebel. Wherever I had marched, death had followed.

  But now I was a slave.

  ‘On your feet!’ a German voice called in thick Latin. ‘On your feet!’

  Somehow, the walking dead obeyed.

  ‘That way! Move! Go!’

  And so we marched, leaving the blood forest behind us, the thousands of corpses lining the route as if it were a parade of nightmare. Besides me, Stumps began to whimper.

  ‘They’re all dead,’ I heard him mumble between sobs.

  Were they dead? Most likely. Even Titus, force of nature that he was, would struggle to survive alone in this hostile place. Chickenhead, a man who had grown to be my friend, would rot beneath the German wall. Rufus was lost to the forest, as was young Cnaeus, but try as I might, my battered mind could not mourn them now. Instead, I envied them.

  I envied them, because as we shuffled our way north towards the German hinterland, the terrifying weight of my position came crashing down, and I knew that no battle, no forest, could be as terrible as the torment I was soon to suffer.

  For I was a slave.

  Author’s Note

  I’m not sure when I first became interested in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest – as the decimation of Varus’s army is known – but I do remember Adrian Murdoch’s Rome’s Greatest Defeat accompanying me to Basra when the insurgency there was in full bloom. Through books like Murdoch’s I began to see how Varus’s campaign was an ancient echo of the one I found myself involved in. Where a supposedly superior force – of a supposedly advanced culture – was bloodied at the hands of an enemy they had underestimated, in a land that was unconquered, and amidst a people they did not understand. For me, Iraq seemed to be a case of history repeating itself, and I felt an affinity to those ancient foot soldiers who would have trodden the dense German forests with as little familiarity as I paced a desert city.

  As far as military disasters go, Varus’s defeat ranks alongside Stalingrad as a pivotal moment in history that echoed far beyond the local borders. Stalingrad signalled the end of Hitler’s dreams of expansion eastwards, and so too did the loss of three legions mark the end of Rome’s attempts to conquer German lands east of the Rhine. Who knows how the Empire would have grown with that powerful fighting force intact and in capable hands.

  The scale of the loss of Varus’s army cannot be overstated. Forgetting for a moment the thousands of unfortunate auxiliary soldiers that were lost, the might of three legions was wiped out in a matter of days. There were twenty-eight legions active at the time of the massacre, and so Arminius’s victory deprived Emperor Augustus of more than ten per cent of his heavy infantry. Ten per cent of the soldiers that were the lynchpin of the Roman Empire both in attack and defence. Furthermore, Varus’s defeat came on the heels of a war in Pannonia that had bled the legions viciously, and so it was little wonder that the news of the German victory caused such panic in Rome; able-bodied men were pressed into service, whilst slaves were freed and formed into cohorts sent urgently to bolster the Rhine garrisons.

  Blood Forest features several characters that were known to history at this time. The first, Governor Varus, I have presented as I found him. Then, as now, army leaders were not necessarily the greatest soldiers or even expert tacticians. Birth and political connections played a huge part in appointments, and Varus seems to have been totally outmatched in leadership by his enemy, Arminius, whose conduct of battles as well as his ability to band together an alliance of tribes, showed great strategic capability as well as prowess on the battlefield.

  Arminius is one of my favourite characters in history. He was born into German nobility, raised in Rome, and served with distinction in the Roman army. Varus was enamoured with the man, which seems to have directly contributed to his demise. There is no record as to why Arminius turned on Rome, but I have explained my own theory in this book. There was no unified nation or notion of Germany at the time, but certainly the Germanic tribes held common ground and tongues, and some men would have viewed Rome’s growing power in the region as an act of attempted domination rather than assimilation. Arminius was one of these men, and his victory would see him remembered in his homeland as a hero who defied the invader.

  Prefect Caeonius is remembered in the classical texts for marshalling the army after the suicide of Varus and many of his staff officers. I admire the man’s courage, and could just as well imagine him giving encouragement to a young soldier at Rourke’s Drift: ‘Hitch, do your tunic up.’

  Felix and his section mates were born in my imagination, but their personalities and traits are drawn from the soldiers that I was privileged to serve alongside. Reading the accounts of infantrymen at war has always fascinated me, and I am stuck in my belief that soldiers are soldiers, regardless of the uniform or era. There’s something in our blood that makes us do the things we do, and say the things we say, and I think that Felix would have been just as at home in Helmand province as he would have been in Germany. Very at home actually, as by strange coincidence, the name of my patrol base in Afghanistan was Minden – I’m not lying!

  It is precisely because no account of the Roman rank and file exist that I wanted to write from their perspective. The leaders of the time are well documented in fact and fiction, but a commander is only as good as the men who execute his orders. For the soldier, there is no big picture to a battle. They do not see the masterstrokes, or the turning points. They see only their own struggle for survival, and glory for their leaders comes when enough soldiers are triumphant in their own microcosms of battle.

  Further to this point, I wanted to explore in Blood Forest the mental aspect that conflict has upon the soldier. We are only just beginning to understand the mental scars of war, and I do not believe that Rome’s soldiers would have been easily shrugging off the loss of their comrades, or the acts that they were forced to witness and endure.

  Though I believe I have an understanding of how soldiers think and behave, I consider it important to point out that I am a storyteller and not a historian. Rome’s legions and their battles have gifted me the setting in which to place Felix and his comrades, but this book and the ones that will follow are not intended to be definitive in their detail. I humbly piggyback on academic experts, and whilst I endeavour to be as accurate as possible, there are times where I feel that story trumps fact, and that the beautiful power of artistic licence can be deployed. I am mindful too that no one alive today has lived through the days of the early Roman Empire, and that means – in my mind at least – that there are no definitive answers. If there are lessons to be drawn from Blood Forest, then I hope that it is through metaphor,
and my deep belief that the character of the soldier transcends time.

  As I’ve already alluded to, I could not have completed this novel without the work of historians and academics. For anyone interested in learning more about this era or battle I strongly recommend Michael McNally’s Teutoburg Forest AD 9, the aforementioned Rome’s Greatest Defeat and the definitive Legions of Rome, by Stephen Dando-Collins. All were ever-present during the writing of Blood Forest, but that being said, any mistakes are my own. Feel free to tweet them to me, and I’ll get down on my face and give you press-ups.

  The loss of three legions is a brutal blow for Rome, but the Empire is not known for its forgiveness. With Arminius a threat, and Felix a slave, there’s a lot more blood to shed.

  Acknowledgments

  I could not have written about soldiers without having served with them, and so first thanks goes to the men and women that shivered beside me in training areas, sweated with me in the desert, and listened patiently to my ideas during sentry duty in the early hours. Above all that, thank you for having my back and bringing me home.

  I would not be where I am in life without my parents and family. They gave me confidence to take on any challenge, inspired me to travel the world, and supported me no matter what my decisions. I can’t imagine that my choice of careers as soldier and writer ever gave my mother a sound night’s sleep, but she is responsible for giving me my passion for history and books, and without her Blood Forest would never have happened.

  Huge thanks to the entire team at Furniss Lawton, particularly to my friend and agent, Rowan Lawton, for her guidance and belief in me. I sent Rowan my first manuscript whilst floating on an overcrowded tug boat off the coast of Sudan, and her confidence in my work helped me realize the dream of becoming a professional storyteller, and took me away from the circling sharks that were hungrily eyeing up my Welsh beef.

  The seeds of Blood Forest were planted at Penguin with the help of Rowland White, my editor and fellow lover of all things military. Rowland ‘got it’ from the start, and I could not have asked for a better team to bring my vision to the page. Alongside Rowland, Jillian Taylor of Michael Joseph provided invaluable insights, and has helped me take strides as a writer. There are many others at Penguin who made this book possible, and I have the greatest appreciation for their efforts, with special thanks to Richard Bravery for the most amazing cover art I have ever seen!