The Wald by Born Jason

Author:Born, Jason [Born, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-05-20T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

11 B.C

They had done it. Drusus had led his men across the Rhenus in the springtime when it was time for men to leave their farms and yearn for battle. The legionaries had no farms to abandon, but they were ready for conquering more of Germania that spring. Their commander ushered them across the great river at Vetera, some miles north of Oppidum Ubiorum. The place was not selected at random. It sat at the confluence where the Lupia River drained from the core of Germania and flowed into the Rhenus. Drusus marched his army east along the Lupia’s northern bank which was the southern-most extent of the allied Frisian lands. The general then had a small fort and supply depot built there, the first Roman fort east of the Rhenus in what was formerly Germanic tribal territory but was now decidedly Roman. They had done it.

It was a piece of the broader plan he had worked out with his stepfather, Augustus, during his winter sojourn in Rome. The fort could be easily supplied from Gaul by loading pig ships with food, drink, arrows, spears, et cetera in Vetera along the Rhenus River and paddling them up the Lupia for stockpiling. The legions’ long baggage train could then strike out over land to follow the march wherever Lord Drusus saw fit to direct. And he knew just where he meant to lead. The new fort would serve as a jumping off point for the march into the Germanic heartland to the south and east. Both the Sugambrians and Cheruscans would feel his total wrath this season.

Drusus didn’t desert Gaul entirely. He had left the forts on the west bank of the Rhenus well stocked with troops to dissuade any Gallic rebellion or any misplaced Germanic tribal aggression, and yet the army he took with him as they left the new Lupia fort was grand indeed. It consisted of four full legions of regular Roman army – nearly twenty thousand men. It was bolstered by five cohorts of Gallic auxiliary infantry and finished off with a single cohort of Germanic auxiliary cavalry, mustered mostly from the Batavians and Ubians. The general had discovered that the tribesmen, though mostly too poor to themselves own a horse, were comfortable with animals and excellent horsemen.

Some miles to the east of the new fort, Drusus held up his hand to halt the march along the narrow road that his men literally hacked out of the forest along the river. Even more confident than during the previous year’s campaign, the general leaned over to his newest military tribunes, Chumstintus and Avectius. “We are finished acting like common tribesmen riding upstream for a suitable place to ford this river. These are Roman lands. See that our engineers direct a bridge constructed there.” He pointed to a place where the river ran wide and straight.

Avectius looked to his commander. “Yes, lord. But won’t that delay our entry into the Sugambrian lands? Will the Sugambrians not have more

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