Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome Read Online Free PDF

hard-fought election in 59 b.c., his promotion elevating him to the equivalent rank of lieutenant general.
    But Caesar wasn’t finished with the 10th Legion. Their partnership had only just begun.

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    III
    :
    SAVAGING THE SWISS,
    OVERRUNNING THE
    GERMANS
    aesar was thoughtful for a moment, looking at the dust-covered faces of the cavalry scouts. He himself would write of what took C place this eventful day, in his memoirs.
    Turning to his quartermaster, he asked: “How many days’ rations do the men have left?”
    “Two days’ rations, Caesar,” the quartermaster replied.
    Caesar nodded. One scout had told him that he was seventeen miles from Bibracte, capital of the Aedui tribe. Another told him the massive column of the Helvetii tribe from Switzerland that he’d been following across eastern France for weeks was still in the camp they’d established three miles from his the previous day. “We march for Bibracte,” Caesar announced.
    He would have looked over at Major General Titus Labienus, his second-in-command, a man in his midthirties, and informed him of his intention to secure the army’s food supply from the Aedui before he concerned himself any further with the Helvetii. And then he issued the order for the trumpets to sound “Prepare to March.”
    It was the summer of 58 b.c., and Julius Caesar had kept his word to the men of the 10th Legion. As soon as he’d taken up his new appointment as governor of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum at the beginning of the year, a command soon extended by the Senate to also cover Transalpine Gaul on the death of its governor, he sent for the 10th Legion, and it marched from Spain to new quarters in the south of France.
    At the same time, with the authority of the Senate—at the instigation of Pompey—to command four legions for five years, Caesar had sent for 13

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    C A E S A R ’ S
    l e g i o n
    the other two legions he’d led three years before, the 8th and 9th, plus the 7th, another Spanish legion raised by Pompey, and posted them all to the city of Aquileia in the northeast of Italy, near present-day Venice, so they were midway between his provinces. But before the winter was over he received reports that the huge Helvetii tribe of Switzerland had decided to migrate to the south of Gaul, modern France, where Rome had a large and prosperous province. The Helvetii had sent out messages to all their clans and four other tribes who intended joining their march, to mass at the Rhône River on March 28, then cross the bridge at Geneva and pass down into France. Caesar was determined to stop them.
    He had quickly marched the 10th Legion to Geneva, destroyed the Rhône bridge, then had his legionaries build a sixteen-foot earth wall for eighteen miles along the bank of the Rhône from Lake Geneva to the Jura Mountains. For weeks the Helvetii had tried to cross the river using boats and rafts, even wading and swimming, usually at night, but the legion and the walls between them turned the tribesmen away, and the Helvetii had diverted to another route, marching between the Rhône and the Jura Mountains, and swarming down into the territory of the Aedui people of eastern France—present-day Burgundy, between the Saône and the Loire Rivers. The Aedui had sought Caesar’s help in repelling the invaders, and he hadn’t been slow to respond. Quickly recruiting two new legions in northern Italy, the 11th and 12th, he’d combined them with his existing legions and marched into southern France to do battle with the Helvetii.
    His first battle plan had been ruined a few days back by a soldier who’d let him down. For weeks Caesar had hung on the tail of the ponderous Helvetii column, always staying just five or six miles behind it, waiting for an opportunity to attack to present itself. And then the Helvetii had camped at the base of a large hill. A cavalry patrol that reconnoitered the reverse side of the hill