Marching With Caesar - Civil War Read Online Free PDF Page A

any man who lost his footing. It was in this way that, despite a few men being swept off their feet by the current, almost the entire army crossed without the loss of a single man. Still, despite the relative speed of our movements, it took more than two parts of a watch to get the whole army across, and it was a soggy, tired lot that was given the order to move out after Afranius, who used that time to continue his march south, getting a couple miles closer to the mountains. Despite how waterlogged we were, we still marched much faster than the Pompeians, who might have been dry but were still encumbered with all of their baggage and supplies.
    Toward the end of the day, we came within sight of the rearguard, still being harassed by our cavalry. The Pompeians were fighting a running battle, with our forces lasting the better part of four watches now. With the sun beginning to sink, they marched to a group of small hills to occupy the high ground. While two of their Legions stood in formation on the slopes and watched, the rest began to build camp. For our part, we were still sodden and tired ourselves, but since we left our baggage behind, the best we could do was to occupy a hill a short distance away, making a cold camp without walls or ditch. We settled down the best we could, shivering in our cold clothes, the men continually grumbling about the water setting in and ruining their gear. Since we had no real way to dry and oil our armor and weapons, they worried about having to replace it, knowing it would come out of their pay. I began using handfuls of the sandy soil to scour my own equipment and the rest of the men quickly followed suit, but I knew that we would have to have a cleaning party at the first opportunity, if only to stop the complaining.
    Meanwhile, our scouts were ranging ahead along the Pompeians’ line of march, surveying the country, and they came back to tell Caesar what they found. Once past the small range of hills that we were occupying, the land was fairly open and only gently rolling for four or five miles, until it reached a series of sharply defined ridges that generally blocked passage to the Iber. However, a narrow defile was there that was apparently a dry watercourse feeding into the Iber. Whoever got to that defile first could block passage to the boat bridge. As they were hurrying back with this report, the scouts captured a detachment of Pompeians sent to get water. Under interrogation, we learned that Afranius was planning on a night march, and was at that moment preparing to try and slip away. Immediately, Caesar ordered the bucina to sound the order to make ready to march, in turn issuing the corresponding commands. Between the horn and the bellowing of the Centurions, the sound rolled across the space between the hills, alerting Afranius that we had discovered his plans. He then countermanded his own marching orders, and after a lot of bustling about, things settled down again for the rest of the night.
    Shortly before dawn, I was summoned along with the other Centurions to a meeting of the command group. We were standing together as the sun rose, and with the light turning the sky first gray, then the coppery blue that promised another hot day, we discussed our options. From the spot in camp where we were talking, we could see a small knot of men in the Pompeian camp and I smiled grimly to myself, thinking that their conversation was undoubtedly an exact copy of our own; what was the other side thinking? What were they going to do next? As it turned out, they did nothing for the whole day, and neither did we, other than sitting and watching each other. Since we had marched out with only the normal three-day’s rations and had not brought any of our baggage, the wagering in camp was that the Pompeians would be content to sit on that hill to starve us out. They would force us to withdraw back to the main camp for supplies, or to have a convoy sent to us, thereby providing enough of a