Creating the Killing Zone
In their experiences with the Roman legions, the Germans had learned a simple fact that indigenous peoples have known for thousands of years as they have faced better-equipped imperial armies. Small-scale societies cannot beat heavily armored forces on the open field of battle. But they can defeat them by attacking them in vulnerable situations, especially when they are on the move. Typically, lighter-armed native warriors, with superior knowledge of the landscape and greater maneuverability, can defeat heavily armed imperial armies in places where those armies are unable to take advantage of their technological superiority.
Arminius and his confederates selected a location in which they could ambush the Roman army at the end of its summer campaign season in northern Germany (see map 8). The place was the narrow track between the Kalkriese Hill and the Great Bog, a regular passageway that was easy enough for local travelers to negotiate, but presented complex impediments to a large marching army, especially after the plotters had made some alterations to the natural terrain. On the south side of the east-west route that led past Kalkriese was a row of low hills— the northern edge of the European central uplands. To the north was flat land—meadows, bogs, and ponds. A traveler walking or riding westward along the route around the Kalkriese Hill
I 6 i
Map 8. Map suggesting possible march route ofVarus's legions and positions of German troops prepared for the attack.
Would, at the northernmost point, either have to continue north across the depression to the northern edge of the pass or bear left toward the west, around the hill (see map 8).The Germans may have created an obstacle to limit the Romans' choice, forcing them onto the narrower passage. They may have dug away a large portion of the track that led out across the depression, exposing open water where land had been, and on the other side of the water arranged brush and saplings to look like natural vegetation. The Roman marching column, coming around the hill, would have seen open water there and no trace of a track, then continued on the path leading around the base of the hill toward the southwest.
To improve an already ideal ambush site, the Germans constructed a wall of sod that they dug from the edges of the track (see map 9). This project had two purposes. First, digging the sod enabled the Germans to narrow the track along which the troops would have to march, giving the soldiers less room to maneuver. The key to their plan was to confine the troops as tightly as possible, so that they could not use either the weapons or the battlefield tactics in which they had drilled. Second, the wall provided a protective barrier from behind which the ambushers could hurl their weapons in the first phase of the attack.
A team probably began by using wooden stakes to mark a fifteen-foot-wide and one-mile-long band along the southern edge of the track, following the contour at the base of the wooded slope. Then with long knives, swords, and iron-edged wooden spades, the workers cut sodden chunks of turf from along both edges of the track. They arranged the damp turves within the staked area to form the base of a fifteen-foot-wide wall. Once the base layer of turves was finished, they built another, slightly narrower layer on top of it, continuing upward until the wall was five feet high. Finally, they most likely cut leafy branches from trees in the woods to arrange on the front and top of the wall, so that the wall blended in with the hilly and forested slope behind it. Hundreds of people must have labored at this project from dawn till dusk for several weeks.
The Legions March into the Trap
The route that Varus's troops followed took them well north of the usual tracks along which the Roman armies marched during their summer campaigns, and hence into unfamiliar territory. For Varus, this was not an unwelcome diversion. He was confident that his predecessors had pacified this territory. He was glad to have a reason to march his troops through these more northerly
Map 9. Map showing locations of excavated wall segments (shading), some of the major finds, and wagon tracks.
Lands, both to display Roman might to the peoples who lived there and to become familiar with another part of the region that was being transformed into a new province over which he would rule as governor.
When the army traveled outside of the Empire, marching order placed auxiliary units and cavalry at the front and rear of the column, and the legions, baggage, and commander with his retinue in the center. The width of the marching units of infantry troops varied from nine men abreast to four, depending on the terrain. If we pick a figure of six abreast for the arrangement during this march, take eighteen thousand as the number of Roman troops, and assume a yard between one man and the next behind him, then the infantry would have covered about three thousand yards, or a little under two miles. Allowing space for cavalry, baggage, and the commander and his retinue, and gaps between units, the total column length would have been around two and a quarter miles. If the march proceeded at the rate of three miles per hour (the mules pulling baggage wagons over the earth track were the slowest element), the entire column would have passed any given point within less than an hour.
As the soldiers marched along, they probably felt a variety of emotions. They were tired from the summers camping near the upper Weser and eager to return to the relative comfort of their winter base at Xanten. Some felt excitement in anticipation of the welcome change in their daily routine that would begin in just four days, when they arrived at the Rhine. Many also felt varying degrees of fear as they trudged through the unfamiliar countryside. As they progressed, the landscape became increasingly wooded on their left, and on the right extensive dark and menacing marshes stretched as far as the eye could see. Many thought the dark forests and forbidding swamps were inhabited not only by potentially hostile natives but also by troublesome spirits. No Roman from Italy felt completely comfortable in the dark and wild landscapes of northern Europe, and memories of
The close calls suffered by Drusus's legions still lingered among some of the troops. Frequently during their campaigns, soldiers swore oaths of devotion to the deities who protected them. Most wore amulets—bronze pins, pendants, and other decorations— on their uniforms to shield them from the malevolent local spirits. The presence of the governor Varus was important to the soldiers' morale. Knowing that the supreme Roman authority in this part of the Empire's frontier rode with them provided some sense of security.
As the head of the column rounded the base of Kalkriese Hill, the men at the front may have hesitated for a moment at what appeared to be a fork in the track. The beginning of a route northward along a low sand ridge seemed to lead across the watery depression. But it ended abruptly in a huge pool of black water, and on the far side was a thicket of underbrush. After the instant's hesitation, the lead troops bore left, staying on the narrowing sandy path that hugged the base of the hill. The edges of the track were cut away in many places, and soldiers on the two sides of the column were sometimes slipping into the muddy ground below the path. As they marched along, the men were forced to move closer together. In some places, only five could pass abreast, and those on the outside sometimes had to slosh through the swampy marsh at the edge. The scrambling of men to stay abreast and still keep their feet dry created confusion and irritation between soldiers jostling into one another. Some exchanged angry words, as one man's shoulder bumped another's chin, and the shaft of one legionary's javelin clanked against the helmet of another.
Meanwhile, the Germans waited nervously behind the sod wall. Some of the older men, who had fought against the Roman legions during the campaigns of Drusus, Ahenobarbus, and Tiberius, or who had lost kinsmen in battles with those armies, hated the Romans with passion and were eager to attack the troops and to kill as many as they could. But most were frightened, even terrified, at the prospect of confronting the dreaded legions in face-to-face combat. Like their Roman counterparts, the Germans had offered their devotions to the gods they worshiped, seeking protection in the battle to come. But those devotions failed to calm most of the men. They did not want to be there waiting for the Romans to arrive, and they did not want to kill anyone. But they had to join in this effort or risk endless ridicule, or worse. There was no choice but to make the best of the situation. If they won the battle, which their leaders assured them was a certainty, they would not only share in the glory but also win some of the booty stripped from the defeated Romans. For most, however, those prospects paled in comparison to their terror at the prospect of facing the imperial legions.
Arminius, with his experience in the Roman army and among fellow warriors at home, knew that most soldiers were concerned more with staying alive than with being heroes. He instructed his lieutenants to disperse the most experienced soldiers evenly along the wall, so that they might serve as examples to the hesitant and inexperienced.
Experience also told Arminius that his warriors would function better by using their projectile weapons from behind the wall against the mass of marching Romans than by engaging in hand-to-hand combat with those heavily armed troops. When they imagined facing the enemy, they could picture the six-foot-long javelins flying toward them, the deadly points piercing their chests, and they felt physically ill. The idea of rushing headlong into a line of Roman legionaries, set to draw their razor-sharp swords to slash a man's face off or slice open his chest, was terrifying. It was much easier to envision hurling spears from behind the relative safety of the wall at the forest's edge. If worst came to worst, there was always the possibility of fleeing back into the forest, however unlikely a successful retreat would be if the Romans were able to rally.
The Spear Attack
If we make educated guesses about the numbers of German warriors stationed at different places in and around the trap, we can envision how the attack probably progressed. Working with our provisional total of 18,000 men for the German side, let us place 5,000 along the wall, 5,000 back in the woods behind the wall ready for the charge into the Roman ranks, 7,000 in the woods on the east slope of the hill, and 1,000 stationed at various places in the depression north of the track (see map 8). Along the mile of the wall, one man may have been stationed every yard to throw spears, and another two men behind him to hurl their spears over his head, or to step forward into his place after he had launched his. A man can throw a spear with accuracy every four seconds. If, at the signal to launch the attack, every man began hurling his spears, then within twenty seconds, as many as 25,000 spears could have been hurled at the Roman troops.
The Germans were well prepared with weapons for their attack. Archaeological evidence shows that iron production was widespread in the regions east of the Rhine by this time. Iron ore, in the form of what is known as bog ore, was abundant in most areas. Most villages that have been studied archaeologically show evidence of iron production, and a few larger centers of ironworking have been discovered. Most of the furnaces used for smelting in this period consisted of holes in the ground, about fifteen inches in diameter and twenty inches deep, with a circular ceramic chimney about a yard tall on top. At ground level, one or more holes in this chimney admitted air, supplied either by natural wind or by hand-driven bellows. Iron smelters loaded the furnace with alternating layers of charcoal, usually made from oak, and hematite or limonite ore, then set the charcoal on fire. After anywhere from five to twenty hours, depending upon the supply of oxygen, the quality of the charcoal, and the character of the ore, the smelters removed the bloom—a lump of impure iron mixed with slag, about the size of a basketball—from the pit.
The next step was to reheat the bloom in another furnace to a red-hot temperature, then pound it with a hammer to drive out the impurities. The result was a chunk of wrought iron that could be hammered into weapons, tools, and ornaments. Well before this period, skilled smiths had already learned how to make steel. To create a steel blade on a sword or spearhead, the smith placed the weapon in a hot fire and surrounded it with charcoal. Carbon from the charcoal entered into the structure of the wrought iron to produce the alloy steel. Steel had the advantage over wrought iron that it was much harder and that it could be worked to a much sharper blade or point.
Archaeological evidence indicates that around the middle of the final century B. C.—at the time that Caesar was waging his war against the Gauls west of the Rhine—the manufacture of weapons among peoples east of the Rhine increased greatly. The change is apparent both in a rapid expansion in smelting and forging activity at many sites and in the new practice of placing weapons in the burials of many men. This increase in weapon production came in response to the growing threat of the Roman armies. In this elaborately prepared situation at Kalkriese, the Germanic warriors had a chance to put their expanded supply of weapons to good use.
When the Roman army marched through the countryside, scouts went ahead to make sure that the passage was safe. Why did scouts not discover this trap and warn the troops? The Roman army employed local auxiliaries as scouts, since they knew the land better than soldiers from Italy or Gaul. In this case, the scouts may well have been confederates of Arminius— part of the elaborate plan. They rode forward to Kalkriese, informed the men waiting there that the marching column was approaching, then rode back to tell the Roman troops that all was safe up ahead.
As the Roman soldiers sloshed along on the increasingly soggy sandbank at the base of the hill, the soldiers wondered whether the going could get any worse. Their earlier worries about malevolent spirits in the woods and swamps receded to the back of their minds, as they focused on staying on their feet and keeping more or less in line. Suddenly the men in the front third of the column heard piercing shouts from the wooded slope on their left, and seconds later a barrage of steel-pointed spears came raining down on them from out of the woods. The first shouts were echoed by tens of others from all along the trackway. These were the signals to the concealed warriors to launch their attack.
With no warning, hundreds of spears were falling from the air, or flying horizontally directly at them, and the tightly packed marching troops could do nothing to defend themselves. There was hardly room to raise their heavy shields, let alone throw their cumbersome javelins. Spears glanced off helmets and plate armor with sharp clanking noises, bruising the wearers and creating a terrifying sound, like huge hailstones pounding incessantly on a sheet metal roof. Some spears hit shields with a thud and a splintering crash, as they pierced the wood and often impaled their bearers. Even if the razor-sharp point missed the soldier, the shield became useless. It was extremely difficult to extract the spear in the midst of this assault, and the weight of the shaft made the shield impossible to maneuver.
Other spears found their marks directly. Some landed in soldiers' faces, some in their necks, others in their legs or arms. The armor of helmet and cuirass was designed to protect the legionary in infantry combat, not against intensive barrages of sharp projectiles traveling with deadly energy gained by falling from a high arc or being hurling powerfully at body level. The shrieks of agony as spearpoints penetrated flesh quickly drowned out the lesser sounds of spears hitting armor and shields. Wounded soldiers fell to the ground, many gushing blood and screaming or moaning in pain.
The cavalry horses were terrified at the sudden eruption of battle sounds—the clanking of metal points hitting armor and the screaming of men. When a spear landed in the flesh of a horse, the animal shrieked in pain and bolted, throwing its rider and charging off into the swamp, often trampling men in its path. Wounded mules tore off, jerking their wagons along, crashing into and bowling over soldiers, until the mules broke loose from their harnesses or collapsed in panicked exhaustion. Most wounded animals that dashed into the marsh became trapped in the deep mud and, weakened by loss of blood, soon drowned. Others charged in panic into the ranks of troops, trampling and wounding or killing many men. A few in their terror and disorientation bolted toward the woods, attempting to scale the brush-covered wall, often falling back into the ditch to die there of their wounds.
Within ten seconds of the start of the spear barrage, the marching units disintegrated into chaos. The attacked soldiers stopped walking, in order to try to defend themselves. Since they were marching in close formation and few could see much beyond the men immediately around them, those behind kept marching forward and crashed into their fellows. At first, soldiers farther back in the column were unaware of what was happening toward the front, and they kept pressing on. Like a chain-reaction highway crash, men piled into one another. Many lost their balance and fell forward. All the time, spears continued to fly into the ranks of the thousands of troops on the track in front of the sod wall.
When spears struck soldiers' arteries, blood gushed in little fountains, drenching both the wounded man and surrounding soldiers. Wounded, dying, and already dead men quickly covered the track, making movement increasingly difficult for the others. The scene was one of complete chaos—spears falling like hail, men collapsing and gasping, even those not yet wounded struggling to remain on their feet, and occasionally frenzied horses and mules crashing through the swarm of troops. Within minutes, thousands of Roman soldiers lay dead or dying, pierced by spears, while others struggled to stay on their feet and to raise their shields for shelter.
The Romans had no chance. In all of their training, they had been taught to fight well-planned, set battles on open fields. Once their order was broken, which happened in the first seconds of this attack, their command structure ceased to function and the units' maneuverability was destroyed. The seventy pounds of metal armor and weaponry, as well as the packs of personal gear, that burdened each man made movement to avoid the ongoing collisions between men and the continuing shower of spears very difficult. The heavy shield was almost impossible to raise effectively in the chaos. For most soldiers, there was no room to throw javelins. Only some soldiers on the south side of the column managed to hurl their javelins toward the attackers on the other side of the wall, but few hit the enemy.
Roman soldiers had been trained to remain with their unit, to fight for the common good, and never to flee. Flight and desertion were punishable by death. But in this fiasco panic set in. Despite their training, the troops were completely overwhelmed by the massive surprise attack in this terrifying environment. In their panic, hundreds fled. Most became mired in the bog, sinking up to their waists or necks in the slimy mud or, in some cases, over their heads, and drowned. Some thus trapped were quickly dispatched by lance - or sword-wielding Germans waiting for them on the edges of the swamp. Others were captured and taken prisoner, to be sacrificed in postbattle celebrations or kept as slaves. A few fleeing legionaries were temporarily luckier than others. They happened upon somewhat drier ground through the bog and, throwing aside their armor, weapons, and packs to reduce their burdens, ran as hard as they could away from the scene of the carnage. But Germans awaiting them on the bank at the north edge of the depression quickly killed or captured them.
Face-to-Face Combat
As the Roman soldiers tried to protect themselves from the shower of spears that seemed to come from all directions, struggling to maintain their footing as their fellows bumped and fell into them, amid the screaming, falling, and moaning, German warriors behind the wall felt a surge of wild courage and lust to kill. For the first time in their lives, they saw Roman legionaries—representatives of the imperial power that marched with impunity through their lands, bribing their chiefs and subverting their politics—powerless and helpless. Observing that the spears had done their work, throwing the infantry and cavalry into chaos and panic, the boldest of the Germans led their more hesitant comrades in rushing from behind the wall toward the nearest Romans, thrusting viciously with their lances. Most of the legionaries, bewildered, confused, terrified, and wounded, could offer almost no resistance. The German chargers, emboldened by seeing Roman troops at their mercy, lunged savagely with their lances, piercing abdomens and chests, and sending the front row of Romans staggering backward into the troops behind them.
Other Germans rushed in with their swords, hacking and slashing ferociously at the Roman soldiers. By this time, even the legionaries who had not yet been wounded by spears or lances were so exhausted that they could hardly manage to defend themselves from the sword assault. Germans slashed deep, mortal gashes into their enemies' bodies and thighs, hacked off Romans' hands and arms, and sometimes chopped off heads in their fury. Blood spurted everywhere, on Romans and Germans alike.
The narrow confines of the place played a critical role in the battle. Romans in marching formation had difficulty defending themselves against surprise attack in any circumstances. Here on the narrow track, bounded by the forest and wall on the south, and the marshy depression with open water and endless mud on the north, the soldiers were packed together even more tightly than usual. When they prepared for the type of battle for which they had been trained, Roman infantry soldiers had about five square yards of space in which to operate—to throw their javelins, slash with their swords, and maneuver their shields. On this track, under the spear barrage, they had very little space to maneuver anyway, and with the rest of the column still pushing forward behind them, that space continually lessened, and men knocked into one another and bowled over those trying to fight. The fallen, wounded and dying, presented disastrous impediments to those still standing, making their movement virtually impossible. In the chaos, they could not easily step over their fallen comrades, nor could they stand on soft, slippery bodies to fight.
Within five minutes, the entire passageway north and northeast of the Kalkriese Hill was full of dead and dying Romans. Yet there was no effective way that accurate information about this sudden catastrophe at the front of the column could be conveyed to the back. Communication between different parts of the column was severely hampered, because riders on horseback, who ordinarily could move quickly along the edge of a road to carry information, could not get through the densely packed troops on the narrow passage, nor could they ride easily through the deep, sticky mud at the edge.
After several minutes, word of the disaster made its way to the middle of the column, where Varus and his counselors rode. At first, Varus probably thought this was another irksome skirmish, perhaps part of the small uprising he was marching to put down—nothing more. In Syria, Varus had made his reputation by acting decisively when the situation required it, moving his legions into position to apply Roman power. Given what he had been told and had observed so far about the situation in Germany, he had no reason to think that similar decisive action would not win the day again. Varus ordered his legions to press forward all the more rapidly to aid their fellows at the front. He could not imagine the full extent of what was happening.
As the column advanced, crushing the troops under attack at the front, German warriors who had been waiting in the forest on the east side of the Kalkriese Hill swarmed down the wooded slope onto the rest of the column (see map 8). They ran fast, the front line hurling spears at the troops and rushing headlong with lances and swords into the stunned ranks of marching Romans. The entire column was now embroiled in battle.
The track, from the western end of the wall to the eastern edge of the Kalkriese Hill, had become a two-and-a-quarter-mile-long killing zone. The topography of the place did not allow the Roman troops to mass into deep formations, where their heavy armor and developed tactics could have been used to advantage. Everything about the situation was in the Germans' favor, and they killed savagely and thoroughly.
The German fighters had no such restrictions on their movements as the Romans did. They could range freely along the edges of the track, lunging, slashing, and stabbing at the hapless Roman troops. Heavy armor did little good when two Germans attacked one legionary, one from the front and one from behind, incapacitating him in seconds by stabbing their lances or swords into his unprotected neck, abdomen, or back.
At the sight of the thousands of warriors rushing down out of the woods, many more Roman soldiers in the middle and rear of the column broke ranks and fled, some to the north into the bog, others eastward, trying to go back the way they had come. Most were captured or killed. A few managed to escape and, by hiding in the daytime and moving cautiously at night, made their way, terrified, starving, and exhausted, back to the Rhine and the safety of the base at Xanten, where they told their story.
Varus realized quickly that all was lost for his army. Rather than face capture and certain torture and gruesome death at the hands of his enemies, he fell on his sword, a means of death that
Rome regarded as respectable—certainly more so than public execution after torture by the Germans. His generals and other officials did the same, in the knowledge that these northern barbarians delighted in tormenting captured Roman officers before dispatching them.
Once the soldiers learned that Varus and other officers had committed suicide, all remaining order disintegrated. Some legionaries fought like madmen, stabbing and slashing wildly at their enemies, but with little effective result. Others attempted to flee, now in all directions, since none seemed any more promising than any other. Still others simply gave up, allowing themselves to be hacked to pieces by their enemies, or taken prisoner for unknown futures—torture and execution, or slavery.
The battle, if we can call it that—"massacre" might be a more appropriate term—lasted about an hour. After that, all Roman resistance had collapsed. Many Roman soldiers were still alive but mortally wounded, and they lay, scattered and in heaps, on the track, along its edges, and floating in the marsh. Others had been captured and were being treated roughly by their captors. Some were still trying to escape through the marsh, but they were being rounded up by Germans on all sides, to be killed summarily or taken prisoner.
Some five thousand Romans had been killed in the hour during which the battle raged. Another ten thousand were mortally wounded and lay dying. A couple of thousand had been captured alive and awaited their fates.
Only a few hundred Germans were killed as the result of the feeble and uncoordinated resistance that the besieged Romans were able to offer.
World History
