The Return

As the retreating Bructeri began to burn their own possessions, to deny to the Romans every sustenance but ashes, a flying column sent by Germanicus commanded by Lucius Stertinius routed them; and there, discovered amid plunder and the dead, was the Eagle of the nineteenth legion, lost with Varus. * The Romans now brought to the land of the Bructeri,—to whatever lay between the river Ems and the river Lippe, to the very edge of their territory,— devastation; until they reached at last the Teutoburgian Wood, in whose darkness Varus and the remains of his fifteen thousand men, it was said, lay unburied. * Germanicus then conceived a desire to honor with obsequies these unburied warriors whose massacre once filled Augustus himself with rage and shame,— with hope or fear every corner of the Empire,— while the least foot soldier, facing alien terrain, was overcome with pity when he thought of family, friends, the sudden reversals of battle, and shared human fate. * First Caecina and his men entered,— ordered to reconnoitre the dismal treacherous passes, to attempt to build bridges and causeways across the uneven, sodden marshland,— then the rest of the army, witness to scenes rending to sight and memory of sight. * Varus’ first camp, with its wide sweep and deployment of ordered space in confident dimension, testified to the calm labors of three legions;— then a ruined half-wall and shallow ditch showed where a desperate remnant had been driven to take cover;— on the open ground between them were whitening bones, free from putrefaction,— scattered where men had been struck down fleeing, heaped up where they had stood their ground before slaughter. Fragments of spears and horses’ limbs lay intertwined, while human skulls were nailed like insults to the tree-trunks. Nearby groves held the altars on which the savage Germans sacrificed the tribunes and chief centurions. * Survivors of the catastrophe slowly began, at last, to speak,— the handful who had escaped death or slavery told their fellow soldiers where the generals fell, how the Eagles and standards were seized;— one showed where Varus received his first wound, and another, where he died by his own melancholy hand;— those thrown into crude pits saw gibbets above them, as well as the platform from which Arminius as if in delirium harangued his own victorious troops,— fury and rancor so joined to his joy, the imprisoned men thought they would soon be butchered,— until desecration of the Eagles at last satisfied or exhausted his arrogance. * And so, six years after the slaughter, a living Roman army had returned to bury the dead men’s bones of three whole legions,— no man knew whether the remains that he had gathered, touched perhaps in consigning to the earth, were those of a stranger or a friend:— all thought of all as comrades and bloodbrothers; each, in common rising fury against the enemy, mourned at once and hated. * When these events were reported to Rome Cynics whispered that thus the cunning State enslaves us to its failures and its fate.— Epicureans saw in the ghostly mire an emblem of the nature of Desire.— Stoics replied that life is War, ILLUSION the source, the goal, the end of human action. * At the dedication of the funeral mound, Germanicus laid the first earth,— thereby honoring the dead, and choosing to demonstrate in his own person his heartfelt share in the general grief. He thereby earned the disapproval of Tiberius,— perhaps because the Emperor interpreted every action of Germanicus unfavorably; or he may have felt the spectacle of the unburied dead must give the army less alacrity for battle and more respect for the enemy— while a commander belonging to the antique priesthood of the Augurs pollutes himself by handling objects belonging to the dead. * on the open ground whitening bones scattered where men had been struck down fleeing heaped up where they stood their ground Varus’ first camp with its wide sweep across the open ground the ruined half-wall and shallow ditch on the open ground between them whitening bones scattered where men had been struck down fleeing heaped up where they stood their ground