Cato 04 - The Eagle and the Wolves by Simon Scarrow Page B

Plautius’ dispatch, as framed in the needlessly ornate language of staff officers with more time on their hands than they know what to do with.
    ‘Well,’ he drawled at length, ‘apart from a few reservations about our scope of operations, and caveats about the amount of men we place under arms, it seems that the general has given us permission to arm the, uh, Wolves and the Boars.’

Chapter Nine
    Some thirty miles to the west of Calleva, Vespasian gazed at the smoke billowing around the crest of a hill. The hillfort, scarcely two hundred paces across, was the smallest the Second Legion had razed so far. Yet the people who had built it had chosen the site well: a steep hill tucked into the bend of a fast-flowing river. The exposed flanks of the hill had been heavily fortified with earthworks, thick palisades and an inventive range of anti-personnel obstacles, some of which had clearly been copied, albeit crudely, from Roman originals. Crude copies they may have been, but they had inflicted some crippling injuries on the more unwary of the legionaries who had assaulted the ramparts at noon.
    A steady stream of casualties passed the legate on their way to the dressing station just inside the Second Legion’s marching camp: men with mangled and bloody feet where the barbed points of caltrops had driven through the soles of their boots; others with deep penetration wounds from being pushed on to the points of abatis by their unwitting comrades behind. Then there were men injured by the missiles that had rained down from the warriors fiercely defending the hillfort’s gateway, men struck by everything from spears and arrows, to stones, old cooking pots, animal bones and shards of pottery. Finally, those who had been wounded when the legionaries had at last got to grips with the enemy. These men bore the usual stab, slash and crush injuries delivered by spear, sword and club.
    It had been only two days since the legion had pitched camp a short distance from the outer defensive ditch, and already there were over eighty casualties - the equivalent of one century. The full butcher’s bill, Vespasian knew, would be waiting for him on the campaign desk in his tent. That was why he was reluctant to turn away from the spectacle of the burning hillfort. If the Durotrigans continued to bleed his forces away at this rate, then before long the legion would be too weak to continue campaigning independently of the main body of General Plautius’ army. That would be a bitter blow for Vespasian, who had counted on this opportunity to make something of a name for himself before his tenure of the legion came to an end. If his political career was to advance when he returned to Rome, then he would need a good military record to trade on. His family was too recently promoted to the senatorial class for him to depend on any help from the old boy network of those with an established aristocratic lineage. It constantly infuriated Vespasian that men less able than he were given greater responsibilities far earlier in their careers. Not only was this not fair, he spurred himself on, it was so obviously inefficient and prone to disaster. For the good of Rome, and her divinely sanctioned destiny, the system had to change . . .
    The hillfort was the seventh settlement his legion had seized and sacked. This had taken only two days to achieve, yet there were certain aspects of the operation that Vespasian was certain could be improved. A handful of the enemy had managed to slip through his picket lines the first night the legion had camped in front of the hillfort. That was quite deplorable, and the optio in charge of the sentries had been broken back to the ranks. Next time, the legate firmly resolved, he would erect a palisade across any likely rat runs.
    Then there had been only a limited supply of ammunition for his artillery engines to lay down a demoralising and destructive barrage upon the defenders. Although they had managed to damage the