reached on the third day. Here we halted for twenty-four hours while I inspected the camp and made a short reconnaissance down the road that led to Boudobrigo. At Bingium the river Nava joined the Rhenus, and the fort was protected on two sides by water with hills to the back of it. From the camp as you looked down-river great cliffs of rock towered high on the left bank, making an impregnable barrier against those who might wish to cross from the east. The cliffs continued along the south bank of the stream and it was at the foot of these that the road ran till it joined the bridge leading to the camp. If Bingium were captured, those at Moguntiacum would find their retreat cut off, it being an easy matter then for the enemy to break the bridge while, at the same time, commanding the road to Augusta Treverorum. From there the way into Gaul would lie open. Here I left another mixed cohort under the charge of a senior tribune while the diminished legion continued its march to its headquarters at Moguntiacum, which was reached on the fifth day.
Moguntiacum had once been the capital of Germania Superior but that was in the great days of our power when the province had possessed a civil as well as a military administration, and the legions held the east bank in strength. On the rising ground behind the town was the old camp. It had been built to hold two legions, but that was in the time of Domitian. It was abandoned later when the town was fortified, and the garrison now lived in huts on the city side of the river wall. The town had grown up along the river and had once been a place of some splendour. It boasted a number of wide streets, still lined with open-fronted shops, and there was a forum, a christian church, a ruined theatre, innumerable abandoned temples, and a carved column to Jupiter, now covered with grime. Outside the town walls, along the river bank, there was a string of wooden huts, some of which hung over the water on stilts and which were occupied by the very poor. A market fair was held occasionally but trade was lethargic, for the town had so often been sacked by raiders from the east that it was no longer a place in which the energetic and the ambitious wished to stay if they could move elsewhere. Those who remained were a mixed population of Franks, Burgundians and Alemanni whose blood was inextricably mixed by the confusion of marriage with the descendants of legionary veterans who had come from Hispania, Pannonia, Illyricum and all the parts of the empire. The harbour lay a little way down-river outside the protection of the town walls, and around it was a small settlement, occupied mainly by veterans and their families.
The Twentieth had been stationed at Novaesium in the time of Claudius. It was from there that they had been sent to Britannia, so their return to the Rhenus was, in a sense, a home-coming; though the only part of the legion that had ever before seen this river was the bronze Eagle that had been given us by the first emperor of Rome.
I ordered Aquila to pitch camp in the ruins of the old fort for the night and rode, with a handful of officers on an inspection of the town. Barbatio, the praefectus of the auxiliaries, was expecting me. He was a heavy young man of about thirty, already running to fat and as obviously out of condition mentally as he was physically. He looked frightened when he spoke to me; and he had cause. His cohort was a rabble of unshaven, scruffy looking individuals who appeared never to have done any drill in their lives. Their quarters were crammed with their wives, their children and their cattle, and the remaining contents of their huts seemed to suggest that the majority spent the greater portion of their time in mercantile activities.
In answer to my questions he told me, hesitantly, that there was little traffic across the river in boats because the current was difficult (this at least was true) and the Alemanni hostile, but traders on their way to Borbetomagus, the last and highest of the forts to which I was to send a cohort, would pass through the town from time to time.
It all reminded me strongly of Corstopitum as I had last seen it. It was very depressing.
“The old camp is too far back,” I said to Quintus. “I want another built, here on the bank to the left of the bridge. My men are going to have to kill wet barbarians, not dry ones.”
He said cautiously, “That will mean taking over a part of the town. We shall be popular.”
“They will get used to it. I want the ground cleared north of the road between the present camp and the river. We shall need, approximately, six acres. The cavalry—the majority of them anyway—will have to be housed on the old camp site.
The river at this point was about seven hundred and fifty yards across and it flowed more swiftly than any river I had ever seen. In the middle there were two long narrow islands, as flat as sword blades, and the lower end of the northern one was submerged in summer. They were thickly wooded and uninhabited, providing only a refuge for occasional outlaws from the communities on both banks. A third island, also long and thin, passed close to the west bank and sheltered the harbour from the force of the main channel. From the town walls we could see the broken bridge that jutted out forlornly over the water as far as the third pile. “What about that?” said Quintus. “Do we get it mended?”
I shook my head. “No.”
Across the river lay the ruins of the bridge-head camp that had once protected the settlement and the villas that had sprung up round the baths at Aquae Mattiacae. My father, I remembered, had always sworn that it was the hot springs there that had cured the injury done to his leg by an Aleman spear when he was a young man. And even in his later years he always insisted that its waters would have been better for his rheumatism than the baths at Aquae Sulis. The camp had been abandoned, finally, when the Alemanni sacked Moguntiacum in the year that my Theodosius came to our aid. It was unlikely that anything was left of the baths or the settlement now.
Quintus said stubbornly, “We could repair it. A useful thing, I would suggest, to have a toe-hold on the east side.”
I screwed up my eyes against the glare. “I’ll think about that one,” I said. “The important thing is to get ourselves established here first.”
That first evening I walked out through the river gate and down the bank to where the bridge stood. I walked out on to the broken planks and stared at the remaining piles, stretched out to the further shore, stepping stones for some giant in a child’s story. Patches of mist drifted above the swirling water. I threw a stick into the current and was amazed at the speed with which it was taken away. Barbatio explained to me that a little way upstream from the bridge the river Moenus flowed into the Rhenus. “That’s the division, sir, between the Alemanni and the Burgundians. The Burgundians’ western frontier lies between here and Confluentes where the Franks take over.”
“Are their frontiers firm ones?”
“No, not really, sir. It depends who is on top at the moment.”
“Well, what’s the position now?”
“You see those escarpments, sir, down-river on the east bank. Well, all the country behind that, extending from this town to Bingium, is disputed. At the moment it’s held by a Frankish clan who guard the right bank for us in return for subsidies.”
“You mean Roman silver; and they stay loyal just so long as the bribe is sufficiently heavy?”
He looked startled. “Yes, sir.”
It was getting cold now and I shivered, staring hard at the east bank. That bank there—on that my father had once walked in civilian dress and bearing no arms. But I, if I walked on it, would risk death as an enemy. In my father’s time we had owned it with as much certainty and as little doubt as we had the crumbling city of which I was now governor.
Quintus twisted the bracelet on his wrist and said, “This place is like the end of the world.” It was as though he were thinking my thoughts.
“Yes,” I said. “It is—the end of our world.”
He said, moodily, “I still think it would be a good thing to repair this bridge and take back that camp on the further bank. It would give us a fine start if we should need to take the offensive.”
Barbatio said diffidently, “The Alemanni, sir, would see that as an act of war. General Stilicho, by his terms, gave them absolute rights over the east bank.”
“In that case there’s no point in provoking them without cause.”
Quintus turned to the praefectus. “Have you seen the old camp? Can it be repaired easily?”
Barbatio said hastily, “Yes, sir, though half the walls have been pulled down and the huts destroyed. They did the same to the villas.”
“Who burned the bridge?”
“That was done many years ago, sir, after Rando sacked the town. It was he who destroyed the cathedral.”
“Who is Rando?”
