I, Claudius - Robert Graves [90]
"Never was there a better general or a better man," shouted a veteran. "Hurrah for Germanicus, father and son!"
It is a comment on my brother's extreme simplicity that he did not realise the effect his words were having. By his father he meant Tiberius [who also was often styled Germanicus], but the veterans thought he meant his real father; and by Augustus' successor he meant Tiberius again, but the veterans thought that he meant himself.
Unaware of these cross-purposes he went on to speak of the harmony that prevailed in Italy and of the fidelity of the French, from whose territory he had just come, and said that he could not understand the sudden feeling of pessimism that had overcome them. What ailed them?
What had they done with their captains and their colonels and their generals? Why weren't these officers on parade?
Had they really been expelled from the camp, as he had heard?
"A few of us are still alive and about, Caesar," someone said, and Cassius came limping through the ranks and saluted Germanicus. "Not many! They pulled me off the tribunal and have kept me tied up in the guardroom without food for the last four days. An old soldier has just been good enough to release me."
"You, Cassius! They did that to you! The man who brought back the eighty from the Teutoburger Forest?
The man who saved the Rhine bridge?"
"Well, at least they spared my life," said Cassius.
Germanicus asked with horror in his voice: "Men, is this true?"
"They brought it on themselves," someone shouted, and then a fearful hubbub arose. Men stripped themselves to the skin to show the clean silver scars of honourable wounds on their breasts and the ragged and discoloured marks of flogging on their backs. One decrepit old man broke from the ranks, and running forward pulled his mouth open with his fingers to show his bare gums. Then he shouted, "I can't eat hard tack without teeth. General, and I can't march and fight on slops. I served under your father in his first campaign in the Alps and I'd done six years' service even then. I've two grandsons serving in the same company as myself. Give me my discharge. General. I dandled you on my knees when you were a babyl And look. General, I've got a rupture and they expect me to march twenty miles with a hundred pounds' weight on my back."
"Back to the ranks, Pomponius," ordered Germanicus, who recognised the old man and was shocked to find him still under arms. "You forget yourself. I'll look into your case later. For Heaven's sake show a good example to the young soldiers!"
Pomponius saluted and returned to the ranks. Germanicus held up his hand for silence, but the men went on shouting about their pay and the unnecessary fatigues put on them so that they hardly had a moment to themselves from reveille to lights out, and that the only discharge a man got from the Army now was to drop dead from old age. Germanicus made no attempt to speak until he had complete quiet again. Then he said: "In the name of my father Tiberius I promise you justice. He has your welfare at heart as deeply as I have and whatever can be done for you without danger to the Empire, he will do. I'll answer for that."
"Oh, to hell with Tiberius!" someone shouted, and the cry was picked up on all sides with groans and catcalls. And then suddenly they all began to shout: "Up, Germanicus!
You're the Emperor for us. Chuck Tiberius into the Tiber! Up, Germanicus! Germanicus for Emperor! To hell with Tiberius! To hell with that bitch Livia! Up, Germanicus!