(Report of a victim)
This is a tricky situation -
I've only got myself to blame.
It's just a simple fact of life,
It can happen to anyone -
(From "It's a hardlife", by Fredericus Mercurius of the group "Regina")
When this all started, I was actually quite happy. A herald from Caesar arrived in our camp and brought a message that sounded too good to be true. This man proclaimed that Caesar forgave our -um, well- lack of discipline and ordered us to move to a normal outpost in Gaul.
We all were quite happy because, as you all know, Gaul is entirely occupied by the empire and this promised to be a quiet life with lots of vinum, visits to Lutetia and maybe some orgia with the famous gaulic girls...
When we arrived in Armorica we were full of enthusiasm and, after building a provisional camp, soon went off to our first patrol to a Gaulic village nearby. We were curious because the commander of a camp nearby seemed to be afraid of those stupid barbarian cowards. Now we, the elite Cohort of Julius Caesar would teach them to creep in the dirt before us.
When we marched through the forest, songs of war and destruction on our lips, some of us noticed that the wild boars there were exceptionally nervous, they ran faster than the horses in the Circus Maximus or attacked us with fear and despair in their eyes. Our songs became less loud, and somehow we felt that there was something wrong with this forest. Sometimes we found menhirs, nothing unusual for this part of Gaul, but, as we realized with terror, there were roman shields and pilums half buried below them, as if something had dropped those enormous stones directly on a poor legionnaire. But, we were elite, weren't we? So we made our second mistake this day (the first was leaving the camp).
After a while we sighted two gaulish warriors. We ordered them to stop, but instead of trying to flee they seemed to be pleased to see us and advanced towards us, looking not very intimidated. Our leader Julius screamed "AAAAH! CHARGE! BANZAIIII!" and led us into combat when the fat one said "Oh! Fine! Yes, CHAAARGE!" and smashed him against an oak with one single blow of his fist which was bigger than a pumpkin. The small one - and he was still quite big, I swear - still had the nerves to take a nip from his canteen before joining the fight. The battle raged for seemingly endless seconds when a beast attacked our rear, I don't call it dog because this monster must have come directly from Hades. Because we were outnumbered (remember - we were just one single Cohort, and there were TWO of them and this monster) we wisely decided to risk a courageous tactical retreat.
When we were back in our camp our wise leader ordered us to fortify our camp against the enemy armies we expected to come and to send a message to Caesar that there was an uprising of strong gaulic forces in this sector. Now we leave the camp only if necessary and wait for reinforcements, but until now we did not get anything else from Caesar than hold on and defend the empire as good as you can, the populus romanus is on your side and we all count on you, just such stuff.
Somehow I have the idea that something is really foul here, this all stinks like rotten fish (strange, I nearly smell it physically as I write this). The only thing I am sure of is that I won't leave our camp Valium if no one is behind me with a pilum pointed at my arse.
[ In Rome, in Caesar's palace at the same time:
"Amazing, it seems the idea to send them to those gaulic madmen was even
better than feeding them to the lions. You have so mean inspirations, Hera
would be proud of you. I would really not like to be your enemy, Brutus!" ]