Proelium adversus Ariovistum
About
Julius Caesar's six legions broke the Suebian king Ariovistus's Germanic warband near the Rhine, driving the survivors into the river after a fierce close-quarters fight. Ariovistus himself escaped across the Rhine but died soon after, and his invasion of Gaul was over. It was Caesar's first battle against a Germanic force and set the Rhine as Gaul's eastern boundary for generations. The exact battlefield in modern Alsace is still debated by historians.
What happened here
A Roman army fights the way it camps: in lines, by drill, on ground chosen if possible. The legions form up in cohorts with gaps that let ranks rotate, throw a volley of heavy javelins at close range, and then close with the short sword, pushing behind the shield. Auxiliaries hold the flanks and do most of the cavalry work and most of the skirmishing. Battles are short and decided by whether one line breaks, and the killing happens in the pursuit rather than the fighting. The camp is dug and palisaded every night regardless. Afterwards the dead are stripped and the field is looted for days; the ground is remembered locally long after the campaign is a paragraph in someone's history.
Sources
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