Week 9 - They Built a Wall

They Built a Wall

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Emile was no warrior and anyone that had ever seen him in uniform would safely say the same thing. He was no warrior, but he had however made a life for himself out of service to the military. It had been an era of peace. He had never been in combat, never faced the horrors of war. He had actually seen the enemy, something not everyone on the frontier could claim. And while that was the case, he had never needed to throw his javelin nor shoot his manuballista. He did spend an inordinate amount of time practicing and training with both though, and was a sure shot at practice targets. If sport and recreation won wars, he was ready.

Emile was not a warrior. He prayed daily for peace and was always glad when it came. The gods were generous and Emile had never needed to find out what sort of warrior he truly would be.

Emile was not a warrior, but he was a patriot. He loved the Emperor. He loved the Empire. Some boys his age feared going to the frontiers. Not Emile. He would have volunteered for service, even if it hadn’t been mandatory. It was an honor and a privilege. It was his duty as a citizen and he believed that with all his heart. He was glad when he came of age and could do his part, even if it was a relatively small one.

During his mandatory military service, Emile had been assigned to the trenches. Along the western frontier there were ditches and moats and walls and berms, but Emile had spent his later teen years in the trenches. He didn’t know how or why he was chosen for this particular service, but he never wanted to show anything but patriotism, so he never questioned his orders. His people needed protecting and he would do his duty, even if it meant long stretches of crouching and watching or extended periods of digging in order to do it. Emile didn’t mind the physical labor. It made the time pass and was less dull than the crouching and watching for an enemy that never came.

For three years Emile existed in the world below ground made of dug-out tunnels. To the north and further west things were different. That was where the walls began. The walls were all the rage. Maybe it was because of the terrain and the mountains. Walls were better suited there, while further south, there were more open fields for maneuvering and additional sorts of defense.

Once upon a time, when he was young and his family had the resources for leisure travel, Emile had seen the wall of walls – Hadrian’s Wall. He could see down the side of the mountain and there it was... Hadrian’s Wall. Not the original of course. It was larger and taller and more imposing and complex, but this new wall still carried his name.

When Emile was in the service he didn’t go to the Wall. He had gone to the small walls, the smaller and shorter defensive walls. Many of them were built to bridge the valleys between impassable mountains. There were hundreds of walls, spread out all across the countryside. Tactically it made no sense, and no single wall would have stopped any invading force. But they hadn’t been built all at once. They had been built over years, as battles had raged and armies pushed east or fell back west. Each wall represented a former border between nations. Now there was no true border, just miles of frontier to be manned and guarded and watched.

Soldiers patrolled a series of walls somewhere in the middle. They had been further west before, but there wasn’t much point in sticking out so close to the enemy. No one wanted this land anymore. There was no reason to risk lives and stretch already thin lines. They fell back to the middle territories, establishing a happy medium, lost somewhere in no man’s land.

Emile had spent a season of service at one of the walls, in order to learn just enough to help defend them if need be. This was obviously considered unlikely by their superiors, as the walls were poorly equipped and poorly manned. It was apparent that no one at the walls expected to be in battle any time soon. Even if they didn’t expect war, Emile still applied himself and did his sworn duty. He learned as much as he could as quickly as he could. Emile was always efficient and learned technique quickly. If he had any other desires he might have learned to lead men or taken on a craft trade. As it was, he was content to simply do a good job here.

Still, it seemed like a tremendous and impractical waste of resources. Did the wall really intimidate an enemy? Couldn’t they simply sneak over them, especially if they were so poorly staffed? Was there really something to achieve by that? If the Iberians wanted to attack, weren’t there hundreds of ways to tear down a wall? Or just sail around it?

Emile thought perhaps things were how they were because the walls were so much further away and it was harder to get resources through the mountains. Build a tall wall and have a few men to look over it every once in a while. That was easy to defend. There were fewer men needed, which made maintenance of the status quo easier for those in charge. No one in charge would admit that though.

Emile had read about the history of the walls. He understood that they had been built as a tactical response, a show of strength and a military answer to the enemy’s wall. The enemy had tall walls, so Roma had to have tall walls as well. No one built like the Romans could. Construction was their pride. The world knew it. The Egyptians had their pyramids and the Greeks had their statues and pillars. But those were old and in ruins and mostly forgotten. No one built like that anymore. No, the Romans could build anything and they aimed to prove it.

Emile could understand it was a matter of pride. It was a matter of showing off and proving their rightful place to the rest of the world. He understood that in the context of the times. But why now? Why maintain symbols of a lost legacy? The great wars were over. They had been over since before Emile was born. The Iberians stayed on their side of their wall and that was that.

At least the bunkers and the trenches made sense. Those could be used if war actually came. Here, there were fields and open space and cities nearby. Here there was need for more than just some poorly manned walls. They needed several types of reinforcements to slow invaders. They needed options and variations. Wars needed to be flexible here, nearer to the populations. No one cared about rocky terrain with little resources. There was no need to invade or defend that so adamantly.

Here they needed men to fight, to hunt, for reconnaissance and for raids.

That was, they would need all of that, if there really were any battles to be fought.

The battles between them seemed like ancient history.

After his mandatory service concluded, Emile tried to rejoin society. There was nothing there for him. It wasn’t that he was particularly vicious or violent. He didn’t long for the chance to kill someone. But the trenches made sense. He had friends there. He could sit all day and think and talk and not have to worry about anything. They fed him. They clothed him. They told him what to do.

Emile joined the Accensi and became a reservist. It was a low position that came with no respect. Emile didn’t mind. He wasn’t in the military for fame or notoriety. He was a poor man and couldn’t afford much equipment, but the military was happy to have him. After each war, the Accensi were phased out. But on the frontier, where the potential for war was an everyday reality, a newer Accensi had risen. He only worked part time and only received enough food to not starve and a place to sleep. But that was all he really wanted – a job and a chance to serve his country. He was cheap labor, and a cheap soldier, and he made things easier for his superiors. He was “trained” and had “experience.” He could show the new recruits and mandatory youths what to do and where to go and how to handle themselves. He never expected to fight. He could tell by the looks on the newer faces that neither did they.

Complacency was a dangerous thing. Even Emile realized that. Complacency and lack of an enemy never served any army well.

Out of boredom, Emile began to tell stories to the younger soldiers to help pass the time. Lies mostly. They didn’t know any better, and it made for a better evening that listening to them moan about what their lives had been like in the cities and what they would rather be doing than this “honor” of protecting the Empire. Emile had no patience for listening to that sort of rhetoric. For him, serving to protect was an honor. One of the highest. There were boring evenings, lots of them, but Emile was a patriot. He believed in the Empire and the Emperor.

Emile told tales of his confrontations with the Iberians. Everyone grew up hearing the horror stories of the past and had nightmares where Iberians were storming their homes and burning them to the ground. They were wild beasts and little boys knew from birth that someday they would have to do their duty to protect the Empire and do battle with the darkness. Everyone knew to be scared. And there was good reason to be. But after a decade of service in one form or another, Emile knew the reality. He had seen an Iberian, but that was practically an accident. And he was a far cry from the tales Emile had heard as a boy. The Iberian looked like a beast of muscle and mass, but he was still a man, and he was hardly a devil from below. But the fresh and young soldiers didn’t know any of that. They still had fear in their eyes. They still believed that death was just around any corner.

So Emile told them the tales he knew would scare them the most – he told them the stories they wanted to believe.

Emile made up battles. Iberian incursions across the frontier. Confrontations and skirmishes. The men in the trenches were heroes. They had turned back attack after attack. They had stopped an invasion and the complete destruction of the Empire. Emile told how the Emperor himself had come to congratulate the men in the trenches just two years ago. Emile explained that these stories had been kept secret because no one wanted to frighten the citizens back home. The men in the trenches laughed. The boys weren’t sure what to believe.

But the stories passed the time, so Emile made more of them up. Every night he spent in the trenches he spent telling tales of war and heroics. Emile never made himself the hero or focus of the stories. He was a humble observer. He always knew someone who had faced the enemy or heard a story from another soldier who had seen some fantastical fight. Emile didn’t need to be the hero. He didn’t want to be a hero. He knew no one would believe his stories if he claimed he was some great man of great heroics.

As the seasons passed Emile’s stories changed. New recruits meant fresh ears, but Emile didn’t want to bore the men that had already heard his tales. So old adventures were revised. New heroics with new twists of fate. Emile would adapt or change ideas based on how the new recruits reacted. If they wanted horror, he added horror. If they wanted blood and killing, there were suddenly new and epic battles.

Slowly, the focus began to change. The men knew what it meant to be a Roman soldier. They knew what Roman heroes looked like. They had heard legends and read histories their entire lives. What no one knew about were the Iberians. The Iberians had been behind their wall for over a hundred years. None of the boys in the trenches had any idea what a true Iberian even was. Were they civilized at all? Did they speak a common languages? Pray to common gods? What was it like to look them in the eye? What was it like to kill one?

Suddenly Emile became the world’s leading expert on what it meant to be an Iberian. He knew their culture, their language, their laughter and their loves. There had been accords during holidays where the men in the trenches shared their food and beliefs with the Iberian warriors and in turn learned about the Iberian way.

People loved the Iberian stories. Emile was mostly illiterate, but several of the other men could scribe, so they began writing his stories down. The stories were passed amongst the men and made their way to the other soldiers. Men in the other trenches loved them. Men on the walls loved them.

Then people back home started hearing about the stories and reading them too.

Tales of the wars that never were.

Emile had become a mythmaker, famous, but unknown. Everyone began hearing about the feats of military might. Everyone began hearing about the strength of the Roman soldier. Emile’s name was left out. Mostly. The officers knew where the stories had begun.

Emile was told to stop. He was giving people false hope, false heroes, false ideas about what things were really like on the frontiers.

The military was getting too many recruits. They couldn’t pay them all. The military didn’t know what to do with all the bodies.

Senators were beginning to discuss whether or not Iberia truly was a threat and whether or not it might be prudent to invade and conquer. They were planning an unwinnable war based off tales of fantasy. Emile was liable to get tens of thousands of men killed.

There was a false sense of pride on the streets of Roma. People were becoming unreasonable. They were beginning to believe anything. Emile’s stories were going to take the entire Empire down a very deadly and dangerous path.

Emile listened and he understood. But he also knew that telling the stories he told was the most interesting part of his day and possibly of his entire life. He wasn’t ready to give that up and he was sure he was right when he believed that the stories were a positive thing.

And he told his commanders that. They told him for the sake of the nation he had to stop. He told them they were wrong.

“I would think you’d want me to do exactly what I’ve been doing.”

“And what is that?”

“You say you don’t have enough money, enough resources. But what if everyone in the cities realizes there have been no wars here? Just how much funding would you receive then? And what if they believe the frontiers are as boring and tamed as they really are? Will they feel safe? Complacent? There will be no reason for them to spend if there is no war. But we are at war. We are always at war. We are at war to protect and preserve everyone’s way of life, including our own.”

“You want me to lie.”

“I want you to do what you think is best. I am here to help protect the Empire. It’s not for me to determine what the best way is. What if we all go home and then the Iberians do take up arms? What if there are no soldiers or walls to protect the people? What if the Empire falls and collapses? We have all sworn to do our duty. If we fail to preserve this balance, and hold onto the one thing that keeps the rest of the world safe, then none of us will have done our jobs at all. We will only be remembered by our failures. Instead, we can all be remembered as heroes.”

After he stopped writing stories, life in the trenches got a lot more boring. He wondered what things were like on the other side. Maybe they were just as bored as he was.

He had been given a reprimand and was sent back to the trenches. He was told that there would be a review and perhaps more discussions before any final decision would be made. In the meantime he was expected to keep his stories to himself.

Two months later he still hadn’t heard any new news or reply. He did hear that the Senate had approved additional funding to build a new stretch of walls and defensive embankments to the north. That was something, he supposed. Perhaps he would ask to be sent back to the walls. Doing something with his hands to pass the time would have to be better than sitting in a ditch all day.