THE AMBUSH THAT CHANGED HISTORY

AN AMATEUR ARCHAEOLOGISTDISCOVERS THE FIELD WHERE WILY GERMANIC WARRIORSHALTED THE SPREAD OF THE ROMAN EMPIREBY FERGUS M. BORDEWICH

In A.D. 9, Teutonic tribes annihilatedthree Roman legions (a clash re-imaginedin the 19th century, opposite). The sitewas lost for some 2,000 years until aBritish Army officer, Tony Clunn (withmetal detector), uncovered it in 1987. “All I hoped to find,” says Clunn today,“was the odd Roman coin.”

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his is the soil of 2,000 years ago, wherewe are standing now,” Susanne Wilbers-Rost wassaying as a young volunteer pried a small, darkclod out of it. Wilbers-Rost, a specialist in earlyGerman archaeology, peered through wire-rimmed glasses, brushed away some earth, and

handed an object to me. “You’re holding a nail from a Roman sol-dier’s sandal,” she said. Atrim, short-haired woman, Wilbers-Rosthas worked at the site, which is ten miles north of the manufac-turing city of Osnabrück, Germany, since 1990. Inch by inch, sev-eral young archaeologists under her direction are bringing to lighta battlefield that was lost for almost 2,000 years, until an off-dutyBritish Army officer stumbled across it in 1987.

The sandal nail was a minor discovery, extracted from thesoil beneath an overgrown pasture at the base of Kalkriese (theword may derive from Old High German for limestone), a 350-foot-high hill in an area where uplands slope down to the northGerman plain. But it was further proof that one of the pivotalevents in European history took place here: in A.D. 9, threecrack legions of Rome’s army were caught in an ambush and

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lake, and everywhere around the rim of the empire, Rome’sdefeated enemies feared her legions—or so it seemed to opti-mistic Romans. “Germania” (the name referred originally to aparticular tribe along the Rhine), meanwhile, did not exist as anation at all. Various Teutonic tribes lay scattered across a vastwilderness that reached from present-day Holland to Poland.The Romans knew little of this densely forested territory gov-erned by fiercely independent chieftains. They would pay dear-ly for their ignorance.

There are many reasons, according to an-cient historians, that the imperial Romanlegate Publius Quinctilius Varus set out soconfidently that September in a.d. 9. He ledan estimated 15,000 seasoned legionnairesfrom their summer quarters on the WeserRiver, in what is now northwestern Ger-many, west toward permanent bases near theRhine. They were planning to investigate re-ports of an uprising among local tribes.Varus, 55, was linked by marriage to the im-perial family and had served as Emperor Au-gustus’ representative in the province ofSyria (which included modern Lebanon andIsrael), where he had quelled ethnic distur-bances. To Augustus, he must have seemedjust the man to bring Roman civilization tothe “barbarous” tribes of Germany.

Like his patrons in Rome, Varus thoughtoccupying Germany would be easy. “Varuswas a very good administrator, but he wasnot a soldier,” says Benario. “To send him outinto an unconquered land and tell him to make a province of itwas a huge blunder on Augustus’ part.”

Rome’s imperial future was by no means foreordained. Atage 35, Augustus, the first emperor, still styled himself “firstcitizen” in deference to lingering democratic sensibilities ofthe fallen Roman Republic, whose demise—after the assas-sination of Caesar—had brought him to power in 27 b.c., fol-lowing a century of bloody civil wars. During Augustus’ rule,Rome had grown into the largest city in the world, with apopulation that may have approached one million.

The German frontier held a deep allure for Augustus,who regarded the warring tribes east of the Rhine as littlemore than savages ripe for conquest. Between 6 b.c. and a.d.4, Roman legions had mounted repeated incursions into thetribal lands, eventually establishing a chain of bases on theLippe and Weser rivers. In time, despite growing resent-ment of the Roman presence, the tribes exchanged iron,cattle, slaves and foodstuffs for Roman gold and silver coinsand luxury goods. Some tribes even pledged allegiance toRome; German mercenaries served with Roman armies asfar away as the present-day Czech Republic.

One such German soldier of fortune, a 25-year-old princeof the Cherusci tribe, was known to the Romans as Arminius.(His tribal name has been lost to history.) He spoke Latin andwas familiar with Roman tactics, the kind of man the Romansrelied on to help their armies penetrate the lands of the bar-barians. For his valor on the field of battle, he had been award-ed the rank of knight and the honor of Roman citizenship.On that September day, he and his mounted auxiliaries were

deputized to march ahead and rally someof his own tribesmen to help in puttingdown the rebellion.

Arminius’ motives are obscure, butmost historians believe he had long har-bored dreams of becoming king of histribe. To achieve his goal, he concocted abrilliant deception: he would report a fic-titious “uprising” in territory unfamiliar tothe Romans, then lead them into a deadlytrap. A rival chieftain, Segestes, repeated-ly warned Varus that Arminius was a trai-tor, but Varus ignored him. “The Romans,”says Wells, “thought they were invincible.”

rminius had instructedthe Romans to make what he haddescribed as a short detour, a one-or two-day march, into the terri-tory of the rebels.The legionnaires

followed along rudimentary trails that me-andered among the Germans’ farmsteads,scattered fields, pastures, bogs and oak

forests. As they progressed, the line of Roman troops—alreadyseven or eight miles long, including local auxiliaries, camp fol-lowers and a train of baggage carts pulled by mules—becamedangerously extended. The legionnaires, wrote third-centuryhistorian Cassius Dio, “were having a hard time of it, fellingtrees, building roads, and bridging places that requiredit. . . . Meanwhile, a violent rain and wind came up that sep-arated them still further, while the ground, that had becomeslippery around the roots and logs, made walking very treach-erous for them, and the tops of the trees kept breaking off andfalling down, causing much confusion. While the Romanswere in such difficulties, the barbarians suddenly surroundedthem on all sides at once,” Dio writes of the preliminary Ger-man skirmishes. “At first they hurled their volleys from a dis-tance; then, as no one defended himself and many werewounded, they approached closer to them.” Somehow, thecommand to attack had gone out to the German tribes. “Thisis pure conjecture,” says Benario, “but Arminius must have de-livered a message that the Germans should begin their assault.”

The nearest Roman base lay at Haltern, 60 miles to thesouthwest. So Varus, on the second day, pressed on doggedlyin that direction. On the third day, he and his troops were en-tering a passage between a hill and a huge swamp known asthe Great Bog that, in places, was no more than 60 feet wide.

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annihilated. Ongoing finds—ranging from simple nails tofragments of armor and the remains of fortifications—haveverified the innovative guerrilla tactics that according to ac-counts from the period, neutralized the Romans’ superiorweaponry and discipline.

It was a defeat so catastrophic that it threatened the sur-vival of Rome itself and halted the empire’s conquest of Ger-many. “This was a battle that changed the course of history,”says Peter S. Wells, a specialist inIron Age European archaeology atthe University of Minnesota andthe author of The Battle ThatStopped Rome. “It was one of themost devastating defeats ever suf-fered by the Roman Army, and itsconsequences were the most far-reaching. The battle led to the cre-ation of a militarized frontier inthe middle of Europe that enduredfor 400 years, and it created aboundary between Germanic andLatin cultures that lasted 2,000years.” Had Rome not been de-feated, says historian Herbert W.Benario, emeritus professor ofclassics at Emory University, a very

different Europe would have emerged. “Almost all of mod-ern Germany as well as much of the present-day Czech Re-public would have come under Roman rule. All Europe westof the Elbe might well have remained Roman Catholic; Ger-mans would be speaking a Romance language; the ThirtyYears’ War might never have occurred, and the long, bitterconflict between the French and the Germans might neverhave taken place.”

ounded (at least accord-ing to legend) in 753 b.c.,Rome spent its formativedecades as little more thanan overgrown village. But

within a few hundred years, Romehad conquered much of the Italianpeninsula, and by 146 b.c., had leaptinto the ranks of major powers bydefeating Carthage, which con-trolled much of the westernMediterranean. By the beginning ofthe Christian Era, Rome’s sway ex-tended from Spain to Asia Minor,and from the North Sea to the Sa-hara. The imperial navy had turnedthe Mediterranean into a Roman

Writer FERGUS M. BORDEWICH, who reports frequentlyon history and archaeology, is based in upstate New York.

Arminius, a prince of the Cherusci

tribe (in a 16th-century engraving),

was the mastermind of the trap.

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ABetween 6 B.C. and A.D. 4, Roman legions established bases on the Lippe and Weser rivers (above); the plan was to extend the

empire from the Rhine to the Elbe. Those ambitions were crushed at Kalkriese (below) when Roman soldiers were cut down between

a hill and a bog. This “was one of the most devastating defeats ever suffered by the Roman Army,” says scholar Peter Wells.

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As the increasingly chaotic and panicky mass of legionnaires,cavalrymen, mules and carts inched forward, Germans ap-peared from behind trees and sand-mound barriers, cuttingoff all possibility of retreat. “In open country, the superblydrilled and disciplined Romans would surely have prevailed,”says Wells. “But here, with no room to maneuver, exhaustedafter days of hit-and-run attacks, unnerved, they were at acrippling disadvantage.”

Varus understood that there was no escape. Rather thanface certain torture at the hands of the Germans, he chosesuicide, falling on his sword as Roman tradition prescribed.Most of his commanders followed suit, leaving their troopsleaderless in what had become a killing field. “An army un-excelled in bravery, the first of Roman armies in discipline, inenergy, and in experience in the field, through the negligenceof its general, the perfidy of the enemy, and the unkindnessof fortune. . . . was exterminated almost to a man by thevery enemy whom it has always slaughtered like cattle,” ac-cording to the a.d. 30 account of Velleius Paterculus, a re-tired military officer who may have known both Varus andArminius.

Only a handful of survivors managed somehow toescape into the forest and make their way to safety.The news they brought home so shocked the Ro-mans that many ascribed it to supernatural causes,claiming a statue of the goddess Victo-ry had ominously reversed direction.The historian Suetonius, writing acentury after the battle, assertedthat the defeat “nearly wrecked theempire.” Roman writers, says Wells,“were baffled by the disaster.” Thoughthey blamed the hapless Varus, or thetreachery of Arminius, or the wild landscape,in reality, says Wells, “the local societieswere much more complex than the Ro-mans thought. They were an informed,dynamic, rapidly changing people, whopracticed complex farming, fought in or-ganized military units, and communicatedwith each other across very great distances.”

More than 10 percent of the entire imperialarmy had been wiped out—the myth of its invincibility shat-tered. In the wake of the debacle, Roman bases in Germanywere hastily abandoned. Augustus, dreading that Arminiuswould march on Rome, expelled all Germans and Gauls fromthe city and put security forces on alert against insurrections.

ix years would pass before a Roman armywould return to the battle site. The scene the sol-diers found was horrific. Heaped across the field atKalkriese lay the whitening bones of dead men andanimals, amid fragments of their shattered

weapons. In nearby groves they found “barbarous altars”upon which the Germans had sacrificed the legionnaires who

surrendered. Human heads were nailed everywhere to trees.In grief and anger, the aptly named Germanicus, the Romangeneral leading the expedition, ordered his men to bury theremains, in the words of Tacitus, “not a soldier knowingwhether he was interring the relics of a relative or a stranger,but looking on all as kinsfolk and of their own blood, whiletheir wrath rose higher than ever against the foe.”

Germanicus, ordered to campaign against the Cherusci,still under the command of Arminius, pursued the tribe deepinto Germany. But the wily chieftain retreated into theforests, until, after a series of bloody but indecisive clashes,Germanicus fell back to the Rhine, defeated. Arminius was“the liberator of Germany,” Tacitus wrote, “a manwho, . . . threw down the challenge to the Roman nation.”

For a time, tribes flocked to join Arminius’ growing coali-tion. But as his power grew, jealous rivals began to defect fromhis cause. He “fell by the treachery of his relatives,” Tacitusrecords, in a.d. 21.

With the abdication of the Romans from Germany, theKalkriese battlefield was gradually forgotten. Even the Romanhistories that recorded the debacle were lost, sometime afterthe fifth century, during the collapse of the empire under the

onslaught of barbarian invasions. But in the 1400s, hu-manist scholars in Germany rediscovered

the works of Tacitus, including his ac-count of Varus’ defeat. As a conse-quence, Arminius was hailed as thefirst national hero of Germany. “Themyth of Arminius,” says Benario,

“helped give Germans their first sensethat there had been a German people that

transcended the hundreds of smallduchies that filled the political land-scape of the time.” By 1530, evenMartin Luther praised the ancient

German chieftain as a “war leader”(and updated his name to “Hermann”).Three centuries later, Heinrich von

Kleist’s 1809 play, Hermann’s Battle, invokedthe hero’s exploits to encourage his coun-trymen to fight Napoleon and his invadingarmies. By 1875, as German militarismsurged, Hermann had been embraced as

the nation’s paramount historical symbol; atitanic copper statue of the ancient warrior,

crowned with a winged helmet and brandishinghis sword menacingly toward France, was erected on a moun-taintop 20 miles south of Kalkriese, near Detmold, wheremany scholars then believed the battle took place. At 87 feethigh, and mounted on an 88-foot stone base, it was thelargest statue in the world until the Statue of Liberty was

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To date, archaeologists have uncovered more than 5,000 objects fromthe site (including, clockwise from top left, a Roman standard-bearer’s

silver face mask, fragments of a sandal, and spearheads). In 1987, asClunn made his first discoveries at Kalkriese, he found that “a cohesive

pattern began to emerge. There was every indication that a largecontingent of people had splayed out, fleeing from an unknown horror.”

Coins (above) found at the site provide important clues: none

had been minted later than the reign of the emperor Augustus;

most of them were in pristine condition, as if new when lost.

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through his fingers. He dug down about eight inches. “ThenI saw it!” Clunn exclaims. In his hand lay a small, round silvercoin, blackened with age—a Roman denarius, stamped onone side with the aquiline features of Augustus, and on theother, with two warriors armed with battle shields and spears.“I could scarcely believe it,” he says. “I was transfixed.” Soonhe found a second denarius, then a third. Who lost these? heasked himself, and what had the coin carrier been doing—run-ning, riding, walking? Before Clunn left the area for the day, hecarefully logged the location of the coins on his grid map,sealed them in plastic pouches and restored the clods of dirt.

The next time Clunn returned to Kalkriese, his metal de-tector signaled another find: at a depth of about a foot, hediscovered another denarius. This one, too, bore a likenessof Augustus on one side, and on the other, a bull with headlowered, as if about to charge. By the end of the day, Clunnhad unearthed no fewer than 89 coins. The following week-end, he found still more, for a total of 105, none minted laterthan the reign of Augustus. The vast majority were in pris-tine condition, as if they had been little circulated whenthey were lost.

n the months that followed, Clunn continued his ex-plorations, always turning over his finds to Schlüter.Along with coins, he discovered shards of lead andbronze, nails, fragments of a groma (a distinctive Romanroad-surveying device) and three curious ovoid pieces

of lead that German scholars identified as sling shot. “Slow-ly but surely a cohesive pattern began to emerge,” saysClunn. “There was every indication that a large contin-gent of people had splayed out from the area at the apexto the field, fleeing from an unknown horror.” Clunnbegan to suspect that he had found what was left of Varus’lost legions.

Thanks to Schlüter’s contacts in German academia,the site was recognized, almost immediately, as a major dis-covery. Professional archaeologists under the direction ofSchlüter and, later, Wilbers-Rost undertook systematic ex-cavations. They were fortunate: sometime in the past, localfarmers had covered the poor sandy subsoil with a thick layerof sod that had protected the undiscovered artifacts below.

Since the early 1990s, excavations have located battle de-bris along a corridor almost 15 miles long from east to west,and a little more than 1 mile from north to south, offering ad-ditional proof that it unfolded over many miles, before reach-ing its dreadful climax at Kalkriese.

Perhaps the most important single discovery was evi-dence of a wall 4 feet high and 12 feet thick, built of sand andreinforced by chunks of sod. “Arminius learned much fromhis service with the Romans,” says Wilbers-Rost. “He knewtheir tactics and their weak points. The wall zigzagged so

that the Germans on top of it could attack the Romans fromtwo angles. They could stand on the wall, or rush out throughgaps in it to attack the Roman flank, and then run back be-hind it for safety.” Concentrations of artifacts were found infront of the wall, suggesting that the Romans had tried toscale it. The dearth of objects behind it testifies to their fail-ure to do so.

The more the archaeologists excavated, the more they ap-preciated the immensity of the massacre. Clearly, Arminiusand his men had scoured the battlefield after the slaughterand carried off everything of value, including Roman armor,helmets, gold and silver, utensils and weapons. Most of whatarchaeologists have unearthed consists of items the victorsfailed to notice, or dropped as they looted. Still, there havebeen some spectacular finds, including the remnants of aRoman officer’s scabbard and, most notably, a Roman stan-dard-bearer’s magnificent silver face mask. They also uncov-ered coins stamped with the letters “VAR,” for Varus, whichthe ill-fated commander had awarded his troops for merito-rious service.

In all, Wilbers-Rost’s team has found more than 5,000 ob-jects: human bones (including several skulls gruesomely splitby swords), spearheads, bits of iron, harness rings, metal studs,pieces of armor, iron nails, tent pegs, scissors, bells that oncehung from the necks of Roman mules, a wine strainer andmedical instruments. Many of these objects, cleaned and re-stored, are on display in the museum at the site. (Archaeolo-gists also found fragments of bombs that Allied planesdropped on the area during World War II.)

lunn, now 59, still works, as a staff officer, forthe British military in Osnabrück. One recent af-ternoon, amid intermittent cloudbursts, he and Idrove east from Kalkriese along the route thatVarus’ army most likely followed on the last day of

its harrowing march. We stopped at a lowhill on the outskirts of the village ofSchwagstorf. From the car, I couldbarely detect the rise in the ground,but Clunn assured me that this was the

highest spot in the vicinity. “It’s the onlyplace that offers any natural de-

fense,” he said. Here, he has foundthe same types of coins and arti-

facts that have been unearthed atKalkriese; he hopes that futureexcavations will determine thatthe battered Roman forces at-tempted to regroup here shortlybefore they met their doom. Aswe stood at the edge of a trafficcircle and gazed across a corn-field, he added: “I’m convincedthat this is the site of Varus’last camp.”R

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dedicated in 1886. Not surprisingly, the monument became apopular destination for Nazi pilgrimages during the 1930s.But the actual location of the battle remained a mystery.More than 700 sites, ranging from the Netherlands to east-ern Germany, were proposed.

mateur archaeologist tony clunn ofBritain’s Royal Tank Regiment was hoping for achance to indulge his interest when he arrived at hisnew posting in Osnabrück in the spring of 1987. (Hehad previously assisted archaeologists in England

during his spare time, using a metal detector to search fortraces of Roman roads.) Captain Clunn introduced himself tothe director of the Osnabrück museum, Wolfgang Schlüter,and asked him for guidance. The British officer promised toturn over to the museum anything he found.

“In the beginning, all I had ever hoped to find was the oddRoman coin or artifact,” Clunn, who retired from the armywith the rank of major in 1996, told me, as we sat drinkingtea in a café next to the Varusschlacht (Varus Battle) Museumand Park Kalkriese, which opened in 2002. Schlüter had sug-gested that he try the rural Kalkriese area, where a few coinshad already been found. Clunn planned his assault with a sol-dier’s eye to detail. He pored over old maps, studied region-al topography and read extensively about the battle, includ-ing a treatise by 19th-century historian Theodor Mommsen,who had speculated that it took place somewhere nearKalkriese, although few agreed with him.

As Clunn drove around Kalkriese in his black Ford Scor-pio, introducing himself to local farmers, he saw a landscapethat had changed significantly since Roman times. Forestsof oak, alder and beech had long since given way to cultivat-ed fields and copses of pine. Stolid modern farm buildingswith red-tile roofs stood in place of the huts of the ancienttribesmen. The Great Bog itself had disappeared, drained inthe 19th century; it was now bucolic pastureland.

Using an old hand-drawn map he got from a locallandowner, Clunn noted the locations of earlier coin finds.“The secret is to look for the easy route that people wouldhave taken in ancient times,” he says. “No one wants to diga lot of unnecessary holes in the ground. So you look forthe most logical spot to start searching—for example, apass where a trail might narrow, a bottleneck.” Clunn fo-cused on the area between where the Great Bog had beenand Kalkriese Hill. As he walked, sweeping his metal de-tector from side to side, he noticed a slight elevation. “Isensed it was an old trackway, perhaps a path across thebog,” he says. He began following the elevation, workingbackward toward the hills.

Before long, a ringing in his earphones indicated metal inthe earth. He bent over, carefully cut away a small square ofturf with a trowel, and began to dig, sifting the peaty soil

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The site of the massacre (and of current excavations) is today

a pasture. Here, wrote historian Velleius Paterculus in A.D. 30,

the “first of Roman armies was exterminated almost to a man.”

Arminius (in an 1875 sculpture) symbolized an emergent

nationalism. “The Germans,” says Herbert Benario, “had

someone [to] match against the heroes of ancient Rome.”

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