Ancient Warfare: The Lost Legions of Rome – Part 2

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In my last article I discussed two legendary ‘Lost Legions’ of the Roman Empire.  Such legends often have a habit of eclipsing reality.  In this article I shall discuss the facts behind two archetypal lost legions, one Roman and one modern: the VIIII Hispana, which supposedly met its end in the wildes of Scotland; and the 1/5 Norfolk Battalion of the Sandringham Guards, which disappeared on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915.

The legend of the VIIII Hispana is as strong as ever today, and several web sites tell varying stories on them. The legion was one of the elite of the Roman Army and probably fought under Julius Caesar in Gaul.  It distinguished itself in Spain and the Balkans, for which it was rewarded with the titles HISPANA and MACEDONICA.  At the beginning of the first century AD it seems to have been based at Sisca in Pannonia, then in AD43 the legion was transferred to Britain as part of the invasion force.  There the legion was involved in heavy fighting during the rebellion of Boadecia, when it was badly mauled, and later they were pitted against the Picts along the Scottish border.  Until AD120, when their camp was abandoned and all trace of them disappeared from the soil of Britain.  An official inscription dating between AD130-60 which lists the legions of the Roman Army makes no mention of VIIII Hispana, leading to the conclusion that sometime between AD120 and AD160 the legion ceased to exist.  They are never referred to again by any Roman historian and little trace of them can be found in the archaeological record.

In this vacuum of hard facts legend has ballooned to fill the void.  Local stories tell of the VIIII’s final mission into Scotland.  There, it is said, they were ambushed and annihilated, like Varus’ legions in Germany, but their destruction was even more complete.  Not one survivor returned to tell the tale.  Some versions of the tale go even further: fearing Roman reprisals, the Picts cast the dead and all their equipment to the bottom of a deep loch, erasing the Romans forever from history and cleansing the countryside of any trace of them.  The Romans, it is presumed, shocked and humiliated, quietly removed the VIIII Hispana from the army lists and their historians solemnly vowed never to utter their cursed name again.

So goes the story, however we must always treat tales unsubstantiated by hard evidence with scepticism.  There are no ancient sources which attest to the destruction of the VIIII in pitched battle, and although the story supposedly survived by word of mouth within the local community, it was never mentioned in print until the mid-nineteenth century.  If the story is so old and so notable then we would expect at least one or two medieval monks to have recorded it.  The fact that the story appears during the Victorian era should arouse our suspicion.  The Victorian English were characterised by a romantic fascination with both Britain’s Roman history, which they were just beginning to unearth, and bonny Scotland.  A tale which could connect the two would have a lot of currency.  The tale of the VIIII Hispana sounds suspiciously like the historical story of Varus’ defeat at the hands of German Celts.  That story grew particularly popular in Germany when nationalism was on the rise, and would have been a convenient model for anyone who wanted to construct a tale about the indomitable Scots.  Furthermore, since the tale first became popular generations of treasure-hunters have scoured the Scottish countryside searching for any trace of the VIIII Hispana, to no avail whatsoever.  So, the tale of the VIIII Hispana lacks any physical evidence, is only recently recorded given the antiquity of the events it refers to, and may well be the product of amateur archaeology tainted by ideological romanticism.

What did, then, did happen to the VIIII Hispana.  Modern archaeology can now hint at some kind of answer.  It now seems likely that their base on the Scottish border was indeed abandoned around AD120, however traces of the VIIII Hispana have now been found in Holland, dating to AD120-30.  There is no doubt that by AD160 the VIIII Hispana ceased to exist, however they were not destroyed in Britain, but rather transferred to Europe and perhaps finally destroyed in one of the uprisings in Hungary or Judea.  We should not be too surprised that pinning down the movements of legions like the VIIII is so difficult.  Sometimes because the Roman world is so well known to us, compared to other ancient societies, we forget just how much we don’t know.  Often the evidence is slim.  Although noone doubts that the VIIII Hispana was stationed in Britain for some time, it is worth remembering that even the evidence for this relies only on 3 literary references, 1 monumental inscription, 1 altar, and 7 tombstones, plus some roof tiles stamped with the legion’s number (it is roof tiles which indicate the legion’s occupation of Holland also).  In all just a dozen written references identify the legion in Britain.  Regarding their demise, it seems most likely that the VIIII Hispana fell victim to the crisis in manpower that gripped the Roman Army after Teutoberg.  The Roman Empire simply couldn’t provide enough recruits to maintain its legions against the natural attrition involved keeping its borders internally and externally secure.  In the same period at least two other legions dropped from the army lists, worn out subduing internal revolts or holding back tides of tribal warriors at the margins.  In this context the Picts can take some credit for bleeding the VIIII Hispana, but it was demographics that killed it in the end.

The legend of the 1/5 Norfolks reflects the Twentieth Century psyche, just as the legend of the VIIII Hispana probably reflects the Nineteenth Century romantic spirit.  It began on August 12, 1915, when the battalion began its march across the countryside of the Dardanelles as part of the concerted but futile Britich effort to break out from their Gallipoli landing grounds.  An official despatch of December 11, 1915, records the story of “a very mysterious thing”:

“The 1/5 Norfolk were on the right and found themselves for a moment less strongly opposed than the rest of the brigade.  Against the yielding forces of the enemy Colonel Sir H. Beauchamp, a bold, self-confident officer, eagerly pressed forward, followed by the best part of the battalion.  The fighting grew hotter, and the ground became more broken.  At this stage many men were wounded, or grew exhausted with thirst.  These found their way back to camp during the night.  But the Colonel, with sixteen officers and two hundred and fifty men, still kept puching on, driving the enemy before them…  Nothing more was ever seen or heard of any of them.  They charged inot the forest and were lost to sight and sound.  Not one of them ever came back.”

And at that moment the Norfolks disappeared from history and entered the world of myth.  Theories regarding their disappearance range from Turkish atrocity to alien abduction.  However the facts of the case are less exotic, if just as tragic.

Firstly, we should not forget that it was not unusual for the armies of the First World War to lose whole units in a single action.  The doctrines of the time attempted to neutralise the new automatic weapons and artillery by pitting iron resolve and discipline against them.  Steel and lead trumped iron discipline at every engagement.  In one incident during the Gallipoli landings the first forty eight men of the Munster Fusiliers who left the landing ship River Clyde, proceeding down the gangway in single file, were killed by Turkish machinegun fire one after another.  Such tactics quickly annihilated companies, battalions and regiments.  Likewise hundreds of men literally disappeared during the massive artillery barrages on the Western Front.

Of course in such situations the fate of the missing is in no doubt.  In the case of the 1/5 Norfolks, however, the British advance never caught up with them and they met their end beyond sight of their comrades, permitting rumour, speculation and fantasy to run wild.  All this was given fresh energy after the war when two veterans of the Gallipoli campaign reported seeing the doomed men march into a mysterious cloud which then lifted and they were gone.  This story lay dormant until the mid-seventies when the UFO fever hit full-pitch.  Recently a British television movie preferred to portray the Norfolks as the victims of an anonymous atrocity.

It may be a surprise, then, that the mystery of the 1/5 Norfolk Battalion was quietly solved soon after the cessation of hostilities in 1919.  Writing on September 23, 1919, the commander of the Graves Registration Unit at Gallipoli declared:

“We have found the 1/5 Norfolks – there were 180 in all; 122 Norfolk and a few Hants and Suffolks with 2/4 Cheshires.  We could identify only two – Privates Barnaby and Cotter.  They were scattered over an area about one square mile, at a distance of at least 800 yards behind the Turkish front line.  Many of them had evidently been killed in a farm, as a local Turk, who owns the place, told us that when he came back he found the farm covered with the decomposing bodies of British soldiers which he threw into a small ravine.  The whole thing quite bears out the original theory that they did not go very far on, but got mopped up one by one, all except the ones who got into the farm.”

In my next article I shall discuss ancient chemical warfare – how chemicals were used by the armies of the ancient world to give them a fighting edge. 

Acknowledgments:

Special acknowledgements to D. Mark Sansom for an excellent web article summarising the history of the VIIII Hispana at https://www.esg.ndirect.co.uk/ninth_legion.htm  (2/12/03), and to F. Lorraine Petre, who’s The History of the Norfolk Regiment was quoted in extract at https://user.glo.be/~snelders/sand.htm  (2/12/03).

Article written by Jonathan Wicken