Calmly flowed the cool water of the Arar beneath the June sun, winding its way through the lush green landscape of the province Gallia Narbonensis. Thousands of Helvetians—men, women, and children with their horses, donkeys, oxen, and wagons—had waited for days to cross the river on hundreds of rafts to join the war campaign. The carts were covered with furs, wool or linen cloths, bleached by sun and rain; underneath were baskets, tools, millstones, clay jars, fodder, weapons, and infants. People sat or stood patiently around the wagons. Women were knitting, some were cooking, children ran barefoot between the carts, dirt on their legs, carrying wooden toys or small knives like their fathers.

The rafts at the water’s edge were fully loaded with people and supplies, ceaselessly ferrying back and forth between the riverbanks. On the far side, the Helvetians moved along trampled paths into the Gallic forest with their wagons and cattle.

Three-quarters of the warband had already crossed the river when, behind the waiting crowd, the infernal sound of war horns rang out. Thousands of heads turned toward the green hill that blocked their view of the hinterland. It didn’t take long before panicked scouts came galloping over the ridge, shouting with wild gestures that the Roman army was approaching.

Great unrest surged through the crowd. Women left the wagons, pushed toward the river with their children and forced their way onto the rafts. In the panic, some rafts capsized; some beat each other, shoving others from the boats. Mothers waded waist-deep into the cold water, passing their children up to the overloaded vessels.

Meanwhile, the men seized their weapons, embraced their loved ones, turned their backs on them, and hastily formed a battle line, every one of them determined to buy his family as much time as possible.

Again and again, the war horns blared from beyond the hill, and the pounding of thousands of hobnailed boots grew louder. Then they appeared on the crest. Six legions advanced slowly, patiently, as disciplined as machines. The Helvetians, roughly five hundred paces away, held their line, staring nervously up the slope, watching the terrifying sight.

Then, suddenly, the horns sounded again, and the entire Roman host came to a halt. An eerie silence fell over the field. A few officers shouted orders, and the Romans closed ranks.

Among them, in the front line, stood Tiziana, a young Tribuna Laticlavia, and gazed down upon the sea of people below—fleeing civilians at the river and the thin line of Celtic warriors between them.

A few moments of unbearable tension passed before the Roman horns resounded again. The cohorts began to move, advancing steadily toward the Helvetians. The barbarians could no longer endure the wait and charged with the courage of despair—thousands of screaming, bearded warriors, some half-naked and painted, others armored, young and old alike, all shouting at the top of their lungs as they hurled themselves at the legionaries.

Tiziana tried to breathe calmly and advanced with steady steps, shoulder to shoulder with her comrades. When the barbarians had come within thirty paces, the next signal rang out. Abruptly, the Romans halted and raised their pila.

"Iacite!" Tiziana shouted, and the legionaries hurled their spears. The volley wrought a horrific slaughter among the Helvetians. The lucky ones had their shields pierced and were forced to throw them away; others were impaled outright. Tiziana’s spear struck a young Helvetian in the throat. He dropped axe and shield, fell to his knees, grasped the spear with both hands, and stared at it with panicked eyes as his tribesmen stormed past.

The Romans drew their short swords and let the barbarians crash into their line. With a deafening roar, the wild warriors slammed into the legionaries. One man threw himself with full force against Tiziana’s shield, slashing at it with his massive sword. She thrust her gladius like a stinger into his soft thigh. The warrior screamed in pain and collapsed. Another immediately took his place and swung his axe at her shield. Tiziana’s comrade stabbed him through the ribs with a short motion. The next tried to seize her shield and wrench it away but screamed as he had to pull back his hand—now missing three fingers.

Desperately, the Helvetians battered the living fortresses across the whole front. They managed here and there to knock a Roman out of formation, but another immediately stepped in. Slowly, methodically, patiently, the legionaries pushed the desperate warriors back toward their families and the river, leaving a carpet of corpses beneath their boots. The Romans trampled over the wounded warriors, who were ruthlessly stabbed by the men in the rear ranks.

The Helvetians retreated faster and faster. Some threw away their shields already and ran toward the river. More and more turned their backs and fled. Eventually, the Helvetian host collapsed entirely. The men ran toward the bank, and the Romans pursued them in mechanical unison. A few still stood in their way, eyes filled with tears—and were mercilessly cut down.

The fleeing warriors rushed past the abandoned wagons, arriving at the crowd of women and children helplessly waiting at the riverbank, begging the men on the rafts to hurry. In the chaos, those at the rear began pushing the mass of bodies, shoving the front ranks ever deeper into the Arar.

The Roman formations reached the abandoned wagons and had to break formation to advance further. The legionaries began running toward the helpless horde of barbarians, Tiziana at their head. Then they charged like rabid dogs and fell upon the lost Helvetians. Men and women, old and young, threw themselves to their knees, raising their hands. Tiziana plunged her sword into the first man’s throat, shoved him aside, stabbed his wife, stabbed the next, and the next, as did the men around her.

A pretty girl threw herself at her feet and clung to her legs, begging. Tiziana drove her sword into the girl's neck, stepped over her, and thrust her blade into the next body. Her bloodlust grew by the second- she gnashed her teeth and cursed that she couldn’t swing her sword faster. So many bare bodies to stab—no armor, no shields, just soft flesh. She couldn’t get enough. In her frenzy, she cast aside her scutum and stabbed faster and faster. Behind each one who fell, another appeared. Men, women, children— they all fell beneath her blade: some dead, some dying, some merely wounded, only to be finished off by the next.

The men on the rafts no longer dared to cross and watched in despair as their kin were slaughtered. They screamed in rage and agony as they witnessed the massacre. Many, in desperation, threw themselves into the river to escape the Romans’ blades—only to be swept away.

After more than an hour, the Romans had hacked their way through the sea of bodies and reached the shore. The Arar shimmered dark red, filled with hundreds of bodies, some moving and some not. Some stood in the water up to their necks on tiptoes, holding their offsprings aloft, while legionaries on the bank laughed and competed to hit them with stones. Others walked across the battlefield with stoic expressions, stabbing anything that moved beneath the corpses. Some legionaries raped Helvetian women—both living and dead.

Tiziana knelt on all fours at the riverbank, surrounded by countless dead barbarians, gasping like a madwoman, nearly fainting from exhaustion. She was drenched head to toe in blood—some hers, most her enemies’. She dipped her calloused hands into the cool, red water and dug them into the brown mud. She wanted to wash her face and leaned over the water only to stare into a hideous, dark red grimace, its hair matted with wet flesh, with two wide, crazed eyes glaring back at her, bloody strings dripping from its mouth.

*****

Twelve weeks later and four hundred miles further south, Tiziana lay upon the terrace of her villa, far from the fields where blood had soaked the earth and sipped her wine in quiet satisfaction. She had spoken to her guests, Sarah and her cousin Livia, of the campaign — of the battles at the Arar and Bibracte, of the arrow that struck her hip, and of how swiftly she recovered.

Her guests had listened in silence, until at last Sarah spoke:

“Thank the gods you are returned to us. Surely now, after all you have endured, you will rest?”

“I shall return to the camp the moment the medicus declares me fit to march. I already miss the war.”

“But… but war is terrible,” said Livia, her voice trembling. “You have escaped its jaws. How can you seek it again?”

Tiziana regarded her.

“I would wish for a world without war,” Livia added.

The aristocrat smiled faintly, and her gaze turned distant.

“The world is war. All of it. It breathes war as men breathe air. How did Heraclitus put it? War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free.

Look upon nature: it is killing without end, strife without rest. One beast devours another, one tribe destroys the next, unceasingly. What we call peace is but the pause between storms, a moment when strength gathers for the next blow. The world is a battlefield, where wills clash in endless contest — a spectacle for the gods, who delight in this great slaughter. Without end, without aim, an eternal recurrence of the same; of war, and between, fleeting interludes we call peace.”

“But war is dreadful. It consumes men…” said Livia.

“Yes, war devours tens of thousands, and the best of a race are just good enough to be cast into its maw. But war also offers man a gift: it calls forth the hero who slumbers within. War breaks the routine of comfortable life. The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment of his life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence spent consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.

You cannot imagine that moment: when two stand face to face, weapons drawn, rage burning in their eyes, the will to destroy blazing in their hearts, and both know — one must fall, that the other may stride onward to the next struggle. You or I — nothing else remains in the world. One must have felt the enemy’s hot breath, seen the murder in his gaze. Whoever has endured such combat knows his strength and knows that the will of man has no bounds.”

“You spoke yourself of the pain the arrow brought you. But you do not have to go through that again. You are rich beyond measure. Why not now enjoy the peace you have earned? Why not enjoy all your wealth?”

Tiziana turned her face from them and watched as the sun, red as blood, sank behind the distant hills.

“I wish for every higher soul to know pain and trial. Wealth is sweet — I do not deny it — but it is danger also. Comfort is danger. Safety is danger. They make men weak. They make men cowards.

Struggle, on the other hand, is blessing. Strife is blessing. War is blessing. For that what does not kill me makes me stronger.”

A silence fell, as Sarah and Livia too gazed into the dying light.

“And if it kills you?” Livia whispered. “Are you not afraid?”

Tiziana breathed out, long and slow.

“I know no finer end. What a beautiful thought — to die in battle and squander a great soul.

Do you know what I fear far more than death? To grow old and soft and withered; to cling to life like a cripple to his staff.

Look at them — the old, the bent. They have crouched and hidden all their lives, and now, upon the threshold of death, they grow anxious and begin to wonder: Was that all? No. No, surely there must be more.

And so they speak to you of worlds beyond.

Set against that a young man, so full of life, so full of strength and abundance, that he would throw his life away for a cause or a love without a second thought! Is that not a thousandfold more beautiful? What stirs your heart more?

And think not the old do not bleed. Even if they have never stood upon a field of battle, they bleed all the same — wretchedly slow, day by day their strength ebbs, over years without end.

Give me the blade through the heart, in the tempest of destruction. Give me to fall upon meadows drenched in blood. Those whom the gods love, they call to themselves early.

Yet I know: not all are made for this. Yes, there are those to whom peace is the highest good. And the greatest peace would be the Sabbath of Sabbaths. To such weary souls I say: go, and sleep. Sleep forever. This world was never meant for you.”