Honouring the Dead

Last month saw a prince of the British realm re-visit a battlefield to honour fallen soldiers of the Empire; men who had given their lives a full 94 years ago in the Great War.

At a newly dedicated cemetery near the French town of Fromelles, The Prince of Wales and other dignitaries, laid to rest the remains of scores of WWI servicemen, only recently discovered in an unmarked grave.

See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10679715

This very current event reminded me of a similar homage undertaken by a prince of Rome to a foreign battlefield. A Roman prince that also sought to honour the fallen soldiers of his great empire.

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That prince was Germanicus, grandnephew to the imperial progenitor Augustus and a celebrated soldier of his age. The year was A.D 15, and his expedition into the wild Germanic forests was of huge significance to the Roman national and military psyche.

[Germanicus Julius Caesar, 16 BC - 19 AD]

Only 6 years prior to that journey, Roman arms had suffered total annihilation (A.D. 9) at the hands of a pan-Germanic coalition in the enemy lands of the Tutonberg Forrest.

The utter destruction of three Roman legions, represented nothing short of a national trauma for the Roman state and left a lasting scar on an otherwise flourishing period of Augustan imperial consolidation. Some measure of that defeats significance can be perceived from the dramatic attention that the historian Tacitus devoted to Germanicus' re-visit of the battlefield:

"[He] conceived a desire to pay his last respects to these men and their general. Every soldier with him was struck with pity when he thought of his relations and friends and when he reflected on the hazards of war and of human life. ... a half-ruined breastwork and shallow ditch showed where the last pathetic remnant had gathered. On the open ground were whitening bones, scattered where men had fled, heaped up where they had stood and fought back. So, six years after the slaughter, a living Roman army had come to bury the dead men's bones of three whole legions. No one knew if the remains he was burying belonged to a stranger or a comrade. But in their bitter distress, and rising fury against the enemy, they looked on them all as friends and blood brothers. Germanicus shared in the general grief, and laid the first turf of the funeral-mound as a heart felt tribute to the dead."

Empires have always honoured their war-dead and their princes are perhaps destined to always re-visit past battlefields in their efforts to pay homage to the fallen.