In AD 9, a warlord known as Arminius led an army of Germanic warriors belonging to the Cherusci tribe. They were armed to the teeth, carrying wooden spears with fire-hardened tips for throwing and stabbing. Some of them also held long iron slashing swords. A few wore armour of mail, but most were stripped to the waist, pumped up with adrenaline. They gathered in the gloom of the Teutoburger Wald – a vast region of ancient forest in what are today the German states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia.
Arminius and his men shadowed three Roman legions marching through the brushwood and ferns. Some of the younger warriors had let their hair and beards grow – swearing only to cut them when they dipped their weapons in the blood of their Roman enemies. When Arminius finally unleashed his forces on the Romans, the battle was brutal and without mercy. The three Roman legions were wiped from the face of the earth, and as news of the massacre spread, the classical world was rocked to its foundations.
Nearly two thousand years later, this devastating display of primitive energy would have a strange afterlife – as the dark inspiration for Germany’s more modern warlords. In 1875, Kaiser Wilhelm I, the man who oversaw the annihilation of the French Army at the Battle of Sedan and founded the German Second Reich, sat in a pavilion near to the city of Detmold. The site was chosen because it was believed to be close to the original battlefield fought over by Germans and Romans in AD 9. The Kaiser watched as actors dressed as ancient warriors re-enacted the bloody events of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
Voices on the Path