Free Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James by David Downie Page B

layered, complex landscape. The more you read and queried, the more you realized that the foundations, the lowest layers of the Morvan’s saga, were strife, hunger, bloodshed, and a nightmare existence.
    Some documents found in the Helvetian camp were brought to Caesar , Alison continued, a register of the names of all the emigrants .
    The total of fighting-age men, plus women, children, and old men, came to 368,000, Caesar noted, comprising 263,000 Helvetii, 36,000 Tulingi, 14,000 Latovici, 23,000 Rauraci, and 32,000 Boii … a census was taken of those who returned home, and the number was found to be 110,000 .
    I asked Alison to re-read the paragraph. Then I subtracted 110,000 from 368,000. That came to 258,000 dead or enslaved. In a single battle? Even if the count was off, even if only one tenth of that number had died, it was still a massacre of unimaginable proportions.
    This seemed to me a two-headed revelation. First, I’d never known that body counts were important in Antiquity, and wondered now whether the Romans had sent out messengers to tell families their loved ones had died. Caesar doesn’t mention the tally of dead Romans and mercenaries, only that of the enemy.
    The second revelation was that Caesar, too, outsourced to security contractors and shied away from showing or talking about body bags. The parallels to modern warfare and public relations were uncanny.
    But to return to the Helvetii—our modern-day Swiss—and a peculiar irony of history, it suddenly struck me that the infallible pope, heir to Caesar and the divine-right emperors that followed him, is guarded by none other than Swiss guards.
    Alison read several more pages, but the rain had gotten going again and the book was getting wet. No sooner had we packed and started walking than a Mirage fighter jet appeared, a dart on the horizon. It roared toward us, its black silhouette piercing the cloudy gray sky. Within seconds it was overhead, a hundred yards above us. Instinctively I ducked. The heat of the jet’s flames seemed to singe mM">passéisme incarnate.dChy hair. The crackling, hoarse thunder deafened us. “Jesus J.,” I blurted. “Good thing we’re not superstitious.”
    “Superstitious? You think someone is listening?”
    Of course not. No one was watching or listening to us. The Mirages were merely engaged in low-fly exercises. The French did them daily, flexing their muscles, swinging the slingshot, one eye on the arms market, the other on the global Goliath in Washington, D.C. Precisely because the Morvan is depopulated, no one complains about low-flying fighter jets; and when they do, tant pis! Too bad, and so what?
    For the next hour I barely noticed the gentle sylvan scenery. It was hard to believe that in this gorgeous backwater, a place tourists will kill to visit, the natives had experienced millennia of misery. Theirs was a heritage of blood. They’d bred canon-fodder for the Great War of 1914–1918. Hundreds of thousands had perished. Long before that, their Celtic ancestors had suckled spear-fodder—the warriors and drudges Caesar described, men sent out for slaughter by pitiless Druids and head-hunting tribal chieftains. The rule back then was burn your village before your enemy could take it. Burn and fight, or flee before superior force. Few straggled. Those left behind would be hideously tortured and disfigured, skewered alive or enslaved by the newcomers—either rival tribesmen or the Romans, who were charitable in comparison.
    We crossed a modern causeway, pausing to admire the lake’s blue waters, so worryingly low. Then we found the dirt road to Marigny and started to climb. The road looked suspiciously straight, like the Roman road to Bazoches. Had Caesar ridden up it? Had I always been obsessed with Caesar and Rome? If so, why? The answer seemed straightforward enough. It wasn’t merely my Roman genes and the idyll I’d experienced while living in Rome as a child. My fascination stemmed from the eerie,