“You’ve done this before, Captain,” the spear instructor said, “so you know the drill. You can warm up for a while with the javelins, then you start in with the pilum. The shields are over there.”
My shoulder twinged with anticipation, knowing what was to come. Javelin throwing is an agreeable enough sport, one at which I excelled. Of course, there is a major difference between tossing the things out on the Campus Martius, without a shield and dressed in a tunic, and going through the same exercise wearing armor with a legionary’s scutum on your left arm.
The scutum is nothing like the light, flat, narrow cavalry shield, which is called a clipeus. The scutum covers a man from chin to ankles and is as thick as a man’s palm. It is oval in shape, made of three layers of thin wood, steamed and glued so that it curves around the body, giving protection to the sides and improving the balance. It is backed with thick felt and surfaced with bullhide, and completely rimmed with bronze. The long, spindle-shaped boss makes a spine down the center, its widened middle section hollowed out to accommodate the hand. The boss is sheathed with bronze: this tremendous contraption has to be managed with a single, horizontal hand-grip in its center, behind the boss.
In truth, the scutum is not so much a shield as a portable wall, turning a line of legionaries into an advancing fortress. In the famous “tortoise” formation a unit of cohort size can advance with scuta overlapped in front, back, sides, and overhead like roof tiles, invulnerable to anything smaller than a boulder hurled by a catapult.
In ordinary use, the scutum doesn’t have to be maneuvered much, because it leaves so little uncovered to begin with. In a stand-up, toe-to-toe fight, it need only be raised a few inches from time to time to ward off a thrust to the face. But when hurling the javelin, it has to be raised high for balance, placing great stress on the left wrist and shoulder. That will only happen a few times in the course of a battle, but in practice it just goes on over and over—and so it was that morning.
Javelins are about four feet long, lightweight weapons to soften up the enemy before the battle lines clash. The pilum is another matter entirely. It is man-height, made of ash or other dense wood, and as thick as your wrist up to the balance point, where it flares to form an area as long and as thick as a forearm. The rest of its length is an iron shank terminating in a small, barbed head. Compared to a javelin, it has all the flight characteristics of a pointed log.
Military tinkerers are always coming up with ways to improve the pilum, the idea being to make it difficult for an enemy to throw it back at you, always a hazard with missile weapons. Marius slotted the iron head into the wooden shaft, fixing it with one rivet made of iron and another made of wood. The idea was that, upon impact, the wooden peg would break and the shank would then rotate on the iron one, rendering it useless for throwing. Caesar’s innovation was to temper only the point, allowing the relatively soft shank portion to bend. This must have made him popular with the armorers, who had to straighten them out after the battle.
Of course, the pila employed for training were of a more permanent nature. The target was a man-sized straw bale fifty feet away. The pilum is never thrown farther than that. This is primarily because there is hardly a man alive who can throw one farther than that. Most centurions instruct their men to get within ten feet before hurling the pilum. That way you can scarcely miss and the effect is devastating.
The purpose of the pilum is not so much to kill the enemy as it is to deprive him of his shield. With the massive thing firmly lodged in the shield and bent past further use, the warrior can only abandon the shield or else employ it very inefficiently. The commonly taught technique is to nail the enemy’s shield with the pilum, draw your gladius, step in, give the shaft of the pilum a kick to uncover the unfortunate wretch, and stab him. Most barbarians are too lazy to pack around heavy shields of the Roman type, so as often as not the pilum goes right on through the flimsy shield and impales the man behind it. Then there is nothing left to do except to find another barbarian to stab. Sometimes barbarians try to endure the first storm of missiles by huddling behind overlapped shields, only to find all their shields nailed together by pila so that all have to be abandoned, leaving them defenseless.
In short, although the sword gets all the glory, the pilum is our battle-winner.
The drill with the pilum was always the same: step out, raise the spear over the shoulder, then, at the proper range, take one very long step. Back goes the pilum, up comes the scutum, and heave. To get the massive spear fifty feet you have to use your whole body and you feel the strain from your right wrist to your left ankle. And in training, this goes on hour after hour. The instructor encourages you with his wittiest line of patter.