Trajan is gone now, long gone, and he has a column monument on the Quirinal Hill just north of the Forum Romanum. It’s a pillar of marble decorated with friezes depicting his various campaigns, including the Dacian campaign, and at least once a week I pay it a visit. I look at the friezes and I can see that Trajan’s army advanced in three columns, driving through Dacia toward the capital city of Sarmizegetusa. It’s easy to see on the frieze, but when you’re a common soldier all you see is the road at your feet and the sweaty sunburned neck of the man marching ahead of you. The road, the sting in the air, the road, the dust in your throat, the road, the ache in the feet and the small of the back, the road—nothing but the endless road. I had to go to the maps and the friezes to find out what I hadn’t known at the time, that Trajan’s first column had followed the path of the winding rivers, going from garrison to garrison, then joined with the second column, which had marched north through the valleys. They saw fighting, I heard from the men who marched in those columns—hard and desperate fighting from bands of Dacian warriors who harried the outskirts of the march. But I marched with the third column, under Trajan, and I don’t remember any fighting.

I remember sunny days, drying the dew an hour after dawn and sending the dust up in white clouds under our hobnailed sandals. I remember the steep-sloped mountains furred with those tangy pines, falling abruptly into flat greenlands or glacial lakes. I remember Trajan’s red cloak as he rode, not safe behind his guards at the center of the column but spurring restlessly up and down the flanks with his eyes scanning the horizon.

There were villages destroyed in our wake, usually for giving aid to the rebels, but I don’t remember putting a torch to a single roof. I remember one girl with a red scarf over her hair and the huge liquid eyes all the Dacian women seemed to have, staring at us over the backs of her sheep as we marched by. Boil fell head over heels for another Dacian girl he met at a well, and brought her along with us for a few weeks. She shared the tent at night for a while, adding odd vegetables to our flat stews and teaching Sabina a few words of her own language, but the girl left Boil and went home after a week too many of long marches, and we ribbed Boil about it until he bellowed.