BOOK ONE: YESTERDAY than Berthold. Vogelsang was wily. But Berthold was plucky and tenacious. He sat brooding over the books which dealt with his sub- ject, Tacitus, Mommsen, Dessau. Had Arminius the Cherus- can actually accomplished anything? His victory had been precious little use to hirn. Only two years later, the Romans were across the Rhine again; they recovered two of the three lost eagles of their legions. The whole thing was only a colonial war, a kind of Boxer rebellion, which the Romans soon settled. Arminius himself, when he had been conquered by the Ro- mans, was slain by his own countrymen. His father-in-law looked on from the Emperor's box while Arminius's wife and son walked in chains in the Roman triumphal procession. What can we learn from Arrninius the German ? General considerations were no use to Berthold, He had to have strik- ing pictures: The fight. Three legions. A legion means about six thousand fighting-rnen. With its baggage-train and other appurtenances, ten to twenty thousand. Swamps, forests. It must havebeen very much like Tannenberg. A camp of forti- fied baggage-wagons, the thickening fog. Above all, the Ger- mans hated the Roman law-makers. They temporarily spared their lives so as to put them to death later on with exquisite tortures. The Germans, Berthold read in the book by the nationalistic historian Seeck, believed that common law was inimical to personal honour. They did not want any law. That was the chief reason for their rebellion. It was essential to know what Arminius had looked like. That point had struck Berthold at once. Again and again, with concentrated effort, he tried to get an idea of him. The monu- ment in the Teutoburg Forest, a tall pedestal with a conven- tional statue upon it, didn't help at all. "Look here, man, that Arminius of yours was DO fool," Heinrich Lavendel said to hirn. "Those boys must have had a different kind of intelli-