Word: wall
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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HADRIAN'S WALL by David Divine. 244 pages. Gambit...
...seemed within grasp of the legions. Thereafter, year by year, the troops that had pressed nearly to the top of Scotland fell back under guerrilla attacks from the Britons. At last, in A.D. 119, Rome decided to stem the retreat and make the best of things by building a wall...
Today, from Solway Firth to the North Sea, through places with amiable country names like Milking Gap, Castle Nick, Twice Brewed, Bogle Hole and Lodhams Slack, the overgrown and tumbled remains of the wall still snake across the neck of Britain. For generations, antiquaries have poked at it and puzzled over it as antiquaries will, especially if they are British. The latest is David Divine, a military correspondent for the London Sunday Times, who prefers strategy to stones. He has wrung from the grassy ruins evidence to show how Domitian's mistake, and the very existence of the wall...
...Line. That the doom was a long time coming-more than 250 years-may be credited in part to the tactical genius of another, greater emperor. Hadrian had been ruling barely five years when, in A.D. 122, a frontier tour brought him to the site of the wall. He evolved (personally, according to Divine) a radical new defense plan that helped in part to lend his name to the wall. Previously, Roman soldiers had been stationed in fortlets behind the barrier; from these they were ready to be rushed to threatened segments whenever an attack was mounted. Hadrian added cavalry...
...destroy missions in Viet Nam, Roman cavalry patrols regularly harried the forested valleys and bare fells rising to the Scottish border. Caledones creeping through the furze or wheeling down on the moors in small war chariots soon learned the bloody lesson that the sector in front of the wall was as Roman as anything behind it. So manned, however, the wall was expensive. Divine estimates that no fewer than 35,000 troops, 63% of the entire garrison force of Roman Britain, were tied up along...