Explanation: During Caesar’s Gallic Wars, some Germanic tribes thought it would be a good lark to cross the Rhine and do some raiding. Caesar, rather than fording the river or crossing in boats, built a bridge in ten days, crossed 40,000 Roman soldiers over, did some retributive raiding of his own, then crossed the bridge back to Gaul… and burned it so he couldn’t be followed.
This was stunning to the Germanic tribes, as they had thought themselves safe on the far side of the Rhine from large-scale intervention - bridges of the kind and scale Caesar and the Romans built were unknown to the Germanic tribes, and they watched this architectural marvel be built in a matter of days - and then be burned once Caesar was done with it. Quite a shock!
Fear the engineers of the ancients, as one fears the physicists of today.
Are we supposed to fear physicists?
Only when they are become death, destroyer of worlds.
[atom splits]
This doesn’t look like the Rhine, though.
It looks much too shallow and narrow.Which makes the Roman bridge building even more impressive. There are large stretches of the Rhine that don’t even have bridges nowadays yet…
The modern day Rhine has been heavily canalised in a huge effort in the 19th century, back in Roman days, it used to be 3-4 times wider than nowadays.
There’s a nice Wikipedia article about the bridges (they did it twice)
The article is very interesting.
Ceasar was not even interested in conquering the Germanic tribes, he just built the bridge, burned a few villages, retreated and destroyed the bridge before they could react.
He was just sending a very clear message : do not fuck with me in Gaul.
Caesar had a soft spot for tactical bridge building, he did that a lot during his campaigns.
