And this, boy and girls, is why being auxilia sucks, there’s a perfectly good road, built by the might of the Roman Empire, and you get to trudge through the undergrowth looking for Gauls or whatever.
If you’re gonna be born a barbarian, be born to a horse-riding peoples. That way you skip all that footslogging and get better pay!
How often did you get poked in the eye by the guy in front?
Well, you’d have a bit more distance between soldiers than shown here, and may not be carrying your own javelins if you aren’t in a hostile area. But there’s a good reason that the Romans were one of the first militaries to put an extreme emphasis on the importance of a regular and practiced marching pace on the road, not just on the battlefield. Whether poked in the eye or stepping on someone’s heels with hobnailed sandals - mistakes ain’t good for traveling speed!
Also, from experience, hobnails+natural stone+any wetness=not a fun day.
Backing that up further, there’s an account in the Siege of Jerusalem of a Roman soldier slipping on the blood-slick stone streets and getting killed because his hobnailed sandals were not playing nice with the terrain.
I’m definitely going to tell that next time when someone slips in the very modern tiled bathrooms during a reenactment event.
