thrown up a rampart against the British fort, took it, and drove the Britons out of the woods, receiving in return a few, though only a few, wounds.  Thus the battle ended in the victory of our enemies and our saviours.  Caesar tells us that he forbade his men to pursue the enemy for any great distance, because he was ignorant of the nature of the country, and because, the day being far spent, he wished to devote what remained of the daylight to the building of his camp.

Caesar speaks of this camp and rightly of course, as a thing of importance.  We know from his narrative, too, that it was occupied by some fifteen thousand foot and seventeen hundred horse, with their baggage and equipment for more than ten days.  Where did it stand?  It must have been within reach of the river, for without plentiful water no such army as Caesar encamped could have maintained itself for so long a period as ten days; exactly where it was, however, we shall in all probability never know.

Wherever it was, there Caesar spent the night, both he and his army, sleeping soundly, we may be sure, after the sleepless and anxious nights, one spent in the peril of the sea, the other in a not less perilous night march in a roadless and unknown country.

Yet did Caesar sleep?  Towards sunset the wind arose, and all night a great gale blew.  This was the fourth misfortune the expedition had experienced.  It had first been delayed for twenty-four days in starting; it had then lost the wind and had been for hours at the mercy of the tide, only landing at last when the day was far spent after a whole night upon the waters; it had been compelled by lack of water to quit the camp at the landing-place without rest, and utterly weary and sleepless, to undertake a perilous night march in search of water.  And now in the darkness, after the first encounter with the enemy, a great gale arose.

How often during that night must Caesar have awakened and thought of the sea and his transports.  It was, as he would remember, just such a storm which had ruined him in the previous summer.  To avoid a like disaster he had had his boats built for this expedition, shallow of draft and with flat bottoms that they might be beached.  But with the Mediterranean in his mind and the certain weather of the south, Caesar, seeing the August sky so soft and clear, had anchored and not beached the ships after all.  Perhaps the late landing, the necessity of building a large camp, and finally the perilous lack of water had prevented him from calling upon his men for a task so enormous as the beaching of eight hundred ships.  Whatever had prevented him, that task was not undertaken.  The eight hundred ships were anchored in the shallows, when, upon that third night of the expedition, a great gale arose.

Anxious though he must have been, very early in the morning of the following day, he sent out three skirmishing parties to reconnoitre and pursue the defeated Britons of the day before; but the last men were not out of sight when gallopers came in to Caesar from Quintus Atrius, at the camp by the shore, to report “almost all the ships dashed to pieces and cast upon the beach because neither the anchors and cables could resist the force of the gale, nor the sailors or pilots outride it, and thus the ships had dashed themselves to pieces one against another.”