V
There was an eerie silence as the dawn broke over the fleet of ships sailing in close company across the English Channel. With tense expressions, all on board the eighty transports and the dozen warships of their escort strained their eyes to study the foreign land ahead as the white cliffs of Dover began to shine luminously in the new day’s light.
They had sailed from France at midnight, putting out with the tide, after a day of good late summer weather. With a southerly wind behind them they’d made excellent progress in the night, passing Cape Gris-Nez, then turning northwest. They were following a course planned in advance for them by young Colonel Gaius Volusenus, who had earlier reconnoitered potential landing sites along the southern coast of England in the frigate that would have now been leading the invasion convoy.
Julius Caesar and his senior officers were spread among the warships of the escort, frigates and cruisers with banks of oars that flashed and dipped in the early morning light to the beat pounded out by the warships’ keleustes, their timekeepers, with wooden mallets on wooden blocks. On board the transports, locally built craft with relatively flat bottoms, high prows, and sterns and powered by just a single square sail each, were the Spanish legionaries of the 10th and 7th Legions, with an average of 150 men to each troopship.
With just enough vessels at his disposal to carry two legions and several hundred cavalry, it had been a given that one of the legions Caesar would take with him was the 10th. The 7th, four years older than the 10th, with its men aged between twenty-seven and thirty, had won a place in the invasion force after its dominating performances against the Gallic tribes of Brittany and Aquitania over the past few years. The two legions had built an embarkation camp at Boulogne in the Pas de Calais area, and there the preparations for the operation had been made, the equipment readied, the fleet assembled, and the ammunition and supplies brought in for a brief exploratory visit across the Channel. Caesar himself admitted that little could be achieved in the short amount of campaigning time left to him that year, but, as Plutarch was to say, Caesar had a love of honor and a passion for distinction. He was on a high after his latest successes against the Gauls and the Germans, and, driven by a determination to exceed the reputations of rivals living and dead, he was determined to set foot on Britain, to go where no Roman general had gone before.
While Caesar was engaged on his British expedition, the rest of the army wasn’t to be idle. He had divided the remainder of the legions into two forces. One, under General Publius Sulpicius Rufus, was guarding the embarkation area around Boulogne. The other, under General Quintus Titurius Sabinus, was marching up the coast to subdue a tribe in Belgium and another in Holland that had yet to send ambassadors and negotiate peace treaties with the Romans.
There was movement along the top of the chalk cliffs to their left as the invasion fleet slid up the coast of Kent, or Cantium, as the Romans dubbed it. Observing the ships from the heights were British tribesmen, cavalry and infantry, fully armed and waiting in their war paint—their exposed upper bodies and grim faces daubed in wild, tattoolike patterns with blue-green woad, a plant dye. The Britons’ friends in Gaul had warned them of Roman preparations to cross the Channel, and they had initially sent envoys to Caesar to discuss an alliance with Rome, to forestall an invasion. But when Caesar sent his new ally King Commius of the Atrebates tribe—a man he’d installed as leader of the Atrebates after the Battle of the Sambre—as his ambassador, to continue discussions on his behalf, the Britons had made Commius and the thirty mounted Atrebatian warriors of his escort prisoners. Just as Caesar was really more interested in conquering British tribes on their doorstep than signing treaties with them from afar, the tribes were determined to repel invaders.
At about 9:00 A.M. the Roman fleet dropped anchor off a beach just past the South Foreland, which had been selected for the landing during Colonel Volusenus’s earlier reconnaissance mission. But Caesar was far from happy with the site chosen by Volusenus, a narrow beach with high cliffs on either side from which the gathering Britons could send down a hail of missiles against a force trying to land from the sea. Caesar held off giving the order to go ashore, allowing time for all the ships of the convoy to arrive.
In particular he was waiting for his cavalry. The Roman mounted troops assigned to the operation had been sent to the little port of Ambleteuse, six miles up the coast from Boulogne, where a smaller fleet of eighteen transports had been prepared for them. This second convoy, carrying the cavalry units, was supposed to leave Ambleteuse at the same time the infantry set sail. What Caesar didn’t know was that the smaller convoy’s departure had been delayed by the late overland arrival of the cavalry from Boulogne. By the time they’d been loaded with horses, riders, equipment, and feed, these ships missed the tide and were driven back to the French coast in the darkness. There they remained still, at anchor and waiting for a fresh tide and a favorable wind.
By the early afternoon, running out of patience with the missing cavalry, Caesar convened a conference of senior officers on board his flagship to discuss the situation. They were all rowed to his cruiser in their warships’ dinghies. There, on the deck, and in sight of the Britons on the bluffs, Caesar briefed his generals and colonels on the alternative landing sites previously identified by Colonel Volusenus. Caesar then passed on his intention to land farther up the coast before nightfall. He tells us that prior to dismissing them, he gave his commanders a warning: “For this landing to succeed, my orders—and there are likely to be a number of them, in rapid succession—will have to be obeyed instantly.”
Wind and tide were running with them, and Caesar gave the order to weigh anchor as soon as the officers had been rowed back to their ships. It was 3:00 P.M. when the fleet began to move up the coast.
On land, the surprised Britons followed their progress. Then, realizing the Roman intentions, their war chiefs sent cavalry galloping ahead. And chariots. With each vehicle containing a seated driver and a standing warrior, a noble of his tribe, and drawn by a pair of horses, these two-wheeled war machines were nothing like the idealized and historically inaccurate statue of Boudicca and her Roman-style chariot on London’s Thames Embankment today. The British chariot was an open-ended platform with low wicker sides. And, contrary to folklore, there were no blades attached to the wheels. War chariots had ceased to be used in mainland Europe at least a hundred years earlier, but they were still deployed by armies in some parts of the East, as Caesar would find at the Battle of Zela in eight years’ time.
The new landing site was a long, flat beach between present-day Walmer Castle and Deal. The Britons reached it first. As the leading ships of the fleet came up, cavalry and chariots were galloping along the sands, the warriors waving their javelins and challenging the invaders. Others dismounted and came a little way into the water, shaking their javelins and large rectangular shields and yelling insults. The nobles were better clothed and equipped. The rank and file were generally lithe little men with mustaches but not beards, and stripped to the waist with their faces and torsos decorated with blue woad designs.
Caesar gave the order for the landing to go ahead, and the transports slid into the shallows and grounded. But because of their draft and heavy loads, the craft were still in relatively deep water. Spanish legionaries going over the sides fully armed with shields and javelins would find themselves up to their chests in water, even up to their necks in some cases, and they didn’t like the idea at all. One stumble and they would be fish feed. There were a lot of heads shaking along the low rails of the transports.
Seeing this, Caesar signaled the warships of the escort to also run aground, farther down the beach on the Britons’ right flank, from where they could cover the landing with their artillery and the auxiliary archers carried by several cruisers. Without hesitation, the masters of the warships obeyed—the cruisers and frigates slid into shore with their oars raking the surf, and ejecting volleys of arrows.
On the sand, the Britons, who had never seen ships powered by banks of oars before, lost their initial bravado and drew back out of range. This was the moment Caesar had been waiting for, and he gave the order for the legionaries of the 7th and the 10th to go over the side. But still the troops hesitated, looking at the deep water beside them and the rolling surf that could knock them off their feet.
It was now that the aquilifer of the 10th Legion, the bearer of its eagle standard, took the step that was to immortalize him, although his name has not come down to us. No more than twenty-seven years of age, he probably first uttered the Legionary’s Prayer: “Jupiter Greatest and Best, protect this legion, soldiers all,” adding, according to Caesar, “May my act bring good luck to us all.” Then he went over the side with the eagle of the 10th.
“Jump in, boys!” he called to his comrades, holding the standard high, “unless you want to surrender our eagle to the enemy. I, for one, intend doing my duty by my homeland and by my general.”
The men of the 10th on ships all around him gaped in horror as the aquilifer bore their eagle toward the beach. The eagle of the legion, silver at this time, gold by imperial times, was venerated by its legionaries. Kept at an altar in camp with lamps burning throughout the night, it and the ground it stood on were considered sacred. Conveyance and protection of the eagle were the tasks of the men of the 1st Cohort, but it was the obligation of every soldier in the legion to defend it with his life. Roman generals were feted as national heroes for retrieving eagles wrested from legions by the enemy. But the loss itself was never forgotten. It was the greatest dishonor a legion could suffer to have its eagle taken in battle, a stain to the reputation of legion and legionary alike that never went away.
Well did the men of the 10th know there were many instances in Roman history of eagle-bearers and legionaries and centurions giving their lives to save their eagle. And here was this idiot about to make a gift of the eagle of the 10th to the barbarian British! With a roar, affronted men of the 10th went over the side and then splashed through the water, following their crazy-brave eagle-bearer and their hallowed eagle through the surf toward the waiting Britons. Not to be outdone, on seeing the 10th proceeding to land, the men of the 7th Legion went over the side as well.
Legionaries managed to reach the beach without any great difficulty, but because only small groups were coming off the boats in long, thin lines, each group was quickly attacked by the British cavalry on the sands, with the Britons astutely aiming their missiles at the Romans’ unprotected right sides. Many legionaries soon lost contact with their individual standards as they tried to keep the Britons at bay. The legionary was taught early in his training that if he couldn’t find his own unit’s standard in battle, any standard would do in an emergency. But in obeying this ethic now the men of the landing force found confusion, not clarity, bunching here, leaving gaps there.
Realizing that many of the men straggling ashore from each transport stood the risk of being isolated and wiped out, Caesar ordered the small boats of each larger vessel lowered. These were loaded with men who were then landed as ready-action squads wherever legionaries were in trouble. This tactic paid dividends as the reinforced maniples and cohorts were able to regroup in numbers behind their own standards, then drive the Britons back. As the natives began to turn and flee, Caesar cursed his missing cavalry. It was at this point in a battle that the cavalry arm usually followed up the infantry success and chased the enemy for miles. As it was, his legionaries were called back after half a mile or so rather than lose contact with their commanders on the beach.
Just the same, the success of the Roman landing had a humbling effect on the tribesmen. As the landing force began digging in just inland of the beachhead, British envoys came to Caesar, bringing the captive Atrebates king Commius, Caesar’s ambassador, and his thirty-man cavalry escort, complete with their horses. The prisoners were all handed over unharmed, with Caesar warmly greeting the young king of the Atrebates. The British envoys now asked for peace. In return, Caesar demanded hostages. Some were handed over immediately, and others from tribes far and wide began to make their way to him.
Four days after Caesar’s landing in Kent, the south wind picked up sufficiently for the cavalry to again set sail from Ambleteuse to join their commander in chief. But as the eighteen transports carrying the troopers and their horses slowly approached the Deal area and hove in sight of the Roman troops at the beachhead, a savage storm swept down from the north. Some of the transports were driven back to France, others were pushed down the English coast and forced to stand well out to sea during the night before making their way back to their starting point at Ambleteuse next day. None was sunk, but none reached Caesar either.
The ships of the first convoy fared even worse in the storm. The warships were still drawn up on the sand where they had beached themselves on day one, while the transports lay at anchor off the beach. There was a full moon that night, accompanied by a king tide. Romans had never previously taken note of the fact that particularly high tides accompanied full moons on the Atlantic shore, and no precautions had been taken, with the result that the high tide swamped the warships. Meanwhile, the storm drove the ships at anchor ashore. Some were wrecked on the coast, and all the others sustained often serious damage. Come the morning not a single ship was usable.
Now, all of a sudden, Caesar was cut off, without any long-term supplies or means of getting them from France, let alone transport for a speedy return to France for the winter as planned. Inspired by this, the British chieftains who’d been all for peace and fraternity a few days before put their heads together and decided to renew hostilities against the relatively small Roman force. As Caesar was to later learn, their plan was to starve the legionaries into submission, in the hope that their fate would discourage any future Roman forays onto British shores.
While the men of the 10th Legion concentrated on salvaging the wrecked ships, Caesar sent the 7th Legion out into the fields, which were ripe with British wheat. The 7th Legion’s bold and successful commander of the past two years, young General Publius Crassus, had gone back to Rome over the winter of 56–55 B.C. to take up a civil appointment in his father’s administration—he was consul for the year, along with Pompey the Great, in 55 B.C. The senior Crassus would travel to the Middle East the following year to take charge in Syria, and young Publius would go with him, becoming deputy commander of the force of seven legions that the elder Crassus was to take into Parthia in 53 B.C., when both father and son were killed at the infamous Battle of Carrhae, one of Rome’s most costly defeats, in present-day Turkey. The younger Crassus would die first, leading the advance guard. The Parthians put his severed head on the point of a spear and taunted his father and the rest of the Roman troops with it. Ironically, perhaps, young Crassus’s widow, Cornelia, soon married Pompey the Great, becoming his fifth wife. Pompey had been married to Caesar’s daughter Julia, but she was to die in childbirth in 54 B.C.
So it was without the guiding hand and brave leadership of popular young General Crassus that the 7th went to Britain, and went in search of wheat this day. The first day of wheat-gathering had gone well, with the legionaries toting numerous sacks full of it back to the beachhead camp. After dawn, the men of the 7th marched back out into the fields. It was a pleasant, sunny late summer’s morning as the legionaries marched along, passing small groups of Britons on their way to the camp to do business with the Roman supply officers at the beach. Away in the distance, men, women, and children were working in the fields, tilling the soil, tending their cattle. To the Spanish legionaries this would have been a rural scene reminiscent of home.
A few miles from the camp, and out of sight of it, they came to where they’d been working the previous day, a wheat field spreading to distant woods. Two-thirds of the wheat field had previously been leveled by the 7th, and just one section near the woods remained to be harvested. The men of the legion planted their standards in the ground, did the same with their javelins, leaned their shields against them, and removed their helmets. Then, taking scythes, wicker baskets, and empty sacks with them, they spread out in the rows of wheat stalks, cutting and collecting, chattering and laughing among themselves as they worked, closely supervised by their optios—sergeant majors—and centurions, who soon told them to shut up if they became too rowdy.
The legion hadn’t been at work many minutes when, out of the blue, javelins began slicing into the ground around the feet of bent and toiling soldiers nearest the woods. Moments later, with terrifying war cries, thousands of Britons came streaming from the trees, brandishing their weapons, and after Roman blood. Legionaries closest to the woods were cut down before they knew what hit them. With centurions bawling orders, the men of the 7th dashed for their weapons. There wasn’t time for trumpet calls, no time to form up by squad, century, maniple, or cohort. The Roman troops could only form a rough, disorganized battle line, with stranger beside stranger and each man realizing how much he’d become accustomed to the habits and company of the comrades of his own unit.
The Britons had hidden in the woods all night, knowing the legionaries would return in the morning for the last of the wheat. Now, while their infantry streamed along the perimeter of the wheat field and closed around the men of the 7th like the jaws of a vice, surrounding them, the tribal chieftains signaled to their cavalry and chariots, which had been waiting some distance away. The chariots sped up. Running back and forth along the Roman line, the vehicles were hard-to-hit weapon platforms, with the nobles standing beside the drivers and hurling javelins on each pass. The noise of pounding hooves and drumming wheels would have been deafening, with the legionaries losing count of how many chariots there were—hundreds, maybe thousands. The following year, according to Caesar, the Britons would put four thousand chariots into the field against him.
Sometimes the drivers would run out onto the chariot pole as far as the yoke as the chariots careered along at full speed, then ran back to their driving positions, as quick as lightning, just to awe the men of the 7th, who’d never seen anything like it in their ten years in the Roman army.
The British cavalry charged forward in bands, threw their javelins, then parted to allow the chariots to return in a rehearsed move, sliding through the gaps between the cavalry squadrons. To the legionaries, it would have been almost pretty to watch, had they not been fighting for their lives. Then a new tactic emerged: the chariots wheeled around and halted, the nobles jumped down, ran at the Roman line, and began hacking at the legionary shields with their swords. If the legionaries advanced against them, the nobles ran back to the waiting chariots, which then took off with them, leaving the Roman line disjointed so that the legionaries had to quickly retreat before they were caught out in the open by other chariots waiting close by for just such an opportunity.
There was an air of confidence about the Britons. They had the Romans surrounded in foreign territory and cut off from help. None had been allowed to escape to bring reinforcements. And these much-vaunted legionaries were looking disorganized and afraid. Probably as far as the tribesmen were concerned, the annihilation of the 7th Legion was just a matter of time.
Back at the Roman camp by the beach, Caesar was working in his headquarters tent, the praetorium, dictating to his Greek secretaries. Julius Caesar, man of destiny, man in a hurry, never wasted a minute. When traveling to and from Gaul, while carried in a litter he always had one of his secretaries riding with him, taking down his dictation. Sometimes he made part of the journey driving his own chariot, and on these occasions a secretary sat on the floor taking notes as his commander drove and composed at the same time, while a soldier of his bodyguard stood at the back of the chariot with a drawn sword in one hand and holding on for dear life with the other. On the march with his legions, Caesar often rode with a secretary mounted on either side of him, dictating a different piece to each. Occasionally Caesar would dictate to three or four different secretaries at a time. The material might be chapters of his numerous books— he wrote about subjects as varied as astronomy and public speaking, and his famous military memoirs. He even wrote poetry when the mood struck him—on the overland trip to Córdoba from Rome in 61 B.C. he’d passed the three and a half weeks writing a poem titled “The Journey.” Then there were his official dispatches, orders to his subordinates, reports to the Senate. And a torrent of private letters to his friends and allies back home. Politics, like soldiering, was in his blood. And because intrigue is the currency of politics, Caesar had invented a secret cipher, known only to his most intimate friends, involving the transposition of letters on the written page. Using this, he was able to safely pass on instructions and advice, to seek favors and to promise them, and so to manipulate affairs at home in his absence without fear of the letters falling into the wrong hands and his plans being uncovered.
One of the nonmilitary projects Caesar was working on in Britain was a scientific study of the length of the days on the island. As a matter of course, his legions were equipped with water clocks to time the three-hour watches in camp, and Caesar had several servants meticulously time the hours of sunlight between dawn and dusk each day using dedicated water clocks. It’s likely he was now pacing his tent, dictating a preliminary analysis, comparing the length of the days here to those in various parts of Gaul, when a colonel of the 10th Legion burst in. Stopping in midflow, Caesar would have looked up with an impatient frown, then recognized the colonel as the tribune of the watch, and noted a concerned look on his face.
The colonel would have advised that there was a worrying sight to be seen from the guard towers by the praetorian gate. Caesar would have followed the young colonel out into the main street of the camp, then hurried with him toward the nearby rear gate of the camp, passing off-duty men of the 10th lounging around in front of their tents who would have followed the general’s urgent passage with turning heads. At the gate, the ten men of the sentry detail—ten was the standard number of sentries assigned to each camp gate, according to Polybius—can be sure to have stood with their hands on the hilts of their sheathed swords, looking anxious. Caesar and the colonel can be expected to have clambered up a ladder into one of the wooden guard towers on either side of the praetorian gate, the gate that traditionally faced the enemy.
There, legionaries on tower duty would have pointed to the west. As Caesar followed their gaze, he saw, rising above the trees on the still morning air, a massive dust cloud, obviously man-made. The legionaries would have remarked that the boys from the 7th Legion were over there. Caesar didn’t have to be told that. He knew well enough which direction the men of the 7th Legion had taken when they set off on their foraging expedition that morning and would have already worked out that the dust cloud must have been raised by the pounding hooves of horses and the churning wheels of chariots.
Turning to the tribune of the watch, Caesar issued a stream of orders. The two guard cohorts were to march with him at once. Two off-duty cohorts were to relieve them, and all the remaining cohorts of the 10th Legion were to be called to arms and sent on his heels.
By the time his servants had strapped on Caesar’s armor and equipment, the two guard cohorts would have formed up in their ranks behind their standards in the main street, facing the tribunal, while the rest of the camp was in a commotion of preparation, with men running to answer the call of “To Arms” being trumpeted all around them. Caesar is likely to have addressed them briefly from the tribunal. Looking out over the faces of the twelve hundred waiting men, he would have told them that their comrades of the 7th Legion were in trouble and that they were going to their aid.
The men of the new sentry detail drew back the gate. Orders issued forth from centurions, and the two guard cohorts swung about and marched out the open gateway, like all camp gateways built just wide enough so that ten legionaries could pass through side by side. Caesar led the way. With him marched his personal standard-bearer and his deputies and staff officers. All were on foot because even Caesar’s own steed had been sent to Ambleteuse to make the crossing on the ships that had been modified with stalls for equine transport. There was not a single horse in the Roman camp—even the thirty horsemen of King Commius’s escort were off searching for fodder.
At Caesar’s order, the trumpets of the two guard cohorts would have sounded “Double Time,” and the men of the 10th hurried in the direction of the ominous dust cloud in the distance. As they drew closer, they heard the thunder of horses’ hooves, the rumble of chariot wheels, and the hollering and yelling of the attacking tribesmen. The distant fields were now empty of the tribespeople who had been innocently going about their business earlier in the day.
When Caesar and the men of the 10th came into view, the 7th Legion was holding its ground, but the ranks were tightly packed and suffering from the rain of missiles coming from the Britons surrounding them. When the tribesmen became aware of the approach of Roman reinforcements, their attack faltered. The tribesmen to the east, fearing an attack in their rear, pulled back, opening the way for Caesar to link up with the 7th. The men of the 7th were now able to regroup behind their correct standards and open up their ranks. Standing in their units with comrades of their own squads once more, they can be expected to have poked fun at each other in their relief to be back among friends, and waited for the next order from their own mean but familiar centurions.
Soon six more cohorts of the 10th came pounding over the horizon. As the two legions formed an extended battle line in their cohorts, Caesar held his position, and the Britons withdrew. When the danger had passed, Caesar marched the legions back to the beachhead. The men of the 7th gratefully regained the safety of their camp, refreshed themselves, and had their wounds seen to. But Caesar was not pleased with them. The 7th had not displayed the fighting qualities he’d come to expect of his best troops.
Several days of torrential rain followed, confining the legionaries to their tents. They kept their arms within reach, expecting to see more of the Britons. They weren’t to be disappointed. In this interim, the tribes of southeastern England sent messengers far and wide, telling other tribes how paltry the Roman force was, how easy it would be to destroy the invaders, and how much Roman plunder was the Britons’ for the taking— with the result that as soon as the weather cleared, a vast force of British infantry and cavalry converged on Caesar’s camp. Roman lookouts gave plenty of warning, time enough for the legions to put on their decorations and helmet crests before they marched out and formed battle lines in front of the camp.
The British infantry immediately charged the Roman front line and were promptly repulsed. Steadily, the legions advanced, driving the Britons back the way they had come. Caesar now had a small cavalry force at his disposal—the squadron of thirty Atrebate troopers who had accompanied King Commius—and he sent them after the fleeing tribesmen. Not only did these mounted men harry the Britons for miles, they also set fire to every one of the numerous Gallic-style timber and thatch farmhouses they found dotted around a wide area of eastern Kent, before returning to camp.
Again the British sent envoys begging for peace. This time Caesar demanded twice as many hostages as before, to be sent to him on the Continent. His naval officers informed him that they had been able to repair all but twelve of the transports damaged in the storm, and every one of the warships had been baled dry. At a squeeze, Caesar could take all his men back to France. With the equinox about to bring infamously stormy weather down from the north, he was ready to go.
Within days the army reembarked and sailed away. The crossing back to Boulogne was uneventful except for the closing stages. A strong wind blew down from the north and separated two of the transports from the rest of the convoy, pushing them farther along the French coast. The three hundred legionaries on board—men from either the 10th Legion or 7th Legion—were able to land without difficulty, but once they were ashore, they were attacked by French warriors of the renegade Morini tribe, who saw them as easy pickings.
Although they were surrounded, the legionaries held their ground and slipped a messenger away to Caesar up the coast. He immediately sent his idle cavalry from Ambleteuse and followed with the remainder of the 7th and 10th Legions. The surrounded legionaries held out for four hours until relief arrived, suffering a few wounded but no fatalities. As soon as the Roman cavalry appeared, the Morini scattered.
So drew to an end the first invasion of Britain. The men of the 10th went into winter camp at Boulogne, suspecting that unfinished business lay across the water for them. And when they heard that just two of the dozens of British tribes who had promised to send Caesar hostages had kept their word, the men of the 10th knew where they would be heading once the next campaigning season arrived.
While Caesar spent the winter on business in northern Italy and the Balkans, the legions back in Gaul weren’t idle. They worked industriously through the cold and wet, fulfilling Caesar’s instructions to repair his existing ships and to have the maritime tribes build a large number of new ones, many to Caesar’s own design. Some of the new craft were flat-bottomed, and all were equipped with oars as well as sails for added maneuverability.
When Caesar arrived back in Brittany in the spring of 54 B.C., he found he now had twenty-eight warships and more than six hundred new transports at his disposal, built from local timber, their sails and tackle brought up from Spain. Combining these with the surviving ships from the previous year’s expedition, he had enough vessels to take five fully equipped legions and two thousand cavalry with him on his next jaunt across the Channel. The tribes that had failed to keep their word to him and withheld their hostages were soon to be in for a rude surprise.
The units allocated to the latest amphibious operation were the veteran Spanish legions—the 10th, of course, plus the 7th, 8th, and 9th—as well as the northern Italians of the 12th Legion. Even though it had been raised at the same time and in the same region as the 12th, Caesar didn’t have much time for the 11th Legion. According to his staff officer Aulus Hirtius, even several years later he felt the 11th had yet to prove itself. Throughout its career, the 11th Legion would be like a new pair of shoes that you never really take to—they looked the part but were never a comfortable fit. Everything points to the 11th being left behind in France with the newer 13th and 14th Legions during the British operation, under the command of Caesar’s deputy General Labienus, to guard the French ports and gather wheat.
From camps along the French coast, a force of some fifty thousand legionaries and auxiliaries headed for the embarkation point that spring. But first Caesar marched his four Spanish legions to Trier in Germany, capital of the Treveri Germans, on the Moselle River. The Treveri were proving troublesome to Caesar, the problem stemming from an internal power struggle. After awing the Germans with the pomp and steel of four veteran legions, he sorted out Trever political matters, then turned around and marched back to the Atlantic coast.
The embarkation point for the latest amphibious operation had been moved several miles up the coast from Boulogne to a place Caesar called Portus Itius, which modern historians believe was probably Wissant. This shortened the Channel crossing for the invasion force, which Caesar reckoned would now be a distance of just thirty miles.
Caesar had to delay the departure for almost four weeks because the prevailing wind from the northwest was against him. When the weather improved and the wind changed, he gave orders for the legions and the cavalry to embark. But while the troops were boarding their ships, one of the Gallic auxiliary leaders, Dumnorix, a noble of the Aedui tribe, deserted with some followers and rode off toward his home in central France, between the Loire and Saône Rivers. Putting the invasion on hold, Caesar sent a large cavalry force after the deserters, determined to make an example of them to keep his other auxiliary troops in line, and the cavalry soon overtook them. When Dumnorix refused to come back and drew his sword, he was cut down. Only once his followers returned to camp did Caesar give the green light for the new British operation to go forward.
It was well into spring by the time the invasion convoy sailed. The first ships of the massive fleet upped anchor at sunset, and with a light southerly breeze behind them made steady progress up the French coast and out into the Channel as the night closed around them. By midnight the wind had dropped away, and come the dawn the current had pushed the leading divisions well up the coast of Kent, past the North Foreland and beyond the previous year’s landing zone.
Caesar was determined to land in familiar territory, and his decision to equip all the transports with oars now paid dividends. The legionaries on board the transports willingly manned the oars and pulled the heavily laden craft back down the coast toward present-day Deal, enjoying the fact that they were able to keep pace with the sleek warships of the escort with their trained oarsmen.
At midday, the fleet was off the coast from which Caesar had departed the previous fall. The shore was ominously deserted. Not a soul could be seen from the ships. But the tribesmen were there, skulking up on the hilltops. Since daybreak they’d been watching the horizon fill with hundreds and hundreds of sails, and been dazzled by the thousands of flashing oars. The previous year the Britons had seen little more than 80 Roman vessels off their shores. Now they were staggered to see 800. As the hours passed, the Dover Strait darkened with brown hulls. Never again would an invasion fleet as large as this come to Britain’s shores. The Spanish Armada of 1588 would comprise only a paltry 130 vessels, carrying little more than 19,000 troops. The British tribal leaders were so terrified by the sight of the Roman vessels that they decided to withdraw to higher ground.
Unopposed, the landing went ahead, on a long, sandy stretch of coastline between Deal and Sandwich a little north of the previous year’s landing site. Today the greens of a golf course roll along this picturesque stretch of Kent coastline. Even as long lines of legionaries were still wading onto the sands from vessels in the shallows, work began on construction of a camp where fairways now run. At the same time, cavalry patrols fanned out inland. Soon the patrols returned with unwary tribespeople who’d been too slow to run when the troopers unexpectedly appeared in their fields. From the prisoners, Caesar learned that British warriors were massing, and where.
Throughout his career, Julius Caesar made a habit of marching in the early hours of the morning to catch his adversaries off guard, and a little after midnight, leaving his least experienced legion, the 12th, together with three hundred cavalry, to guard the new camp under the command of General Quintus Atrius, Caesar marched into the night with his four Spanish legions and seventeen hundred cavalry. The column covered twelve miles in the darkness, and with the dawn they saw that the Britons had advanced their chariots and cavalry to a river in their path, the Stour, not far from present-day Canterbury.
The surprised Britons quickly withdrew a short distance to higher ground, their chariot drivers showing impressive skill controlling their horses on the slopes at full gallop. As the legions came up, the chariots swept down from the hill. But Caesar had been expecting this, and his cavalry easily intercepted the chariots and drove them off.
The Britons pulled back to a woods, where they took refuge in an old stockade, previously used during intertribal warfare. They rolled massive logs in front of the gateways. Some small bands came out to skirmish with the Roman column as it marched to the woods but soon withdrew. Caesar now chose one of his legions to go against the stockade. He’d been disappointed with the 7th Legion the previous year. To his mind, it had allowed itself to be surrounded in the wheat field, and had to be rescued by him. He now gave the unit an opportunity to redeem itself.
While the 10th, 8th, and 9th Legions stood in battle formation and watched like spectators at a football game, the 7th went to work. Locking their shields over their heads in the testudo, or “tortoise” formation, the 7th went forward against British stones and javelins, and under cover of thetestudos heaped earth against the walls of the stockade to form ramps, an activity that took several hours. They then surged up the ramps in formation and dropped into the stockade. The Britons fled in every direction, with the men of the 7th giving chase through the trees and cutting down all who tried to stand and fight, before Caesar sounded the “Recall.” It was now late in the day, and he wanted to build a marching camp for the night. The 7th, which had suffered only a few wounded in the action, was once more the apple of Julius Caesar’s eye.
Next morning, he kept one legion at the marching camp—probably the 7th after their exertions of the previous day—and led the other three as he went looking for the enemy. They had been marching for several hours and had caught sight of bands of British warriors in the distance when dispatch riders overtook the column. Caesar called a halt and read a hastily written dispatch from General Atrius back at the beachhead camp. Atrius reported that a severe storm had swept along the coast in the night and many ships of the invasion fleet had broken their cables and been driven into each other or onto the shore. The losses were significant, said Atrius’s message. Always careful to secure his rear, Caesar promptly turned his column around and marched back to the coast, picking up the 7th Legion on the way.
On the beach next day, Caesar and his staff officers surveyed the damage. Forty transports were total wrecks. The rest could be repaired, but it would take time, valuable campaigning time. But Julius Caesar was a man who usually got his priorities right, and this occasion was no exception. He gave orders for all the skilled workmen of the legions to dedicate themselves to salvage and repair work. He also sent an undamaged frigate skimming back to France with orders for General Labienus to hastily build new ships to replace those that had been lost.
Toiling around the clock, with oil lamps burning through the night at the repair sites and work teams rostered in shifts, the damaged vessels were all repaired within ten days. The ships were then hauled up onto the beach, all 760 of them, and enclosed on three sides by fortifications extending down to the water’s edge from the camp. Satisfied that the fleet would be safe, Caesar again allocated the 12th Legion to guard duty and marched off with the 10th and the three other Spanish legions to take up where he’d left off with the Britons.
During this pause in the offensive, the tribes had spread their alliance north of the River Thames. The Catuvellauni tribe, centered in Hertfordshire and Middlesex just to the north of modern London, was at that time the most powerful tribe in southern England. It had regularly waged war against the tribes south of the Thames in the past, but now it shelved old enmities and joined the British confederation, with the tribe’s king, Cassivellaunus, elected as commander in chief of all the tribal forces for the war against the Romans. The wily king formulated a plan to harass the Romans with mixed forces of infantry, cavalry, and chariots, to keep them south of the Thames for as long as possible while he assembled a massive chariot force north of the Thames. If and when the Romans succeeded in crossing the river, the king was determined that they would be in for a shock.
When Caesar marched back to the Stour River with four legions, his scouts reported that the forest stronghold that had been overrun by the 7th Legion two weeks earlier was once more occupied by tribesmen, but in larger numbers than before. British cavalry and chariots attempted to get to the Roman column as it marched up, but yet again they were intercepted by Caesar’s cavalry and driven back to the hills and woods.
Reaching the old marching camp used the last time they had come this way, Caesar halted for the day and set the legions to work strengthening the camp’s defenses. As they worked, and while the legionaries’ guard was down, British cavalry and chariots charged from the nearest woods and swooped on the men on picket duty in front of the camp. Knowing they faced the death penalty if they left their post, the men of the picket stood their ground and put up a furious fight, even though heavily outnumbered.
To support the pickets, Caesar sent out the two guard cohorts on duty—the 1st cohorts of two legions, as it happened—under the tribune of the watch, Colonel Quintus Durus, and sounded “To Arms” throughout the camp. The relief cohorts were soon in deep trouble, as the Britons drove between them and divided them. The tribesmen employed well-organized tactics, probably under the influence of King Cassivellaunus— squadrons of cavalry were held back at the tree line in reserve, and when those in the fray tired or ran out of ammunition, they were replaced by men from the reserve.
It was only when more Roman reinforcements arrived from the camp that the attackers were driven off. Both sides suffered only a few casualties in the skirmish, but one of the Roman fatalities was Colonel Durus, the young watch commander.
The next day, at noon, after their normal lunch of a piece of bread, the men of three legions were led out on a foraging expedition by General Gaius Trebonius, who had come up to Gaul to join Caesar’s staff for this campaign after serving as a civil tribune at Rome the previous year. Once the column was well away from the camp, the British chariots and cavalry reappeared, driving into the column and almost reaching the legions’ eagles. Trebonius was able to regroup the legionaries, then charged at the run, to the surprise of the charioteers. The Roman cavalry joined in. A number of chariots were overwhelmed, and the rest of the British forces ran for the hills.
The Britons were demoralized after this, seeing the Roman heavy infantry charge and overrun the chariots that many had thought invincible. Men went home to their farms in droves, and organized British resistance faltered.
Caesar now marched four legions to the Thames and followed its southern bank inland until he found a place where he could ford the waterway. The cavalry splashed across, and the infantry waded across, up to their necks in water at times. On the other side, they combined and easily dispersed warriors from Cassivellaunus’s tribe who were supposed to be guarding the riverbank.
Appian tells the story that at one point in these operations beside the Thames, where the changing tides both revealed and covered treacherous pathways with frightening speed, Caesar and a group of senior Roman officers became trapped by a small group of Britons in the marshes. A lone legionary, almost certainly a man of Caesar’s bodyguard from the 10th Legion, threw himself at the tribesmen and fought them off, allowing the officers to make their way to solid ground. The legionary then took to the water and, partly by swimming and partly by wading, joined the officers. But in the process he had to let go of his shield. As Caesar and his companions came up to him to congratulate him on his deed, the soldier dropped to his knees in front of the general.
“Forgive me, Caesar,” said the soldier, close to tears.
“Forgive you?” Caesar responded with surprise. “But why?”
“For losing my shield,” the legionary replied with genuine concern. Under legion regulations, he could be severely punished.
Appian doesn’t tell us any more, but no such punishment is mentioned. And, if Caesar remained true to form, far from receiving a punishment, the legionary would have been the recipient of substantial rewards at the end of the campaign.
The legions crossed the Thames without further incident, and as Caesar continued north, guided by prisoners who knew where the British king’s stronghold was located, Cassivellaunus shadowed the advancing column with a force of four thousand chariots he’d been assembling north of the river—two chariots for every one of Caesar’s cavalrymen. Caesar was accustomed to sending his cavalry out on search-and-destroy missions while the infantry marched, but now, whenever the Roman cavalry strayed too far from the column, chariots appeared from the trees in vast numbers and swept in on the outnumbered troopers like hordes of locusts. In the end, Caesar had to keep the cavalry with the infantry.
On the march, envoys arrived from the Trinovantes tribe, old enemies of King Cassivellaunus, who asked for protection against the king. When Caesar granted the tribe the protection they asked for, five other tribes also came to him and surrendered. The Roman force then reached Cassivellaunus’s stronghold. This was a densely wooded spot, heavily fortified with an earth wall and trench, thought to have been at Wheathampstead, five miles north of where Cassivellaunus’s son and successor would build the settlement the Romans called Verulamium and that would grow into the modern city of St. Albans.
The stronghold was full of warriors and cattle, and Caesar wasted no time sending the legions against it. They attacked from two sides, the ferocity of their assault sending the defenders fleeing over a third wall in terror.
While the main body of the Roman army was capturing Cassivellaunus’s stronghold, four tribes in Kent decided to launch an assault on the Roman supply base back on the coast. General Atrius, the rear-echelon commander, quickly sent cohorts of the 12th Legion out to meet the British infantry, and they charged the poorly led locals, who were routed without loss to the 12th Legion. A number of tribesmen were killed, and many, including a chieftain, taken prisoner.
When he heard of this defeat on the coast, and, now deprived of his stronghold, King Cassivellaunus bowed to the inevitable and sent envoys to Caesar for surrender terms. Caesar agreed to peace in return for hostages, an annual payment to Rome, and a guarantee from the king that he wouldn’t molest the Trinovantes people.
As soon as the hostages were handed over, Caesar withdrew to the coast. It seems he never intended leaving a permanent Roman presence in Britain. As in Gaul, his intention was to make allies of the locals, if not subjects, without tying his troops down in garrisons. Caesar knew better than anyone that the secret of his legions’ success was their mobility.
The damaged ships had all been repaired, but with a large number of prisoners who would be sold into slavery once ferried across the Channel, and because sixty new transports built in France by General Labienus were forced back by adverse winds every time they tried to sail, Caesar sent the troops back to Europe in two waves. He was in the second wave, which sailed as the autumnal equinox approached. After several calm days, he packed his last troops into the ships that had returned for him, and in the late evening they pulled away from the Kent shore with the tide. In their usual fashion, the legions would have left their camp of the past few months afire, so it was of no use to the Britons.
The flames would have offered an eerie farewell to the men of the 10th Legion sailing with Caesar. Looking back to the orange glow on the Kent coast, many of them would have guessed that they would never set foot in Britain again. Caesar had achieved all he’d set out to achieve among the barbarous Britons. Plutarch was to say that prior to this many Greek and Roman historians had even doubted that Britain existed. Caesar had proven otherwise, and in the process had rewritten history. But in his own eyes it was no major achievement. Britain, he felt, had nothing to offer Rome.
The return journey went smoothly and swiftly, with the convoy reaching France with the dawn. Both waves returned to the Pas de Calais without the loss of a single ship. Once they had landed, the 10th Legion and its brother legions marched to various camps in France and Belgium, hoping for a quiet winter.
To let the natives know that the Roman army was back, Caesar dispersed his troops, sending single legions to a variety of locations throughout the region. He was later to excuse his action by saying the wheat harvest that year had been poor and it was necessary to spread the legions far and wide to secure more grain for the winter. But breaking up the army like this was to prove a fatal mistake.