y things
which he had heard from the messengers and by letters"; but he adds
that only "about forty ships were lost, the remainder being able to be
repaired with much labour." This he at once began with workmen from the
Legions, and others he brought from the Continent, and at the same
time he wrote to Labienus at Portus Itius "to build as many ships as
he could." Then he proceeded to do what he had intended to do at
first; with great difficulty and labour he dragged all the ships up
on the shore and enclosed them in one fortification with the camp. In
these matters about ten days were spent, the men labouring night and
day. Then he returned to the main army upon the Stour.

But that delay of ten days had given the Britons time to recover
themselves and to gather all possible forces. Caesar returned to his
army to find "very great forces of the Britons already assembled" to
oppose him, and the chief command and management of the war entrusted
to Cassivellaunus, who, though he had been at war with the men of
Kent, was now placed, so great was the general alarm, in command of
the whole war.

Caesar, however, cannot have been in any way daunted save perhaps by
the memory of the time already lost and the advancing season. He at
once began his march into Britain. We may well ask by what route he
went, and to that question we shall get no certain answer. But it
would seem he must have marched by one of two ways for he had to cross
the Stour, the Medway and the Thames. We may be sure then that his
route lay either along the old trackway which, straightened and built
up later by the Romans, we know as the Watling Street, which fords the
Medway at Rochester, and the Thames at Lambeth and Westminster, or by
the trackway we call the Pilgrims' Way along the southern slope of the
North Downs, in which case he would have forded the Medway at
Aylesford and the Thames at Brentford. The question is insoluble,
Caesar himself giving no indications.

Now, when I had well considered all this, I went on to that loveliness
which is Chilham; passing as I went, that earthwork older than any
history called Julaber's Grave, marked by a clump of fir trees. Here
of old they thought to find the grave of that Quintus Laberius, who
fell as Caesar relates, at the head of his men, on the march to the
Thames; but it was probably already older when Caesar passed by, than
it would have been now if he had built it.

No one can ever have come, whether b