e 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."

The appalling seriousness of this disaster, as reported to Caesar, was
at once understood by him. He recalled his three parties of
skirmishers, and himself at once returned to Quintus Atrius and the
ships. He tells us that "he saw before him almost the ver