Expeditions to Britain

There remained the insular Celts. From the close connection
between them and the Celts of the continent, especially
the maritime cantons, it may readily be conceived that they had
at least sympathized with the national resistance, and that if they
did not grant armed assistance to the patriots, they gave at any rate
an honourable asylum in their sea-protected isle to every one
who was no longer safe in his native land. This certainly involved
a danger, if not for the present, at any rate for the future; it
seemed judicious--if not to undertake the conquest of the island
itself--at any rate to conduct there also defensive operations
by offensive means, and to show the islanders by a landing
on the coast that the arm of the Romans reached even across the Channel.
The first Roman officer who entered Brittany, Publius Crassus
had already (697) crossed thence to the "tin-islands" at the south-west
point of England (Stilly islands); in the summer of 699 Caesar
himself with only two legions crossed the Channel at its narrowest
part.(42) He found the coast covered with masses of the enemy's
troops and sailed onward with his vessels; but the British war-
chariots moved on quite as fast by land as the Roman galleys
by sea, and it was only with the utmost difficulty that the Roman
soldiers succeeded in gaining the shore in the face of the enemy,
partly by wading, partly in boats, under the protection
of the ships of war, which swept the beach with missiles thrown
from machines and by the hand. In the first alarm the nearest villages
submitted; but the islanders soon perceived how weak the enemy was,
and how he did not venture to move far from the shore. The natives
disappeared into the interior and returned only to threaten
the camp; and the fleet, which had been left in the open roads,
suffered very considerable damage from the first tempest
that burst upon it. The Romans had to reckon themselves fortunate
in repelling the attacks of the barbarians till they had bestowed
the necessary repairs on the ships, and in regaining with these
the Gallic coast before the bad season of the year came on.

Caesar himself was so dissatisfied with the results of this expedition
undertaken inconsiderately and with inadequate means, that he immediately
(in the winter of 699-700) ordered a transport fleet of 800 sail
to be fitted out, and in the spring of 700 sailed a second time
for the Kentish coast, on this occ