[Sidenote: Review of Caesar’s invasions of Britain.]
The story of these invasions is not without interest for students of military history. In Britain Caesar was confronted by tactical problems of an entirely strange kind; and he did not dissemble the difficulty which he had experienced in attempting to solve them. The Roman soldiers had been trained to encounter an enemy who fought in close order; if ever, in the stress of unforeseen circumstances, such as those which beset the foragers of the 7th legion, they found themselves cut off from the standards which they were accustomed to rally round, they felt that they were but the units of a mob.[1413] It was not perhaps that they lacked the intelligence which enabled the German soldier in 1870 to adapt himself to new conditions. The coolness with which, in the fearful combat with the Nervii, each legionary shook off the effects of his surprise, and, disentangling himself from the press, ‘fell in by the standard he first caught sight of,’[1414] and fought as steadily as under his own centurion, shows that in Caesar’s soldiers no moral, as no physical, military qualification was wanting. But encompassed by those rushing chariots, assailed by those nimble groups of skirmishers who would not come to sword’s point with them, they found themselves helpless. And when they advanced with ranks closed--for the enemy never succeeded in breaking their formation--the charioteers could easily keep out of the way and concentrate the whole weight of their attack upon the cavalry, which they had lured away from their support. Cassivellaunus handled his levies with commendable skill; and if he did not deserve from Caesar the admiration that makes itself felt in the terse chapters which mirror the tremendous personality of Vercingetorix, he was a leader of no ordinary capacity, raised to his high place by merit alone. For the mistake which gave Trebonius the opportunity of dealing him that staggering blow near the banks of the Stour--the rush of his tribesmen, intoxicated by success, upon the ranks of the legions--not his lack of judgement but their lack of discipline was responsible. And if, instead of disbanding his infantry and following Caesar’s march with his chariots, he had then had the hardihood to let Caesar go his way, and, leaving his cattle, his homesteads, and his granaries to their fate, had hurled his entire force, combined with the levies of the Kentish kings, against the little garrison which held the naval camp, it might have gone hardly with Caesar. For, like the weak cohorts with which Galba strove to hold his camp in the Valais against a host of mountaineers, the garrison would have been compelled to defend themselves without respite against assailants whose numbers enabled them to fight and rest by turns; and if, like Galba’s men, they had attempted to disperse their enemies by a sortie, they would have been attacked in flank and rear by the charioteers and cavalry. Perhaps, indeed, Cassivellaunus saw what to do, but was not sufficiently master of his countrymen to do it. He who can keep in hand an aggregate of levies, shattered by defeat in a regular combat which they should never have fought, must needs be a king of men. Caesar understood the weaknesses of half-civilized tribes, and knew what risks he might fairly run. Just as Vercingetorix was compelled by his tribesmen to let go his hold upon the country of the Bituriges, where he barred Caesar’s advance, and to leave the way open to him by returning to succour their farms, so Cassivellaunus, we may be sure, would not have been able to withstand the clamours that would have bidden him go to the rescue of the threatened dominions of the Catuvellauni and their allies, even if, by sacrificing them, he could have cut the invaders’ communications, and detained him a prisoner in Britain. One may be allowed perhaps to speculate whether Caesar, if he had himself had much experience of British tactics in his first expedition, would have been able, without sacrificing the advantage of discipline, to train his troops in the intervening winter to adapt their formation to the methods of attack which they had to expect; or whether it would have been possible for him then, as it was two years later, to enlist the invaluable aid of German cavalry: but in his second campaign he speedily corrected the mistakes which his sanguine temperament had led him to make; and in his mode of conducting the war he conformed so closely to the maxims which the foremost British soldier of our time, himself an enthusiastic admirer of the _Commentaries_, has laid down for generals who have to command against uncivilized enemies,[1415] that one might almost suppose those maxims to have been derived from a study of the campaign.