To describe a thing so ancient is impossible. It casts a spell upon the traveller so that as he follows under its dark yews across the steep hop gardens of Kent from hillside to hillside, up this valley or that, along the mighty south wall of the North Downs to the great ford of the Medway, and beyond and beyond through more than a hundred miles to Winchester he loses himself; becomes indeed one with his forefathers and looks upon that dear and ancient landscape, his most enduring and most beautiful possession as a child looks upon his mother, really with unseeing eyes, unable to tell whether she be fair or no, understanding indeed but this that she is a part of himself, and that he loves her more than anything else in the world.
But that glorious way in all its fulness was not for me. I had determined to follow the Pilgrims' Road but a little way, indeed but for one long day's journey, so far only as Boghton Aluph, where it turns that great corner westward and proceeds along the rampart of the Downs. But even in the ten miles twixt Canterbury and Boghton, that ancient way gives to him who follows it wonderful things.
To begin with, the valley of the Stour. There can be few valleys in this part of England more lovely than this steep and wide vale, through the hop gardens, the woods and meadows of which, the Great Stour proceeds like a royal pilgrim, half in state to Canterbury, and on to the mystery of the marshes, and its death in the sea. Above Canterbury certainly, and all along my way, there is not a meadow nor a wood, nor indeed a single mile of that landscape, which has not been contrived and created by man, by the love and labour of our fathers through how many thousand years. And this is part of the virtue of England, that it is as it were a garden of our making, a pleasaunce we have built, a paradise and a home after our own hearts. And in that divine and tireless making we, without knowing it, have so moulded ourselves that we are one with it, it is a part of us, a part of our character and nature. There lie ever before us our beginnings, the earthworks we once defended, the graves we built, the defeats, the victories, the holy places. By these a man lives, out of these he draws slowly and with a sort of confidence the uncertain future, glad indeed of this divine assurance that there is nothing new under the sun.
Such monuments of an antiquity so great that they have no history but what may be gathered from barrows and stones, accompany one upon any day's journey in southern England, but it is only in one place that a man can stand and say: Here began the history of my country. That place as it happens lies as it should upon the Pilgrims' Road.
Beyond Harbledown, some two miles from Canterbury, he Pilgrims' Road along the hillside passes clean through earthwork of unknown antiquity. Well, it was here the Seventh Legion charged: here, indeed, we stand upon the very battlefield which saw the birth of civilisation in our island. Lying there in the early morning sunshine I considered it all over again.
Caesar's first landing in Britain in B.C. 55 had been, as he himself tells us, merely a reconnaissance. In the following summer, however, he returned in force, indeed with a very considerable army, and with the intention of bringing us, too, within that great administration which he and his adoptive son Augustus were to do so much to make a final and in many ways an indestructible thing.
It might seem that in spite of the lack of the means of rapid communication we possess, the admirable system of Roman roads enabled Caesar to administer his huge government—he was then in control of the two Gauls—with a thoroughness we might envy. After his first return from Britain in the early autumn of B.C. 55 he crossed the Alps, completed much business in Cisalpine Gaul, journeyed into Illyricum to see what damage the Pirustae had done, dealt with them effectively, returned to Cisalpine Gaul, held conventions, crossed the Alps again, rejoined his army, went round all their winter quarters, inspected all the many ships he was building at Portus Itius and other places, marched with four Legions and some cavalry against a tribe of Belgae known as the Treviri, settled matters with them, and before the summer of B.C. 54 was back at Portus Itius, making final preparations for the invasion of Britain.
This invasion, glorious as it was to be, and full of the greatest results for us, was accompanied all through by a series of petty disasters. Caesar had purposed to set out certainly early in July, but delay followed upon delay, and when he was ready at last, the wind settled into the north-west and blew steadily from that quarter for twenty-five days. It had been a dry summer and all Gaul was suffering from drought. The great preparations which Caesar had been making for at least a year were at last complete, the specially built ships, wide and of shallow draft, of an intermediate size between his own swift- sailing vessels and those of burthen which he had gathered locally, were all ready to the number of six hundred, with twenty-eight naves longae or war vessels, and some two hundred of the older boats. But the wind made a start impossible for twenty-five days.
It was not till August that the south-west came to his assistance. As soon as might be he embarked five Legions, say twenty-thousand men, with two thousand cavalry and horses, an enormous transport, and doubtless a great number of camp followers, leaving behind on the continent three legions and two thousand horse to guard the harbours and provide corn, and to inform him what was going on in Gaul in his absence, and to act in case of necessity.
He himself set sail from Portus Itius, which we may take to be Boulogne, at sunset, that is to say about half-past seven; but he must, it might seem, have devoted the whole day to getting so many ships out of harbour. The wind was blowing gently from the south-west, bearing him, his fortunes and ours. At midnight the second of those small disasters which met him at every turn upon this expedition fell upon him. The wind failed. In consequence his great fleet of transports was helpless, it drifted along with the tide, fortunately then running up the Straits, but this bore him beyond his landing-place of the year before, and daybreak found him apparently far to the east of the North Foreland. What can have been the thoughts of the greatest of men, helpless in the midst of this treacherous and unknown sea? To every Roman the sea was bitter, even the tideless Mediterranean, how much more this furious tide-whipt channel. Caesar cannot but have remembered how it had half broken him in the previous year. Very profoundly he must have mistrusted it. But his Gaulish sailors were doubtless less disturbed; they expected the ebb, and when it came, every man doing his utmost, the transports were brought as swiftly as the long ships to that "fair and open" beach where Caesar had landed in the previous summer, the long beach which Deal and Sandwich hold.