fifty miles west of Frejus, a station of the fleet, and threading through the Hyeres islands. By midday we should have reached Marseilles. As we passed Porquerolles, the largest and most westerly of the islands, separated at one point by only a mile of sea from the peninsula of Giens which juts out to meet it, the wind struck us with terrific force; and though the crew rowed like madmen we could make no headway at all and found ourselves slowly drifting on the rocks. We were within 100 yards of destruction when the gate momentarily slackened and we managed to pull clear. But a few minutes later we were in trouble again, and this time the danger was greater still. The last headland that we had to struggle past ended in a great black rock which the action of wind and waves had carved into a grinning Satyr-head. The water boiled and hissed at its chin, giving it as it were a white beard. The wind, blowing dead amidships, was rapidly forcing us into this monster's jaws. `If he catches us, he'll crack our bones and mangle our flesh,' the captain assured me grimly. `Many a good ship has broken up on-that black rock.' I Offered prayers for succour to every God in the Pantheon. I was told afterwards that the sailors who had overheard me swore that it was the most beautiful praying that they had ever heard in their lives and that it gave them new hope. Especially I prayed to Venus and begged her to persuade her Uncle Neptune to behave with more consideration, for the fate of Rome depended very largely on the survival of this vessel: she must please remind Neptune that I did not associate myself with my predecessor's impious quarrel with him, and that on the contrary I had always held the God in the profoundest respect. The exhausted rowers strained and groaned and the rowing- master ran along the platforms with a rope-end in his hand, cursing and flogging fresh vigour into them. We scraped through somehow I don't know how - and when a gasp of joy went up that we were out of danger I promised the rowers twenty gold pieces each as soon as we landed.
I was glad that I had kept my head. It was the first time that I had experienced a storm at sea, and I had heard it said that some of the bravest men in the world break down when faced with the prospect of death by drowning. It had even been whispered that the God Augustus was a dreadful coward in a storm, and that only his sense of the dignity of his office kept him from screaming and tearing his hair. He certainly used often to quote the tag about how `Impious was the man who first spread sail, and braved the dangers of the frantic deep.' He was most unlucky at sea, except in his sea-battles, and - speaking of impiety - once showed his deep resentment at the loss of a fleet in a sudden storm by forbidding the statue of Neptune to be carried as usual in a sacred procession around the Circus. After this he seldom put to sea without raising a storm and was all but shipwrecked on three or four occasions.
Our vessel was the first to reach Marseilles, and fortunately not a single one of the five was lost, though two were forced to turn back and run into Frejus. The earth felt splendidly firm under my feet at Marseilles: I determined never again to travel by sea when I could possibly travel by land, and have not once departed from this resolution since.
As soon as I had heard that a successful landing had been made in Britain I had moved up my reserves to Boulogne and ordered Posides to have transports assembled there ready, together with whatever extra military stores might suggest themselves as likely to be needed for the campaign. At Marseilles twenty fast gigs were waiting for me and my staff Posides had arranged this and carried us, with constant relays of horses, up the Rhone valley from Avignon to Lyons, where we spent the second night, and then on north along the Saone, travelling eighty or ninety miles a day - which was the most that I could manage because of the continuous, jolting, which racked my nerves and upset my digestion and gave me violent headaches. The third night, at Chalons, my physician Xenophon insisted on my resting the whole of the next day. I told him that I could not afford to waste a whole day he answered that if I did not rest I could not expect to be of any use to the .army in Britain when I did arrive: I raged at him and tried to override his opinion, but Xenophon insisted on reading this behaviour as a further sign of nervous exhaustion and told me that either he was my doctor or I was my own. In the latter case he would resign and resume his interrupted practice at Rome in the former, he must ask me to do as he advised me, relax completely and submit to a thorough massage. So I apologized and pleaded that to be suddenly halted in my journey would cause me such nervous anxiety that my physical condition would not be improved by any amount of compensatory massage; and that to say `relax' was no more practical advice in the circumstances than to tell a man whose clothes have caught fire that he must keep cool. In the end we arrived at a compromise: I would not continue my journey in a gig, but neither would I remain at Chalons.' I would be carried in a light sedan on the shoulders of six well-trained chairmen and thus knock off at least thirty miles or so of the 500 that still lay before me. I would submit to as much massage as he pleased both before I started and after the day's journey was over.
From Lyons it took me eight days to reach Boulogne by way of Troyes, Rheims, Soissons, and Amiens, for in the stage out of Rheims Xenophon forced me to use a sedan again. All this time I was not exactly idle. I was turning over in my mind my historical memories of great battles of the past - Julius's battles, Hannibal's battles, Alexander's, and especially those of my father and brother in Germany - and wondering whether, when it came to the point, I should be able to apply all this detailed and extensive knowledge to any practical purpose. I congratulated myself that whenever it, had been possible to draw a plan of any battle from the accounts handed down by eye-witnesses I had always done so; and had thoroughly; mastered the general tactical principles involved in the use of a small force of disciplined fighters against a great army of semi-civilized tribesmen, and also the strategical principles involved in the successful occupation of their country when the battle had been won.
At Amiens, lying sleepless in the early morning, I began picturing the battle-field. The British infantry would probably be occupying a wooded ridge, with their cavalry and chariotry manoeuvring in the low ground in front. I would draw up my regular infantry in ordinary battle formation, on a, two-regiment front, with the auxiliaries on either flank and the Guards in reserve. The elephants, which would be a complete novelty to the Britons, no such animal having ever been seen on that island but here a most uncomfortable thought came to me. `Posides,'. I called, in an anxious voice.
`Yes, Caesar,' Posides answered, springing up from his pallet, half-asleep still.
`The elephants are at Boulogne, aren't they?'
`Yes, Caesar.''
'How long ago did I give you the order to move them up there from Lyons?'
'When we heard news of the landing, Caesar; that would be on the seventh of August.'
`And to-day is the twenty-seventh.'
`Yes, Caesar.'
`Then how in the world are we going to get those elephants over? We should have had special elephant transports built.'
`The ship that brought the obelisk from Alexandria is at Boulogne.'
`But I thought that it was still at Ostia.'
'No, Caesar, at. Boulogne.'
`But if you sent it up there on the seventh it can't possibly have arrived there yet. It can't possibly be any nearer than the Bay of Biscay. It took three weeks to get to Rome from Egypt - you remember in perfect sailing weather, too.'
But Posides was a really able minister. It appears that as soon as I had decided to put elephants among my reinforcements and sent them up to Lyons - in May, I think it was - he had considered the question of transport across the Channel and without saying a word to me had fitted up; the obelisk-ship as an-elephant-transport, it was the only ship big and strong enough for the purpose - and sent it up to Boulogne, where it had arrived six weeks later. If he had waited for my orders the elephants would have had to be left behind. The obelisk-ship deserves more than a passing mention. It was the largest vessel ever launched. It was no less than 200 feet long and broad in proportion, and its main timbers were of cedar. Caligula had built it in the first few months of his monarchy to bring from Egypt an eighty-foot red granite obelisk, together with four enormous stones which formed the pediment. The obelisk was originally from Heliopolis, but had been set up in Augustus's temple at Alexandria a few years before. Caligula now wanted it set up in his own honour in the new Circus that he was building on the Vatican Hill. To understand what a monstrous sort of ship it was you must be told-that its seventy-foot main mast was a silver fir eight feet in diameter at its base; and that among the ballast used to keep it steady when the obelisk and pediment were secured on deck were 120,000 pecks of Egyptian lentils a gift for the people of Rome.
When I reached Boulogne I was delighted to find the troops in good spirits, the transports ready, and the sea calm. We embarked without delay, and our passage across the Channel was so pleasant and uneventful that on landing at Richborough I sacrificed to Venus and Neptune, thanking the latter for his unexpected favours and the former for her kindly intercession. The elephants gave no trouble. They were Indian elephants, not African. Indian
