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 very things which he had heard from the messengers and by letters”; but he adds that only “about forty ships were lost, the remainder being able to be repaired with much labour.”  This he at once began with workmen from the Legions, and others he brought from the Continent, and at the same time he wrote to Labienus at Portus Itius “to build as many ships as he could.”  Then he proceeded to do what he had intended to do at first; with great difficulty and labour he dragged all the ships up on the shore and enclosed them in one fortification with the camp.  In these matters about ten days were spent, the men labouring night and day.  Then he returned to the main army upon the Stour.

But that delay of ten days had given the Britons time to recover themselves and to gather all possible forces.  Caesar returned to his army to find “very great forces of the Britons already assembled” to oppose him, and the chief command and management of the war entrusted to Cassivellaunus, who, though he had been at war with the men of Kent, was now placed, so great was the general alarm, in command of the whole war.

Caesar, however, cannot have been in any way daunted save perhaps by the memory of the time already lost and the advancing season.  He at once began his march into Britain.  We may well ask by what route he went, and to that question we shall get no certain answer.  But it would seem he must have marched by one of two ways for he had to cross the Stour, the Medway and the Thames.  We may be sure then that his route lay either along the old trackway which, straightened and built up later by the Romans, we know as the Watling Street, which fords the Medway at Rochester, and the Thames at Lambeth and Westminster, or by the trackway we call the Pilgrims’ Way along the southern slope of the North Downs, in which case he would have forded the Medway at Aylesford and the Thames at Brentford.  The question is insoluble, Caesar himself giving no indications.

Now, when I had well considered all this, I went on to that loveliness which is Chilham; passing as I went, that earthwork older than any history called Julaber’s Grave, marked by a clump of fir trees.  Here of old they thought to find the grave of that Quintus Laberius, who fell as Caesar relates, at the head of his men, on the march to the Thames; but it was probably already older when Caesar passed by, than it would have been now if he had built it.