Flag and Fleet | Page 8

as Carthage had the stronger navy; so they began to
build one of their own. They copied a Carthaginian war galley that had
been wrecked; and meanwhile taught their men to row on benches set
up ashore. This made the Carthaginians laugh and led them to expect
an easy victory. But the Romans were thorough in everything they did,
and they had the best trained soldiers in the world. They knew the
Carthaginians could handle war galleys better than they could
themselves; so they tried to give their soldiers the best possible chance
when once the galleys closed. They made a sort of drawbridge that
could be let down with a bang on the enemy boats and there held fast
by sharp iron spikes biting into the enemy decks. Then their soldiers
charged across and cleared everything before them.
[Illustration: ROMAN TRIREME--A vessel with three benches of oars]
The Carthaginians never recovered from this first fatal defeat at Mylae
in 260 B.C., though Carthage itself was not destroyed for more than a
century afterwards, and though Hannibal, one of the greatest soldiers

who ever lived, often beat the Romans in the meantime. All sorts of
reasons, many of them true enough in their way, are given for
Hannibal's final defeat. But sea-power, the first and greatest of all, is
commonly left out. His march round the shores of the western
Mediterranean and his invasion of Italy from across the Alps will
remain one of the wonders of war till the end of history. But the mere
fact that he had to go all the way round by land, instead of straight
across by water, was the real prime cause of his defeat. His forces
simply wore themselves out. Why? Look at the map and you will see
that he and his supplies had to go much farther by land than the
Romans and their supplies had to go by water because the Roman
victory over the Carthaginian fleet had made the shortest seaways safe
for Romans and very unsafe for Carthaginians. Then remember that
carrying men and supplies by sea is many times easier than carrying
them by land; and you get the perfect answer.
CHAPTER IV
CELTIC BRITAIN UNDER ROME
(55 B.C.-410 A.D.)
When Caesar was conquering the Celts of Western France he found
that one of their strongest tribes, the Veneti, had been joined by two
hundred and twenty vessels manned by their fellow-Celts from
southern Britain. The united fleets of the Celts were bigger than any
Roman force that Caesar could get afloat. Moreover, Caesar had
nothing but rowboats, which he was obliged to build on the spot; while
the Celts had real ships, which towered above his rowboats by a good
ten feet. But, after cutting the Celtic rigging with scythes lashed to
poles, the well-trained Roman soldiers made short work of the Celts.
The Battle of the Loire seems to have been the only big sea fight the
Celts of Britain ever fought. After this they left the sea to their invaders,
who thus had a great advantage over them ashore.
The fact is that the Celts of the southern seaports were the only ones
who understood shipbuilding, which they had learnt from the

Phoenicians, and the only ones who were civilized enough to unite
among themselves and with their fellow-Celts in what now is France
but then was Gaul. The rest were mere tribesmen under chiefs who
were often squabbling with one another, and who never formed
anything like an all-Celtic army. For most of them a navy was out of
the question, as they only used the light, open-work, basket-like
coracles covered with skins--about as useful for fighting the Romans at
sea as bark canoes would be against real men-of-war. The Roman
conquest of Britain was therefore made by the army, each conqueror,
from Caesar on, winning battles farther and farther north, until a
fortified Roman wall was built across the narrow neck of land between
the Forth and Clyde. Along these thirty-six miles the Romans kept
guard against the Picts and other Highland tribes.
The Roman fleet was of course used at all times to guard the seaways
between Britain and the rest of the Roman Empire, as well as to carry
supplies along the coast when the army was fighting near by. This gave
the Romans the usual immense advantage of sea-transport over
land-transport, never less than ten to one and often very much more.
The Romans could thus keep their army supplied with everything it
needed. The Celts could not. Eighteen hundred years after Caesar's first
landing in Britain, Wolfe, the victor of Quebec, noticed the same
immense advantage enjoyed by King George's army over Prince
Charlie's, owing to the same sort of difference in transport, King
George's army having a fleet