There is in that country a great slope of open land standing above the sea and crowned by the old town of Guerande. And there, upon the low heights that leaned back from the sea and that overlooked islands and half islands upon the shore below and the harbour behind Croisic (where now the salt marshes are), lay stretched the Roman army, awaiting, helpless and as onlookers, the coming fight. For as the light ships of the Roman fleet came sailing and rowing round the corner of the land, and appeared in procession upon the great open of the sea, from the harbour at the feet of the army the whole Venetian fleet, two hundred and twenty monsters, with their dark leathern sails and their enormous hulls shadowing the sea, stood out, with the wind upon the port beam, under that same weather, and marshalled in the open for the fight. It was not quite noon. Commanding those light, swift, but puny vessels upon whom his fate and that of all Gaul depended, Cæsar had placed Brutus, young, in his twenty-ninth year--Brutus, his darling, who was later to kill him in the Senate House at Rome. And this Brutus had designed, as his one hope against his enemy so greatly stronger at sea, something whereby he might board. For the Roman was a soldier, and sure of victory with the sword. This something was an armament in his light ships of long poles, to the ends of which were lashed curved blades--as our bill-hooks. Against those high freeboards and against those tall poops the turrets which the Romans might run up upon their own decks availed nothing, and it was under the peril of a plunging fire from above and at the cost of a slaughter of which we are not told, that the southern rowers, bending violently to their work, shot up alongside of their great enemies, now two, now three engaging upon either side some one Venetian hull. The hooks ran out and up, the blades caught the halyards, and the oarsmen, suddenly backing water, cut through those ropes cleated to the enemy’s bulwarks; and here and there, all up and down the line, the Roman legionaries, watching from the heights upon the shore, saw the great leathern sails come crowding down, and the crew beneath them helpless. And everywhere the little southern men swarmed up the sides of the great Breton ships and boarded; and everywhere the sword conquered, though the long fight lasted through the afternoon under a wind that slowly died away. Thus did Cæsar and his men see victory accomplished on the sea below them, before the sun had set over the calm to the west. When all was lost, some remnant of the Venetian fleet not yet captured brought up their helms a-weather and stood to run before what was left of the southerly breath that evening into their harbours of the north. But the slight wind betrayed them, for before darkness it had utterly died away.