We may assume that Cerealis’s action in marching from Lindum had, at any rate, drawn the Britons away from the vital point. Paulinus reached London before Boudicca. Then the blow fell. No troops were there. The IXth Legion, we know, had been destroyed. Pœnius Postumus, the temporary commander of the IInd, paralyzed by the responsibility, perhaps thought fit to transmit the order to his absent superior, and at any rate stood fast on the Lower Severn. London was not fortified--it must have been crowded with fugitives--and Paulinus’s entire strength, according to Tacitus, was but 10,000 men. There is really no reason to believe, as has been suggested, that he had outpaced his army and had only his escort with him. The position is quite clear. He had ordered a concentration at London, and it had failed. Instead of 20,000 men or more, he had only 10,000 wherewith to defend an open town crowded with refugees. He decided that London must be abandoned. Of its population, swollen, probably, by much of that of Verulam, those who had most to fear--_i.e._, the Continental residents--followed the march. Some, doubtless, escaped on shipboard, but many, probably those of British birth, remained. Conjecture has been busy with the direction of Paulinus’s march. The old view was that he moved on Camulodunum; the more modern one, followed by most recent writers, is that he retreated on Deva to rally its garrison. Neither, however, commends itself to the authors. Let us study the position. Paulinus at London had 10,000 combatants in hand but was burdened with a mass of non-combatants at least equal in number. At and about Deva were perhaps half a legion and auxiliaries--say, 5,000 men. At Lindum, practically blockaded, were the remains of the IXth. About Isca Silurum and on the Lower Severn was the IInd Legion with its auxiliaries. At Viroconium and other places in the west, and in some of the Kentish towns (_i.e._, Rutupiæ), there were certainly garrisons. The British host was somewhere north-east of London. The question of supplies must be considered. It was probably near harvest-time, as the Welsh campaign and the subsequent operations would have consumed most of the summer. The richest districts of Britain were Essex, Kent, and the Lower Severn Valley; but Essex was in the hands of the Britons, and Paulinus could draw no supplies from it. Wherever Paulinus went he had to feed his army and its hapless incubus of refugees. The London-Deva road traversed the thinly-peopled and thickly-wooded Midlands; the way to Colchester was barred by the Britons. [Illustration: THE CAMPAIGN OF A.D. 60 AGAINST BOUDICCA. THE POSITION AT THE TIME OF PAULINUS’S ARRIVAL IN LONDON.