Note 10 — Chapter VI · FIFTH BOOK OF THE WAR IN GAUL.—CÆSAR’S SECOND INVASION OF BRITAIN.—THE GAULS RISE AGAINST HIM.—B.C. 54.

All well-instructed modern Britons have learned from the old authorities that the Briton war-chariots were furnished with scythes attached to the axles,—from Pomponius Mela, the Roman geographer, and from Mrs Markham, among others. And Eugene Sue, in his novel translated into English under the name of the ‘Rival Races,’ explains how the Bretons on the other side of the water, in the Morbihan, used these scythes; and how, before a battle with Cæsar’s legions, the wives of the warriors arranged the straps so that the scythes might be worked from the chariot like oars from a boat. But Cæsar says nothing of such scythes, and surely he would have done so had he seen them. The reader must choose between Cæsar’s silence and the authority of Pomponius Mela, Mrs Markham, and Eugene Sue.