Mindful of the brave and successful resistance which fifty years before they had with united strength presented to the Cimbri on the borders of their land,( 38) and stimulated by the patriots who had fled to them in numbers from central Gaul, the confederacy of the Belgae sent their whole first levy--300,000 armed men under the leadership of Galba the king of the Suessiones--to their southern frontier to receive Caesar there.

A single canton alone, that of the powerful Remi (about Rheims) discerned in this invasion of the foreigners an opportunity to shake off the rule which their neighbours the Suessiones exercised over them, and prepared to take up in the north the part which the Haedui had played in central Gaul.
The Roman and the Belgic armies arrived in their territory almost at the same time.
Conflicts on the Aisne Submission of the Western Cantons Caesar did not venture to give battle to the brave enemy six times as strong; to the north of the Aisne, not far from the modern Pontavert between Rheims and Laon, he pitched his camp on a plateau rendered almost unassailable on all sides partly by the river and by morasses, partly by fosses and redoubts, and contented himself with thwarting by defensive measures the attempts of the Belgae to cross the Aisne and thereby to cut him off from his communications.
When he counted on the likelihood that the coalition would speedily collapse under its own weight, he had reckoned rightly.

King Galba was an honest man, held in universal respect; but he was not equal to the management of an army of 300,000 men on hostile soil.
No progress was made, and provisions began to fail; discontent and dissension began to insinuate themselves into the camp of the confederates.

The Bellovaci in particular, equal to the Suessiones in power, and already dissatisfied that the supreme command of the confederate army had not fallen to them, could no longer be detained after news had arrived that the Haedui as allies of the Romans were making preparations to enter the Bellovacic territory.
They determined to break up and go home; though for honour's sake all the cantons at the same time bound themselves to hasten with their united strength to the help of the one first attacked, the miserable dispersion of the confederacy was but miserably palliated by such impracticable stipulations.

It was a catastrophe which vividly reminds us of that which occurred almost on the same spot in 1792; and, just as with the campaign in Champagne, the defeat was all the more severe that it took place without a battle.
The bad leadership of the retreating army allowed the Roman general to pursue it as if it were beaten, and to destroy a portion of the contingents that had remained to the last.