rst upon them.
They had scarcely recovered from the astonishment and the shock of
this unexpected onset, when the two thousand concealed in the
ambuscade came sallying forth in the storm, and assailed the Romans in
the rear with frightful shouts and outcries.

All these movements took place very rapidly. Only a very short period
elapsed from the time that the Roman army, officers and soldiers, were
quietly sleeping in their camp, or rising slowly to prepare for the
routine of an ordinary day, before they found themselves all drawn out
in battle array some miles from their encampment, and surrounded and
hemmed in by their foes. The events succeeded each other so rapidly as
to appear to the soldiers like a dream; but very soon their wet and
freezing clothes, their limbs benumbed and stiffened, the sleet which
was driving along the plain, the endless lines of Carthaginian
infantry, hemming them in on all sides, and the columns of horsemen
and of elephants charging upon them, convinced them that their
situation was one of dreadful reality. The calamity, too, which
threatened them was of vast extent, as well as imminent and terrible;
for, though the stratagem of Hannibal was very simple in its plan and
management, still he had executed it on a great scale, and had brought
out the whole Roman army. There were, it is said, about forty thousand
that crossed the river, and about an equal number in the Carthaginian
army to oppose them. Such a body of combatants covered, of course, a
large extent of ground, and the conflict that ensued was one of the
most terrible scenes of the many that Hannibal assisted in enacting.

The conflict continued for many hours, the Romans getting more and
more into confusion all the time. The elephants of the Carthaginians,
that is, the few that now remained, made great havoc in their ranks,
and finally, after a combat of some hours, the whole army was broken
up and fled, some portions in compact bodies, as their officers could
keep them together, and others in hopeless and inextricable confusion.
They made their way back to the river, which they reached at various
points up and down the stream. In the mean time, the continued rain
had swollen the waters still more, the low lands were overflowed, the
deep places concealed, and the broad expanse of water in the center of
the stream whirled in boiling and turbid eddies, whose surface was
roughened by the December breeze, and dotted every where with the