PTER LVI.

The camp on the lake shore had been taken, with great loss of life to
the Romans.

A camp wall and ditch had been hurriedly made in the few hours after
their arrival, merely for form's sake, because the good old Roman
custom prescribed it, and Nannienus insisted upon its observance. But
the Commander himself closed his eyes to the carelessness of the work.
This camp was to be abandoned at dawn on the following morning and its
men sent to garrison the one on the Idisenhang and to march in pursuit
of the Barbarians. So the ditch was dug only a few feet deep, the wall
erected only a few feet high, and other fortifications were omitted.
The Alemanni instantly poured from all directions into the fortress,
whose inmates were overcome by sleep and wine.

The old Duke had given them counsel taken from the songs of a wandering
bard, who had sung in his own hall, to the music of his harp, ancient
tales of his race. The man was a Batavian and bore the names, an odd
medley, Julius Claudius Civilis Chlodomer. He went from tribe to tribe
as far as they understood his language, singing and telling the old
songs and legends. So he related how, three centuries before, his
people, skilled in the use of arms, and led by his ancestor who, though
a German, had the same Roman names as his distant descendant, fought
furiously against the Roman yoke and won many a victory, inspired by
Veleda, a maiden prophetess of the Bructeri.

And he sang how once, one moonless, starless night, they attacked a
Roman ship camp on the Rhine: the galleys were anchored in the river;
on the shore were many tents. The Batavians first cut the main ropes,
which wound around the poles stretching the tents; and the sleepers,
buried, entangled, and held beneath them, were easily overpowered while
thus defenceless:

"Like plump fish captured
In nets by night,
They struggled, shouting
Their tents beneath."

The old Duke had firmly impressed upon his mind these lines of the
Batavians; they had seemed to him the best of all, and he now used what
he had learned.

The Romans were wakened first by the tents falling in upon them, by the
glare of flames on all sides, and then by the Germans' shouts of
victory. They scattered without offering the least resistance; saw the
ships, their nearest refuge, also burning; tried to climb to the camp
on the height, but beheld fire blazing there also, and fled, without
a