But if Ariovistus was unafraid, it was easy to see that his soldiers were not over glad to see the Roman army. If they might have attacked the enemy at once, they would have felt less gloomy. But there were soothsayers in the camp, and these went from tent to tent, bidding the soldiers wait until the new moon appeared before they fought.
Cæsar may have known what the soothsayers had said, but in any case, he saw that the Germans were not ready to fight, so he determined to attack their camp.
When the Romans began to advance, the Germans were roused to fury. They forgot the words of the soothsayers, or, if they remembered, they paid no heed to them, for they dashed furiously upon the enemy and tried to break its ranks.
Again and again they hurled themselves upon the foe, but Cæsar’s legions stood firm, and at length they, in their turn, attacked the Germans with irresistible force. The Germans could not stand the onslaught; they broke their ranks and fled.
If they could but reach the river Rhine and cross it they would be safe, but the river was about thirty-five miles away.
Still that was the direction in which they fled, followed and cut down not only by the Romans but by the Gauls, whose enemies they had always been.
Ariovistus himself was almost captured, but he at length succeeded in crossing the river with a few troops, and was then soon beyond the reach of the Roman legions. This was Cæsar’s second great victory in Gaul.
The Nervii, with whom he fought his next battle, were perhaps the most terrible foes he encountered during the many years he spent among the barbarians.
So determined were the Nervii to fight, that they did not even wait to see if the Romans meant to attack them, but assembled in great numbers on the left bank of the river Sambre, a tributary of the Meuse.
The home of this fierce tribe was in the thick forests of their country, and here they had hidden their wives, their children, and their property, when they set out to seek for the Romans.