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 aim or plan, to the right and left along the shore of the lake. They were pursued by few of the victors, who preferred, first of all, to seize the small Roman vessels and in these aid their comrades to board the proud biremes. These vessels would contain more men, and their higher decks were far better suited to climb the sides of the large war galleys than the low fishing boats of the Alemanni. So it happened that many German boats drifted to the shore empty, their crews having abandoned them to pursue in the smaller Roman vessels, the Roman galleys, or having already boarded them. When Decius, with the little band of Illyrians, whom he had held together around the wounded General and Ausonius, reached the burning camp, even Saturninus, with the biremes blazing before his eyes, recognized reluctantly that here, too, all was lost, and any continuation of the battle impossible. He consented, hesitatingly, to think only of flight. Rignomer, who had joined the General at the lake gate, was the first to discover, as he gazed watchfully to and fro, several deserted boats of the Alemanni drifting near them.