Equally astonishing was the condition of supineness, of all governmental officials in Gaul, local and Imperial, as their tale revealed it. Neither the Prefect of the Rhine, nor any one of the Procurators of Gaul, had, as far as their story indicated, made any effort to arrest them, turn them back, stop them, check them, hinder them or even have them expostulated with. As far as I could infer from all I heard neither had the governing body of any city or town. For all they were interfered with by any official they might have been full-time veterans, honorably discharged, marching homeward under accredited officers provided with diplomas properly made out, signed, sealed and stamped. Everywhere they had been fed at public expense, lodged free or provided with camping-grounds and tents; their pack-animals had been replaced if worn out, and everything they needed had been provided on their asking for it or even before they made any request. I could only infer that they had inspired fear by their numbers and truculence and that each town or district had striven to keep them in a good humor and to get rid of them as soon as possible by entertaining them lavishly and speeding them along their chosen way. As they told of their own behavior there had been no consistency or system or method in their additions to their company. By their own account they had enticed men to join them or had ignored likely recruits in the most haphazard fashion, purely as the humor struck them. The like was true of their emptyings of _ergastula_ in Italy. At Turin, as well as I could gather from my chats with this or that centurion or soldier or liberated slave, they had set free the inmates of the _ergastulum_ by the Segusio Gate and had then turned aside to that by the Vercellae Gate, but had ignored the larger _ergastulum_ by the Milan Gate; though they had marched out of Turin, necessarily, by that gate. Similarly at Milan, they had emptied two _ergastula_ and ignored the rest; as at Placentia, where they had expended all their time and energy on the first _ergastulum_ they happened on inside the Milan Gate and on ours, and then had ignored or forgotten the four or five others, equally large and equally well filled.