The first necessity was to augment his numbers, and fill up the wide chasm in his ranks, by fresh enrolments in the territory in which he had entered. The warlike habits and predatory dispositions of the Cisalpine Gauls afforded the means of obtaining this necessary succour. The victory over the Roman horse on the Ticino, when the superiority of the Numidian cavalry was first decisively displayed, had an immediate effect in bringing a crowd of Gaulish recruits to his standard. The Carthaginian general was careful in his first engagement to hazard only his cavalry, in which arm he was certain of his superiority. The battle of the Trebia which followed, and which first broke the strength of the legions, excited an unbounded ferment in Lombardy, and brought the Gaulish youths in crowds, to follow the career of plunder and revenge under his victorious standards. Recruits speedily were not awanting; the only difficulty was to select from the crowds which presented themselves for enrolment. It was like the resurrection of Prussia in 1813, against the tyrannic domination of the French emperor. Winter was spent in organizing these rude auxiliaries, and reducing them to something like military discipline; and so effective was their co-operation, and so numerous the reinforcements which their zeal brought to his standard, that in the following spring he crossed the Apennines, and traversed the marshes of Volterra, at the head of nearly fifty thousand men, of whom above one half were Gaulish recruits. And when the Consul Flaminius attempted to stop him on the margin of the Thrasymene Lake, where the stream still called "_Sanguinetto_" murmurs among the old oaks, the children of the soil, the total defeat of his army with the loss of thirty thousand men, lost the Romans the whole north of Italy, and carried consternation to the gates of the Capitol.