Hasdrubal resolved to make a grand effort, and assembled an army, which including some Iberians, under his brother Mago, as well as some Numidians, headed by Masinissa, their king, numbered 75,000 men, and six-and-thirty elephants. Scipio, though objecting to attack a power more than twice his size, was compelled to do so, by a want of provisions, for he had so little food that his army could not even have grubbed on for a month or two. He was again victorious, and Hasdrubal proceeded to join his brother Hannibal; but the letters written by the former to apprise the latter of his coming, instead of going regularly through all the military posts, fell, by some misdirection or indirection, into the hands of the enemy. The Consul Livius Salinator went into the neighbourhood of Sena Gallica--now Senigaglia--and was joined by his colleague, C. Claudius Nero, who came, under cover of the night, with a large army; and it would appear that the forces of Hasdrubal kept such very early hours, that they had all gone to bed, and knew nothing of the reinforcements that had been sent against them. Hasdrubal, however, saw among the Romans, on the following morning, some soldiers, whose faces were so sun-burnt, as to give a strange complexion to a part of the troops, and he concluded that they had recently been on a journey. After having indulged in an inquiring look, he commenced a patient listen, and he fancied he heard two trumpet calls in the hostile camp, when, without considering whether the second might have been the mere echo of the first, he resolved, in his own mind, that the armies of the two Consuls had joined together. He accordingly determined to fly, and began by trying to swim across the river Metaurus, which is usually shallow enough; but the rains had swelled it to such a torrent that he was soon plunged into the depths of misery. His guides, following the impulse of their own cowardice, ran away as fast as they could, and he, in perfect ignorance of the country, found the river rising and his spirits sinking in about an equal ratio. The Romans came up with him in time to find his army completely damped, and his troops were, according to the military practice of the period, cut, at once, to pieces. Hasdrubal, who had lost heart early in the battle, seems ultimately to have lost his head, for rushing into the midst of a cohort, he was decapitated by a Roman soldier. It is said that the head of Hasdrubal was afterwards brutally thrown into the camp of his brother Hannibal; but happily for the credit of humanity, this story of the head is absurd on the very face of it.