When the army came into the vicinity of the Teutoburg forest, says Tacitus, a longing came over Cæsar to pay the last duties to the fallen warriors and their general; the whole army, mindful of their friends and kindred, of the disasters of war and the lot of mankind, was seized with tenderness and compassion. After Cæcina had been sent forward to spy out the ravines of the forest and to lay bridges and causeways across the swampy bogland and treacherous fields, the whole army entered the place of mourning, terrible alike to sight and memory. The camps of Varus were still standing; by the contracted wall of circumvallation it could be seen that they had sheltered but the remnant of the army. The bones of the fallen were bleaching on the battle-field, here in heaps, there scattered, according as an attempt had been made at flight or resistance; among the human bodies lay broken weapons and the skeletons of horses; hollow skulls stared down from the tree trunks; and in the groves close at hand could be seen the altars at which the tribunes and centurions had been slaughtered to the gods. Some who had escaped from the fight or from captivity pointed out the places where the legates had fallen, where Varus had received his first wound and where he had thrust the sword into his breast; where Arminius had addressed the multitude, where the prisoners had been strung up, where the eagles had been taken and flouted. The army, filled with mingled grief and wrath, buried the bones of the three legions six years after their defeat, and no man knew whose remains he was covering with earth, whether those of a brother or a stranger. Cæsar himself laid the first sod of a tumulus, the last gift to the departed, a witness of sympathetic grief to those present. Tiberius, however, disapproved of the interment of the bodies, either thinking that the soldiers would be cast down and discouraged by the terrible sight, or suspecting that in this act the general was courting the favour of the army and of the people. _The Return March_ After a skirmish with Arminius, in which the Roman cavalry suffered great loss in the swampy bottom of the wood, Germanicus set out on his return march. While he himself with his legions sailed from the mouth of the Amisia along the coast the way he had come, accompanied by the crippled cavalry on land, Cæcina, an experienced warrior who had seen forty campaigns, marched with the bulk of the army on the left of the Luppia towards the Rhine over the long causeway which Domitius had once laid across the bog land.