All this was more a soldiers' rising than an insurrection of the province, or even a Germanic war. If at that time the Rhine legions were fighting with those of the Danube, and further with these and the army of the Euphrates, it was but in keeping that the soldiers of the second class, and above all their most distinguished troop, the Batavian, should enter independently into this divisional warfare. Any one who compares this movement among the cohorts of the Batavians and the Germans on the left of the Rhine with the insurrection of those on the right bank of the Rhine under Augustus, may not overlook the fact, that in the later rising the alae and cohorts took up the part of the general levy of the Cherusci; and, if the perfidious officer of Varus released his nation from the Roman rule, the Batavian leader acted in the commission of Vespasian; in fact, perhaps, on the secret directions of the governor of his province privately inclined towards Vespasian, and the rising in the first instance was directed simply against Vitellius. It is true that the position of things was such that this soldiers' revolt might change itself at any moment into a German war of the most dangerous kind. The same Roman troops who covered the Rhine against the Germans of the right bank were, in consequence of the corps-warfare, placed in an attitude of hostility to the Germans on the left bank; the parts were of such a nature, that it seemed almost easier to exchange them than to carry them out. Civilis himself may possibly have left it to depend on the sequel, whether the movement would end in a change of emperor or in the expulsion of the Romans from Gaul by the Germans. [Sidenote: State of the armies on the Rhine.]