The defeat was soon compensated, in so far as the Rhine army was immediately not simply made up to its strength, but considerably reinforced. Tiberius once more took up the supreme command, and though for the year following on the battle of Varus (10) the history of the war had no combats to record, it is probable that arrangements were then made for the occupation of the Rhine-frontier by eight legions, and simultaneously for the division of this command into that of the upper army, with Mentz as its headquarters, and that of the lower with the headquarters at Vetera, an arrangement, as a whole, which thereupon remained normal for centuries. It could not but be expected that this increase of the army of the Rhine would be followed by the energetic resumption of operations on the right bank. The Romano-German conflict was not a conflict between two powers equal in the political balance, in which the defeat of the one might justify the conclusion of an unfavourable peace; it was the conflict of a great civilised and organised state against a brave but, in a political and military aspect, barbarous nation, in which the ultimate result was settled from the first, and an isolated failure in the plan as sketched might as little produce any change as the ship gives up its voyage because a gust of wind drives it out of its course. But it was otherwise. Tiberius, doubtless, went across the Rhine in the following year (11), but this expedition did not resemble the former one. He remained during the summer on that side, and celebrated the emperor's birthday there, but the army kept to the immediate neighbourhood of the Rhine, and of expeditions on the Weser and on the Elbe there was nothing said. Evidently the object was only to show to the Germans that the Romans still knew how to find the way into their country, and perhaps also to make such arrangements on the right bank of the Rhine as the change of policy required. [Sidenote: Germanicus on the Rhine.]