When the whole horde of the Ambrons advanced to the battle, shouting their war-cry of Ambra! Ambra! a body of Gallic auxiliaries in the Roman army, and in the first rank, heard them with great amazement; for it was their own name and their own cry; there were tribes of Ambrons in the Alps subjected to Rome as well as in the Helvetic Alps; and Ambra! Ambra! resounded on both sides.
The battle lasted two days, the first against the Ambrons, the second against the Teutons.

Both were beaten, in spite of their savage bravery, and the equal bravery of their women, who defended, with indomitable obstinacy, the cars with which they had remained almost alone, in charge of the children and the booty.

After the women, it was necessary to exterminate the hounds who defended their masters' bodies.

Here again the figures of the historians are absurd, although they differ; the most extravagant raise the number of barbarians slain to two hundred thousand, and that of the prisoners to eighty thousand; the most moderate stop at one hundred thousand.

In any case, the carnage was great, for the battle-field, where all these corpses rested without burial, rotting in the sun and rain, got the name of Campi Putridi, or Fields of Putrefaction, a name traceable even nowadays in that of Pourrires, a neighboring village.
[Illustration: The Women defending the Cars----58] As to the booty, the Roman army with one voice made a free gift of it to Marius; but he, remembering, perhaps, what had been lately done by the barbarians after the defeat of the consuls Manlius and Czepio, determined to have it all burned in honor of the gods.