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A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 1 by François Pierre Guillaume Guizot
page 56 of 428 (13%)
answered Marius quietly.

The soldiers obeyed: but the hour of battle had come, and well did Marius
know it. It commenced on the brink of the Coenus, between some Ambrons
who were bathing and some Roman slaves gone down to draw water. 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
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