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 28 HISTORY OF THE FRANKS would doubtless be stronger in their own land. And since this displeased Quintinus and the remainder of the officers, Nanninus returned to Mayence, and Quintinus crossed the Rhine with his army near the stronghold of Neuss, and at his second camp from the river he found dwelKngs abandoned by their occupants and great villages deserted. For the Franks pretended to be afraid and retired into the more remote tracts, where they built an abattis on the edge of the woods. And so the cowardly soldiers burned all the dwellings, thinking that to rage against them was the winning of victory, and they passed a wakeful night under the burden of their arms. At the first glimmer of dawn they entered the wooded country under Quintinus as commander of the battle, and wandered in safety till nearly mid-day, entangling themselves in the winding paths. At last, when they found everything solidly shut up by great fences, they struggled to make their exit into the marshy fields which were adjacent to the woods, and the enemy appeared here and there, and sheltered by trunks of trees or standing on the abattis as if on the summit of towers, they sent as if from engines a shower of arrows poisoned by the juices of herbs, so that sure death followed even superficial wounds inflicted in places that were not mortal. Later the army was surrounded by the enemy in greater number, and it eagerly rushed into the open places which the Franks had left unoccupied. And the horsemen were the first to plunge into the morasses, and the bodies of men and animals fell indiscriminately together, and they were overwhelmed by their own confusion. The foot soldiers also who had escaped the hoofs of the horses were impeded by the mud, and extricated themselves with difficulty, and hid again in panic in the woods from which they had struggled a little before. And so the ranks were thrown into disorder and the legions cut in pieces. Heraclius, tribune of the Jovinians, and nearly all the officers were slain, when night and the lurking places of the woods offered a safe escape to a few." This he narrated in the third book of his History. And in the fourth book, when he tells of the killing of Victor, son of Maximus, the tyrant, he says: "At that time Carietto and Sirus who had been appointed in place of Nanninus, were absent in the province of Germany with the army opposed to the Franks." And a little later when the Franks had taken booty from Germany,