Instead he took his cavalry in a great arc, into the very foothills from which this Brennos had attacked, catching the Celt-Iberians unawares. An irresistible charge on their rear, with his son Quintus well to the fore, had broken the order of the attackers. Aulus now formed his whole army into a cohesive whole, ready to advance in any direction and engage, but a loud horn blew twice and the enemy evaporated, with a discipline no Roman fighting a Celtic army had ever encountered, leaving him no one to fight. Worse still, his baggage train had been plundered and in the process he had lost his wife. He had to march past the site of that as he sought to pursue the enemy, forced to gaze on the broken wagons, scattered possessions and the dead from the engagement. His position, the on-going battle and the need to appear in control debarred any notion that he could stop and examine the wreckage to see if the body of Claudia was amongst the dead. Only later, as the sun sank low in the west, was he able to establish that she was gone and that every man in his Praetorian Guard had died trying to defend her. That evening he received private word that she was alive, the personal prisoner of Brennos, who demanded no less than the withdrawal of the Roman legions as the price for her freedom.