Count Belisarius

This was the day on which we heard of the execution of Hilderich, and on which King Geilimer's scouts first made contact with our rearguard. But Belisarius continued forward without lagging or hurrying. By the sixth day, the fourth day of July, we had crossed the peninsula and, skirting the Lake of Tunis, drawn near to the Tenth Milestone. Here there was a small village and a posting-station; we halted five miles away from it. Belisarius chose a defensible site for the usual fortified camp, where we dug ourselves to safety as usual, each man fixing his stake in the stockade.

Meanwhile the Vandal forces were closing in on us. Ammatas led out the garrison from Carthage; Geilimer's nephew, the son of Zazo, advanced against our flank; and Geilimer himself threatened our rear. Now, the Vandals, like the Goths, were fine horsemen and clever with lance and broadsword, but only their infantry carried bows. They had no recent experience of horse-archers like ours, for their only enemies in this country, the wild Moorish horsemen of the desert, used javelins. This was greatly to our advantage. As for their fighting qualities: these fair-skinned, fair-haired Northerners had now, by the third generation, become acclimatized to Africa. They had intermarried with the natives, changed their diet and yielded to the African sun (which makes for ill-temper rather than endurance) – and to such luxuries as silk clothes, frequent bathing, spiced foods, orchestral music, and massage instead of exercise. This enervating life had brought out strongly a trait common to all Germanic tribes, namely an insecure hold on the emotions. However, their fighting forces had increased in numbers since Geiserich's time from 50,000 to 80,000, apart from their numerous Moorish allies.

Armenian John with the vanguard pushed on ahead, and on the third day of July, about midday, turning a corner in the road close to the Tenth Milestone, he came upon a force of 100 well-mounted Vandal horsemen halted negligently outside the posting-station. John's men, who were riding in column, could not deploy, because of the narrowness of the defile through which the road passed at this point. There was no opportunity for using their bows, so they immediately charged with the lance, just as they were. The Vandals formed up hurriedly and stood their ground. In the ensuing skirmish twelve of our men went down; but then Armenian John pulled a weighted throwing-dart from his shield and with it struck their leader, a handsome youth in gilded armour, full in the forehead at short range. He toppled from his horse, dead, and the Vandals then broke away, with cries of dismay, pursued by our men. More Vandals, leisurely trotting up the road in troops of twenty or thirty, became involved in the rout; and as a snowball rolled down a lull picks up new snow and grows to monstrous proportions, so with the Vandals in flight. With lance and throwing-dart and arrow the cuirassiers pursued, killing methodically, not allowing the enemy the opportunity to reform, driving them headlong out of the defile.

It was possible to deploy in the plain beyond, and the slaughter was even greater there. Armenian John pushed the Vandals back to the very walls of Carthage, and by a view of the corpses dotted here and there over the plain in those ten miles one could liave imagined that an army of 20,000 men, not a mere half-squadron, had been at work.

Meanwhile King Geilimer's forces and those of his nephew converged on the Tenth Milestone. In a plain which had once been a salt marsh the nephew had the ill-luck to come suddenly upon the Massagetic Huns. He outnumbered them by 3,000 to 600, but the outlandish look of these hollow-eyed, long-haired fellows (who lived, remember, a year's journey away from Carthage and had never before been seen on African soil) scared the superstitious Vandals, and the unexpected, stinging showers of arrows were terrible. They fled unanimously without coming to blows at all, and were massacred almost to a man. As for Geilimer, he was unaware of his nephew's fate and had lost touch with Belisarius's rearguard, because of the hilly nature of the ground. Belisarius knew by now that Armenian John had cleared the defile of the enemy; but had received no further reports from him, and feared that he might have been ambushed and stand in need of assistance. Leaving the infantry behind in the stockade, he ordered the Herulians under his blood-brother Pharas, and a squadron of Thracian Goths, to gallop ahead and investigate; he followed at a more leisurely pace with the main body of cavalry.