were for the most part those who were unused to bad food and water. Mountaineers were in general bold, hardy, independent men with well-developed sight and hearing; they were invaluable as scouts and guides in broken country. Men from the wide plains understood the management of horses and the art of open warfare. Sailors were ingenious with their hands and knew how to make themselves at home in strange places and how to establish understanding with foreigners. Each of these classes of men could learn from one another; the more diverse the ingredients of the mixture, the better would be the discipline in any squadron, and the better the terms on which one squadron met with another. For close racial and religious tics uniting men under a single standard often make for mutiny, discontent, and quarrelling with other corps. To enlist in the army should be like becoming the citizen of an entirely new world, not like moving from the centre to the suburbs of one's native town. These were Justin's views as well as those of Belisarius. Belisarius had wanted no estate-levies — that is to say no serfs contributed by landowners to the army in lieu of a tax — because the landowners would in general send their weakest and most useless men; but he had added 'except with the privilege of choice', knowing that in these levies a man Was sometimes included merely because he was too active and independent-minded to please his landowner — and, properly handled, might turn into a fine soldier. Finally, he had wanted no factionists, because they were a disturbing clement wherever they went, and no men with previous military service in other corps, because these always considered that they knew better than the officers and sergeants of their present squadron or company, and taught the recruits traditional tricks for evading duty, and for stealing, and for bettering themselves at other people's expense.
Justin allowed Belisarius his pick of the recruits who came forward that year from Thrace, Illyria, Asia Minor; he chose according to the specifications he had made.
With a well-trained squadron Belisarius raided across the Upper Danube in the summer of the year of our Lord 520. He engaged with the Gepids, a troublesome Germanic race that had been settled in this region for about a hundred yean. The Gepids fought from horseback with long battle-axes and talked in loud voices and greased their yellow hair with rancid butter. They were organized, like most German tribes, into gaus, communities of 5,000 or more souls, each under a nobleman, and providing a thousand or so armed warriors for the national army. The gau thousands were subdivided into 'hundreds', troops of mounted freemen who had taken an oath of personal loyalty to a lesser nobleman and who were members of a single elan, or group of families among which there was a regular exchange of women in marriage.
Belisarius's commission was to engage small forces of the Gepids, to take prisoners, to lose no men himself, to teach this nation a new respect for the Imperial name. All these tasks he accomplished. Even the noblest Gepids wore little armour, relying on leather jerkins and helmets and hide-covered wicker shields; and only their infantry, who were serfs or slaves, used the bow. Belisarius's tactics were to draw the Gepid cavalry away from their infantry, and to keep them just within bowshot; not letting them come to closer quarters with their battle-axes and short javelins until they were demoralized by their losses; first dismounting as many of them as possible by the shooting of their horses. Then he would charge, yet would not press the pursuit, merely capturing the dismounted men and as many others as held their ground. In this summer's campaign, of which I can give no geographical details, because there are no settled towns or other well-known features in that district to indicate its extent, he raided over a distance of 400 miles. The food his men carried with them was barley-meal and dried goat's flesh, always a ration for ten days. He kept a supply-boat on the river, with stores of arrows and a repair-shop in it: this was his base. By the end of the campaigning season three of his men had been wounded, and one drowned in a marsh; but he had captured not less than forty Gepids, all of whom, rather than be sold as slaves for menial work, applied for permission to enlist under his personal command as cavalrymen. They were the first barbarian recruits to the Household Regiment of Belisarius, for so Justin gratefully renamed the force, allowing the men to swear personal allegiance to their commander.
These Gepids have a shortage of metal, iron as well as gold,' and their jewels are of trifling value.
Many of the officers who later distinguished themselves under his leadership in his four principal wars were trained in this campaign; or in the punitive expedition that he made in the following summer against the Bulgarian Huns of the Lower Danube, who had lately been active again on our side of the river. He had 600 heavy cavalry with him on this occasion, not 200. With the Bulgarians, who are horse-archers, the problem was how to come to close quarter] with them, not how to hold them off. His method was to use live bait, a small body of men on fast horses, and draw the greedy Bulgarians into an unfavourable position, from which their retreat could be cut off'. The Bulgarians, like the Gepids, protected their communities, when halted during the march, by barricades of wagons. Belisarius would ride to the windward of these and set them alight by means of fire-arrows. He caused the Bulgarians heavy losses and took numerous prisoners, but the plunder that the captured camps yielded was small.
For his feats Belisarius was promoted in title from 'Distinguished Patrician' to 'Illustrious Patrician'. Justinian was now Commander of the Imperial Guards under his adoptive father the Emperor Justin. He was, however, no soldier, and in practice army matters were still controlled by Justin. On the other hand, Justin had no understanding of statecraft or civil business, and let the officers of State do more or less what they pleased, under the supervision of Justinian.
Belisarius was now employed as general supervisor of military training, and spent the next four years going from one garrison town to the other throughout the Eastern half of the Empire, writing detailed reports on the condition of the troops he inspected and on the capacity of their officers, and making recommendations for improvements in training and equipment. He gained many friends among steady old officers whose work he praised, and active young officers whom he recommended for promotion; but more enemies. He always refused to turn a blind eye to incompetence or to deficiencies in equipment, and was known to be unbribable.
He remained in high favour at Court, yet when he was pressed to marry this high-born woman or that, he always excused himself as at present too much of a traveller. When he could settle down he would marry, he said. But he had no love-affairs with women, married or unmarried, and abstained from visits to the grand brothel which Constantine had built and which was the general meeting-place of all the wit and fashion of Constantinople. His enemies hinted that he was no lover of women merely because he preferred his own sex; but that was a foolish lie. If he did not marry, that was, in my naturally prejudiced view, because the memory of my mistress Antonina had remained with him; and he abstained from the brothel because to attend it was against the Christian law which he had sworn to observe. Besides, his work was enough to occupy his mind, and should he want amusement he would go hunting with his staff. If there was a shortage of deer or hare or other game, this would not trouble him much: he would shoot as readily at hawk in the sky or snake in the hedge as at nobler game, and not less accurately. He encouraged his officers at the same practice; for hunting, he said, was a sort of drill. Boar-hunting with the lance he especially recommended.
He came to Antioch twice in the course of his duties, but on the first occasion my mistress and her husband happened to be staying at their villa in the Lebanon; and on the second she did not meet him cither, though she longed to do so. Her husband invited him to a dinner at the house, but he refused, pleading his official duties. However, he wrote a letter in his own hand as a particular compliment to my mistress's husband. My naturally prejudiced view was that he would have felt embarrassed at meeting my mistress again as the wife of another man.
This may seem an extravagant story, but I later met its parallel in Italy: a young patrician had fallen in love with a married woman when he was only thirteen. Not only did he abstain from love of any other woman, but he went out into the wilderness and lived in a cave, and later formed a society of hermit monks whom they now call Benedictines after this desperate Benedict. They were a decent fraternity, whose employments were three only — namely, worship of God, reading, manual labour; they abstained from butcher's meat, politics, and vice. But they came to hold with Benedict that nun and woman should not merely be strangers to each other but natural, irreconcilable foes; which, to me, is nonsensical. I visited their high-walled hermitage on Mount Cassino once, above the Latin Way between Rome and Naples, and found everything under the strictest and cxactest discipline. I reported what I had seen to my mistress, who by the rules of the monastery was not permitted to enter, and said to her of Benedict: 'A good soldier is lost in him.' Belisarius, who was present, answered me in the Christian sense: 'No, Eugenius, a good soldier found.'
This Benedict was nearly defeated once, for the woman with whom he was in love took pity on him at last, and engaged a party of theatre-women to come with her one evening to the monastery, one woman for each monk. They knocked at the great door; and when the porter — a gigantic Goth — opened to them he was assaulted by fondling arms and smothered in scented kisses, and led away prisoner. The attack was carried out most vigorously,
