Justin had asked Belisarius: 'What sort of recruits do you want? Have you a preference for any particular class or tribe or race?' Belisarius's answer: 'Give me men who can drink foul water and cat carrion. Let them be a mixed force of mountaineers, sailors, men from the wide plains. Give me no estate-levies, except with the privilege of choice, and no factionists, and no men who have served as soldiers in any other corps.'
Justin approved the answer. Disease carried off more men on some campaigns than wounds, and its victims 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.
