Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II Progress of Vandals from Prussia to the Pillars of Hercules— Genseric professes peace to deceive his enemies. IT seems inexplicable that a tribe of Vandals in Baltic lands between the Oder and the Elbe should in less than thirty years be at the southernmost point of Spain. The distance is over one thousand miles and their average progress was about thirty-six miles per year, or three miles for each month—a rate of speed that left abundant leisure for foraging and other profitable digressions. When he took any prisoners, they were either massacred or sold into slavery or incorporated as recruits, and, of course, he spared only those best fitted for his particular work. Of those who followed him from Potsdam, very few could have survived the three decades of hardships, and their places had to be filled. But the history of Frederick the Great, and also that ofthe famous Crusaders and the Buccaneers of the Spanish Main, teaches us that a successful general readily attracts new recruits from every race and creed. Therefore it is fair to conclude that while Genseric and Frederick the Great were Vandals or Prussians, they commanded men selected primarily for fighting qualities and loyalty to their king. Spain, in the days of Genseric, was nominally a part of the Roman Empire; but so many German tribes had crowded in upon that helpless peninsula that they fell to fighting one another in the interval between plundering the helpless natives. It is my private guess that Genseric from boyhood up had occupied his visionary moments with planning an attack upon the warm lands of Europe, much as William II. dreamed of sacking Bombay and Calcutta. His father's camp contained many who had served in the legions of Rome, who had spied out the weaknesses of the enemy, and who urged...