Moved rather by apprehension at the growing love and devotion of the legions for their general and his family than by annoyance at the mishaps of the German expedition, the emperor resolved to recall Germanicus from the Rhine and despatch him to the East. This circumstance made the general all the more anxious to bring to a glorious issue the war in Germany which he regarded himself as bound in honour to terminate. A fleet of a thousand ships, with flat bottoms adapted for the ebb and flow, well manned and abundantly provisioned, was collected in the Batavian islands. In these he voyaged with eight legions to the mouth of the Amisia and then marched by land to the Visurgis, on whose right bank the Germans were posted under the command of Arminius. A brother of the Cheruscan chieftain was serving in the Roman army and had been rewarded for his military services in Pannonia and for the loss of an eye with pay and badges of honour. Arminius asked and obtained an interview with him; but warmly as he exhorted him in his own name and their mother’s to take the part of their beloved country and to fight for their hereditary freedom and native gods, his words recoiled without effect from the breast of the misguided and degenerate man. If the Visurgis had not flowed between these dissimilar brothers they would have come to blows. Thus even in the earliest times Germany exhibits the spectacle of fraternal strife and national disunion. Next day Germanicus led his army across the river. The Batavian cavalry, which preceded the main body, was enticed by a feint of flight on the part of the Cherusci into a plain encircled by wooded heights, where the majority of them, including their gallant leader Cariobald, succumbed to the blows of the enemy. Soon afterwards battle took place in a plain called by Tacitus Idistavisus, that stretched from the Visurgis to the range of hills that bordered it. _Battling with Arminius_ Before the fight began both leaders endeavoured to inflame the ardour of their warriors, Germanicus trying to rid his men of their dread of the unequal combat on wooded ground and of the lofty stature and savage looks of their adversaries, and insisting on the superiority of their armour over the wretched weapons of the other side--their shields of wood and wickerwork, their short spears and sticks hardened in the fire; Arminius reminding the Germans of former victories, and then asking whether any choice was left to them save to maintain their freedom or die before slavery overtook them.