About nine hundred paces west of the village the fugitives met their strong support, a body of eight hundred mounted shield-bearers, led by Velox, Belisarius's bodyguard. The General and all of us who had tremblingly witnessed the flight of the cavalry consoled ourselves with the hope that Velox would check their flight and march back with them to the enemy. But--oh, shame and horror--the weight of the Vandal onslaught was so tremendous that the fugitives and the shield-bearers did not even wait for it; the whole body, mingled together, swept back in disorder to Belisarius. The General said that at this moment he gave us all up for lost: "Gelimer," he said at the banquet that night, "had the victory in his hands. Why he voluntarily let it escape is incomprehensible. Had he followed the fugitives, he would have pursued me and my whole army into the sea, so great was the alarm of our troops and so tremendous the force of the Vandal assault. Then the camp and the infantry would both have been destroyed. Or if he had even gone from Decimum back to Carthage, he could have destroyed without resistance Fara and his men, for expecting no attack from the rear, they were scattered singly or in couples along the streets and in the fields, pillaging the slain. And once in possession of Carthage he could easily have taken our ships, anchored near the city,--without crews,--and thus cut off from us every hope of victory or retreat." But King Gelimer did neither. A sudden paralysis attacked the power which had just overthrown everything in its way. Prisoners told us that, as he dashed down the hillside, spurring his cream-colored charger far in advance of all his men, he saw in the narrow pass at the southern entrance of Decimum the corpse of his young brother lying first of all the bodies in the road. With a loud cry of anguish, he sprung from his horse, threw himself upon the lifeless boy, and thus checked the advance of his troops. Their foremost horses, held back with difficulty by the riders that they might not trample on the King and the lad, reared, plunged, and kicked, throwing those behind into confusion, and stopped the whole chase. The King raised in his arms the mangled and bloody body (for our horsemen had dashed over it); then breaking again into cries of agony, he placed it on his charger and ordered it to be buried by the roadside with royal honors. The whole did not probably occupy fifteen minutes, but that quarter of an hour wrested from the Barbarians the victory they had already won.