Attrition's Apostle?

On a scorching summer day in 378 AD, Rome’s Eastern Army — a formidable force composed of tens of thousands of cavalry, legionnaires, and auxiliaries — moved to crush a rebellion of Gothic refugees near Adrianople, in present-day Turkey. Led by Fritigern, a canny Visigothic chieftain and erstwhile ally of Rome, the fierce Germanic tribesmen had been granted resettlement on Roman territory after fleeing across the Danube. As often in this age of upheaval and mass migration, the patchwork coalition of marauding Goths had themselves been displaced by an even more fearsome foe, the Huns, "a race of men, hitherto unknown" to the Romans who had, in the words of one startled contemporary, "suddenly descended like a whirlwind from the lofty mountains, as if they had risen from some secret recess of the earth, ravaging and destroying everything which came in their way." Disarmed and hideously abused by the Roman frontier units charged with their relocation, the Goths ultimately found themselves reduced to selling their own children into slavery in exchange for rancid dogmeat. Months of such inhumane treatment had eventually sparked widespread revolt, with Fritigern rapidly rallying thousands of fellow tribesmen to his banner. Already struggling to extinguish a series of bushfire revolts and incursions all across the "hewn edges" of its sprawling but increasingly battered empire, Rome painstakingly mobilized a large field army, with the aim of eradicating the Gothic threat once and for all. Led by the Emperor Valens himself, the Romans had good reason to believe they would prevail: They were seemingly numerically superior and far better equipped than the disparate grouping of barbarians encamped within their rustic wagon circle.