In the end the decision was made to stage a lottery to recruit a force of 120,000 from amongst all Natopians of military age (18-34). There had been fears, with the tense question of the succession looming over Lindstrom, that there might be riots against this improvised form of conscription, both from draft-dodgers and spurned volunteers alike. To try and defuse this, the Secretary of Defence enlisted the support of the media barons, civic authorities and local government agencies to make the day of the lottery a festival and a patriotic occasion. By and large the gamble worked and the brawls and lynchings were comparatively few. Desertions were not all together unheard of, but they amounted to no more than 10% of the initial draft, and secondary call-ups were held to plug those gaps whilst the absconding conscripts were pursued through the towns and countryside of Tapfer and Yellow Isle, where roundups by the Imperial Constabulary were conducted in an comparatively unsympathetic manner.
Training at this stage, for the recruits herded into the Demesnal depots and assigned arbitrarily to regiments, comprised of weapons training, drill and a general acclimatisation to the idea of moving fast when being shouted at. The embryonic hierarchy of this new army also began to take shape, with the educated, well-spoken and plausible to become officers, with the dispatched remainder to the rank and file where those with a discernible propensity for psychopathy quickly found themselves marked for the corporal or sergeants stripes.
Competent persons, loosely defined, were siphoned off to the regiments that specialised in command, area defence (artillery), logistics, field engineering and most importantly the regiments which would operate the time-worn Babkhan armoured vehicles which were being taken out of storage and presently being subjected to a severe maintenance regime and overhaul. The infantry comprised thereafter of the remainder, of whom not too much was to be hoped. Instead they would be given a loaded carbine and a quart of rum and pointed in the general direction of the enemy. If the artillery and the armour were the big guns for this "penguin hunt" down in Walstadt, then the infantry would be the beaters, assigned to flush out the survivors of the preliminary and ongoing naval bombardment of the city, and to deal with them in an appropriate manner - without overmuch in the way of kindness.