The Nature of Alexander (24 page)

Effort and triumph must have left their traces. The ruler of Nysa and his nobles, anxiously seeking peace, came to his tent and found him still in his armour, dusty from the ride and spear in hand. “They were
wonderstruck at the sight of him, and fell to the ground, and were a long time silent.” He raised them up and reassured them. Prompted no doubt by some astute Greek trader or settler—many such had preceded the Macedonians—they begged him to spare their city because Dionysus had founded it; hence their abundant ivy, unique in those parts. Their goodwill was their soundest recommendation; but Alexander and the Companions had a delightful ramble in the sacred park of the local Indian god, hailing Dionysus in ivy crowns.

Meantime, the experienced Hephaestion had run a pontoon bridge across the Indus; no mean achievement, for it would bear an army across a wide and powerful stream. Alexander, reunited with his lover and (though not for long) with his bride, was received by King Omphis of Taxila with such a huge parade, complete with war elephants, cavalry, drums and gongs, that it looked like an advancing army, and a dreadful misunderstanding was averted just in time by Omphis’ riding out in front unarmed. Alexander reciprocated; friendly signs sufficed till the arrival of the interpreters.

Nearchus, Alexander’s admiral and one of his exiled boyhood friends, wrote a monograph on India, from which it seems that the Macedonians made contact chiefly, perhaps only, with the Aryan conquerors from the north, who still preserved traditions of their ancient nomadic life. The Nyseans were so fair they were not known to be Indians; the men of the Punjab are described as very tall. Community of race, however, had not kept the Punjab kingdoms, any more than the Greek states, from chronic war; a fact Alexander already knew and had exploited. Alliance with Omphis meant the enmity of his powerful neighbour Porus, whose land lay east of the next river arm, the Hydaspes. Alexander, after putting on an impressive parade, began to prepare for battle.

He made a point, however, of visiting the local ascetics, or naked philosophers as his men called them. Buddhism was now two centuries old, and though its sphere was further east, its influence may have inclined these Hindus towards the “middle way”; they did not practise crippling mortifications, but lived without possessions, fed by the community, in detachment from worldly desires. Arrian (who generally uses Nearchus for descriptive passages on India, Ptolemy for war) says that in rebuke of Alexander’s ambition they struck their feet upon the ground, meaning that only the earth under his soles could be his for all his restlessness. He admired their independence, and persuaded one of them to join his court, despite the others’ reproofs. Known to the Macedonians as Calanus, he was in his sixties; Strabo says that he had taken in his twenties a forty-year vow which had now expired, and was free to do as he chose. It is a great pity we have no record of what he and Alexander discussed together. The strange friendship lasted, as its dramatic end was to prove.

A formal request for Porus’ allegiance produced the expected defiance. Alexander mobilized with Omphis; paying little heed to the entrance on the scene of a more insidious foe, the monsoon rains.

He was realistic about human enemies; unlike Demosthenes he never underrated them. This good judgment failed him more than once in respect of weather. His rigorous training by Leonidas in childhood may have conditioned him to think of it in terms of hardship to be put up with, rather than real strategic threat. Someone must have told him how long and heavy the rains would be; he would have replied that soldiers must expect to get wet sometimes, and they all knew he would get wet with them. They had had rest time after their hard fights in the hills (Hephaestion’s army had had some too, passed over almost in silence by Ptolemy, who gave his own exploits
generous coverage). Any further delay would look like weakness. Through a growing downpour, Alexander led his men to the Hydaspes. It was beginning to rise. Hephaestion had had his pontoons carted from the Indus; but it was already too late to use them except as rafts. Opposite, at the easiest crossing point, King Porus and his army waited, with two hundred war elephants.

For months Alexander had been fighting on foot; but for a pitched battle he must use cavalry, and horses were terrified of elephants. In the field they could be dealt with; the point of crucial danger was the moment of landing. If they were on the bank, the horses would plunge off the rafts in panic, and be swept away.

No operation of Alexander’s better displays his many-sided military genius than the battle of the Hydaspes: war psychology, cool nerve, swift reaction in emergency, resource, organization, and the leadership by which total trust is inspired. Day after day, in pouring rain and thunderstorms, with the river steadily rising, he played an elaborate game of bluff. He made large troop movements to likely crossing points, launching boats and rafts in suggestive ways. He built up ostentatious stores, making it known that he thought of sitting out the floods till their winter fall. He kept Porus guessing not only at his plans, but at his quality. He showed every sign of irresolution. He marched his army by night along the bank, to blow trumpets and yell war cries till Porus and all the elephants had marched to meet him; then he retired, leaving the enemy to wait in the wet till morning. He did it night after night. Porus, a warrior of towering stature, began thoroughly to despise him, and stopped moving elephants each time he made a noise. Alexander was now ready.

He chose an upstream bend, where a headland and wooded island would screen him. The rafts were brought
by stealthy land portage. Craterus was left in camp with a strong contingent, to cross when the elephants were engaged elsewhere. Under cover of a violent thunderstorm, Alexander reached his crossing point. Among his officers, besides Hephaestion and Perdiccas, were Ptolemy, Lysimachus and Seleucus, three future kings. With the rafted horses they stole ashore. There was a bad moment when they found the bank had been cut off by a flood channel, but they just managed to ford it. A fascinating detail here reveals the average height of the Greek war horse: the men were chest deep in water, and the horses could just keep their heads above. No elephants appeared.

Too late, Porus’ scouts alerted him. He sent one of his sons with a flying column of chariots and horsemen. They were cut to pieces, a loss he could ill spare; his infantry superiority was enormous, about 30,000 to Alexander’s 6,000; in cavalry he was weak; he had now lost half (his son, who was killed, as well) and was left with 2,000 to the Macedonian 5,000 or so. He disposed his huge force on the most solid ground he could find, the cavalry on the wings, the infantry in the centre, and in front the wall of elephants, 100 feet apart.

Alexander was never a general to fight his last war over again. He did not attempt the tactics of Gaugamela. His usual right-wing station happened to suit his plan; but when his weary infantry came struggling up through the mud, he rested them till it was time for the decisive thrust. Viewing the portentous line of elephants with their weapon-bristling howdahs, he planned how to make them fight for him.

At first he let them alone. He set his horse archers (mostly Thracian) to harass and confuse the left-wing cavalry, which he then charged with his own cavalry wing. The Indian right-wing cavalry galloped round to meet the threat. They were attacked from the rear by Coenus,
a reliable commander of whom more will be heard. Alexander pressed his assault. The cavalry retreated among the infantry, behind the elephants. Now the horse archers shot down their mahouts, and turned their arrows on the bewildered beasts; as they started milling, the phalanx, its moment come, fell on them with javelins and sarissas. (The sufferings of this intelligent and loyal creature in the service of man’s aggression is one of history’s shameful tragedies.) In pain and panic, bereft of their guides and friends, they flailed and trampled the troops around them, as the Macedonians cordoned the confused and desperate mob in ever-narrowing ground. The Indians had just forced a gap and started to pour out of it, when Craterus, who had meantime crossed the undefended river, arrived with his fresh troops and cut them off. The scene stuns imagination: the great horde of men and beasts, the drumming rainstorms, the neighing, trumpeting and yells, the war horns and gongs counterpointed with thunder; the deepening bog stinking of blood and elephant spoor and river slime; dark faces and fair alike inhuman with mud and rain. Allowing for the chroniclers’ usual licence, the Indian casualties were terrible, the Macedonians’ light. It was Alexander’s last pitched battle; and, as he would have wished, it was his masterpiece.

King Porus was no Darius. On his brave elephant he fought when others fled, till, wounded in the underarm gap of his mail, he turned slowly to join the rearguard in retreat. Alexander had marked him down with admiration, and at the end sent him a royal ambassador; indiscreetly choosing the hated Omphis, whom he at once prepared to kill. Alexander found someone else, and he surrendered. The regal giant gazed down at the victorious enemy who measured beside him like a half-grown boy. How did he want to be treated, asked the muddy lad’s interpreter. “Like a king,” he answered. “I would do that
for my own sake,” said Alexander; “ask something for yours.” Porus, having measured the inward as well as the outward stature, replied that all had been said which needed saying. His kingdom was restored as soon as he had given allegiance, and later added to. His loyalty was lifelong. It would seem that Alexander, honouring the brave, did not even forget his elephant. Philostratus preserves a story that in a “temple of the sun” at Taxila there was a very old elephant, formerly belonging to King Porus, dedicated there by Alexander, who gave him the Homeric name of Ajax; the people used to anoint this pensioned hero with myrrh, and decorate him with ribbons.

At Taxila, Alexander performed the funeral rites of another veteran, nearer to his heart.

In the plains where the battle was fought, and which he set out from to cross the Hydaspes, Alexander founded cities. The first he called Nicaea, from his victory over the Indians; the other Bucephala, in memory of his horse Bucephalas who died there, not wounded at all but from exhaustion and old age. For he was about thirty years old and fell victim to fatigue; but till then had shared with Alexander many labours and dangers, never mounted except by him, since Bucephalas would bear no other rider. He was tall in stature, and valiant of heart.

The Romancers, feeling what was due to him, gave him a heroic death in battle; but both humanity and self-preservation would have kept Alexander from going into such an action on a thirty-year-old horse; and Ptolemy, his lifelong associate, must be Arrian’s source here. Bucephalas had come a long way from the horse pastures of Thessaly. By the shifting channel of the Jhelum archaeologists still seek traces of his tomb.

Porus’ wound did not lay him up. He was induced to
make peace with Omphis, and was soon on campaign with his new King. Alexander was ready to move east, to the sacred Ganges and its mouth in the ultimate ocean; his zest whetted by the real and the rumoured Indian marvels; the banyans which made a wood of a single tree, the sagacious elephants, the tiger skins and pearls and sapphires and rubies, the brilliant dyes of clothes, moustaches, beards and monkeys’ behinds; the fishponds and the shrines.

Not all the marvels were pleasing to his soldiers. Greeks might believe that woman was an imperfect form of man, but it seemed excessive to burn her alive on his pyre. Pythons flushed from their holes by the floods were huge, but unappealing. Worse were the poison snakes also enlivened, of all sizes down to the tiny and deadly krait which can lurk in a shoe or round a door handle. Alexander collected the best Indian snake charmers and used their remedies, but many men died painfully. And always, daily, there was the rain.

He was not going to let it waste his time. He marched north against an old enemy of Porus who, hearing of the rajah’s reinstatement, had declared war on both of them. His territory was reduced and handed as a gift to Porus; later in the campaign he was released to take it over. With him was sent Hephaestion, to help consolidate the conquest, found new towns and get them garrisoned. No mission could better attest the ability he had shown in diplomacy and organization; he had to set up the administration of a newly subdued province, in conference with a powerful ex-enemy, carrying also the vital responsibility for Alexander’s communications. Had he been simply the beloved confidant, he would have been taken along to see the Ocean. Indeed, in view of the outcome he must have been sadly missed.

Alexander marched on towards the foothills of Kashmir,
unaware of its beauties, concerned only to clear his passage eastward. He had been told (correctly) that the king whose lands bordered the Ganges was a low-caste usurper, despised by his divided people. His lands were rich and populous, his elephants particularly large. Alexander was eager to get on. He pressed swiftly across two more rivers, one of them in spate; made a sensational assault on the city of Sangala (unusually defended with a wagon wall), routed hostile tribesmen and arranged the affairs of others who had acknowledged him. He was too busy to notice that, under a well-disciplined outer surface, his men’s morale had sunk to zero.

By this time they had probably decided that it rained in India for nine or ten months a year. The miseries of constant soakings were made worse by inadequate clothes. They could well afford the good strong wool or linen they were used to; but when it wore out, they could get only wretched flimsy cotton, with no wear in it nor protection from the armour’s chafing, tearing on every thorn; they referred to the stuff as “Indian rags.” They were sick of trudging in pulp-wet boots through deep mud churned up by the column; of lame horses with thrushy frogs and worn hooves; of heaving at the wheels of bogged-down ox carts; of mouldy food, mildewed leather, and daily scourings of all their metal for rust. They felt no exhilaration at the thought of larger elephants, or new tribes of warriors, or the half-month march through desert which they heard would lie between. There was one more Punjab river left to cross, the Beas. Camping on its banks, they put their heads together; in significant numbers, they decided not to cross it.