Steven Pressfield (3 page)

3.

The Macedonian infantry phalanx is based on a file of sixteen. Sixteen men, one behind the other. Two files is a section. This is commanded by a Line Sergeant. Four files is a platoon, led by a lieutenant and a Flag Sergeant. A square is four platoons, sixteen-by-sixteen, 256 men. A brigade is six squares, 1,536. There are six brigades in Alexander's army. In depth of sixteen, the phalanx's front is above six hundred yards.

The enlisted commander of each platoon is a Flag Sergeant, so named for the pennant he mounts on the peak of his two-handed pike, his
sarissa.
His post is up front. Second in rank to him is a Lance Sergeant, or file-closer. He is called a “back.” He takes the rear. In many ways his job is more important than the Flag's (also called a “First” or a “Top”) because his will drives the file forward, and any man who thinks of dropping back has to face him.

Third in rank in each file is the ninth man, a Sergeant or Lance Corporal. Why the ninth? Because when the command is given to “double front,” the file of sixteen divides into two half-files of eight, called litters, and the rear eight hastens up alongside the front eight. The ninth man becomes the first in the new file. By this evolution, the brigade has gone from roughly a hundred-man front, sixteen deep, to a two-hundred-man front, eight deep. Across the entire phalanx the front has expanded from six hundred to twelve hundred yards.

This configuration is how the Occupation Army trained at home, and how Alexander's expeditionary force fought in the first three years of the Persian war, in its great conventional battles at the Granicus River, Issus, and Gaugamela.

In Afghanistan, we are now told, things will not be so simple. The place is all mountain and desert. You can't use the phalanx there. The foe will not face it in pitched battle. Why should he? We would annihilate him if he did.

In the training at home with the eighteen-foot
sarissa,
a file had to be perfectly aligned front-to-back. Otherwise the formation would be tripping over its own feet. This was called advancing “on the axis.” The warrior virtue of being “on the axis” meant being sharp, obedient, never deviating. A good soldier was on the axis in everything he did.

Out east, we begin to see, there is no axis. The eighteen-foot
sarissa
has become the nine-foot half-pike; the phalanx exists on the parade ground only. Only two precepts remain: one, sacrifice everything in the cause of the main effort, and, two, never leave another Mack behind.

“Warfare out east,” our poet-sergeant Stephanos instructs us, “is of three types. In the plains, cavalry action. Against strongholds, siege warfare. In the mountains, mobile infantry.”

The fourth type of action was against villages. Our instructors didn't tell us about that.

4.

Our force of replacements is supposed to march out from Tripolis three days after we land, but we wind up stuck there for twenty-two more. Waiting for the cavalry's horses and our own arms. This is no joke, as our bunch still hasn't been paid (no one has), and what little shine we have left is not enough to live on. We wind up stealing like Spartans. Everyone does. The escort troops will not let us into the city, so we scrounge, scavenge, pilfer, trade, and wager. Somehow it works. I wind up with most of my kit refurbished—and a decent pair of boots to replace the ones ruined in the sea. And Lucas and I connect with a pair of Companion cavalrymen rotating home to Apollonia, who know both my brothers and have news of them.

Elias has been wounded but is well; he is in hospital now at Phrada in southern Afghanistan. Philip (Elias is nine years older than I, Philip fourteen) has been promoted to Major. He is in India now, as an envoy with Forward Operations, negotiating alliances with the native potentates in advance of Alexander's army's push over the Hindu Kush into the Punjab. Such place names sound impossibly romantic to me. My brothers! What illustrious fellows! How will I live up to their achievements? Will I even recognize them when I see them?

The Companion cavalry, in which both my brothers serve, is the elite arm of Alexander's fighting corps. To be accepted into a squadron is to be made for life. A man becomes in fact the king's companion. He may dine with him, carouse with him, address him as “Alexander” (though, it is true, few dare.) The phalanx brigades share the name Companions (
petzhetairoi,
“Foot Companions”). But it's not the same thing, as the king is a cavalryman and his closest mates are horsemen too.

In theory, each squadron of Companions is composed only of riders from its home district—Apollonia, Bottiaea, Torone, Methone, Olynthus, Amphipolis, and Anthemos being the squadrons taken by Alexander to Asia. (There are eight other squadrons, from other parts of Macedonia, but these remained home to garrison Greece and the tribal north.) But in practice, outstanding riders come from all over the kingdom seeking a berth. I have known men to marry or get themselves adopted into a local family, just to have a shot in the tryouts.

The trials take place over four days. The first two are compulsory exercises; the third is cross-country; the fourth is combat. A rider must show up with a string of seven horses. He is required to use no fewer than four during the ring work (to show he is not cheating by riding a smart animal), and one of those four must serve as his mount in either the steeplechase or the fighting tests. A good cavalry mount takes ten years to train and costs as much as a small farm. Only a rich man's son can try, unless he is sponsored, as my brothers were, by another rich man, or if he has a father who has been decorated by the king.

Both my brothers were grooms as lads and rode as jockeys in the hippodrome. I cannot tell you how many nights they came home with cracked skulls and busted shins. Nothing could stop them. In the trials at Apollonia, when Elias was only ten, he slipped into the paddock while the horses were being saddled and leapt aboard not one but two champions, placing a foot on each bare back while clasping the reins of one horse in his left hand and the other in his right; he not only rode off at top speed without so much as a watch-my-kit, but jumped the horses over both walls, in and out, all the while standing on the horses' backs as if he were nailed to them. The thrashing he received as punishment nearly carried him off, but it was worth it; he had made his name. He and Philip, five years older, could touch down off a horse's back at the all-out and spring back aboard, yoked only by a wrist through the animal's mane; they could “wrap around” (swing under a horse's belly and back up the other side). It was nothing to either of them to dice a pear with the long lance one-handed at the stretching run, and their knowledge of veterinary medicine and what we call horsemastership (everything inside the barn) was the equal of any physician in the kingdom. Yet both failed to qualify, not once but four times—that's how many superlative riders the realm held—before finally getting sent out in the expedition's second year with four thousand reinforcements under Amyntas Andromenes. They crossed by sea to Gaza in Palestine and joined the king's army in Egypt.

Our own belated contingent moves out from Tripolis, now, on the twenty-third day. The season is high summer. Every surface of armor must have a woven cover; otherwise the sun will turn it into a skillet. At home we have trained to march thirty miles a day with full kit and rations. Trekking now across Syria, fifteen miles feels like forty, and twenty like a hundred. The sun squats on our shoulders; we breathe dust instead of air. Our tongues are lolling like dogs' on the tramp to Marathus.

I fall in beside Flag. He can see I'm suffering. “The Afghan,” he says, “will make fifty miles a day afoot and a hundred on horseback. He doesn't drink and he doesn't eat. Hack off his head and he'll take two more swipes at you before he goes down.”

Reveille is three hours before dawn; march-out beats the sun by two. Lead elements of the column are in camp by midafternoon, with the stragglers and baggage train catching up by dark. An hour before noon a halt is called and the asses and mules are off-loaded; the beasts can go six to eight hours, but they have to get the weight off for two, otherwise they break down. No such luck for us. We get twenty minutes, then pack 'em up! At one stop on the third day, Lucas moves off to make water. Flag looks on, disapproving. “You shouldn't have a drop in you.” If you can still draw piss, he says, you're not trekking hard enough.

We have our weapons now. When we make camp early, we train. Cordon operations. Block and search. We have never heard of such things. High-lining. Sweep by flying columns. These are all new to us.

On treks over great distances, the day's march is planned to take us from one inhabited area to another—a city or town that has been tasked to supply bread and fodder, or at least provide a market for the army. Now on selected days, for training, the column begins bypassing these. We chop from nowhere to nowhere, throw up a “hasty camp,” a circular ditch-and-berm, spiked with palisade stakes. No wheat-bread in these. We dine on “mooch”—barley gruel, whipped up out of our meal bags, which every man packs (holding ten days' grain ration) and seasoned with whatever cresses we can scrounge and the odd pullet or goose liberated from a barnyard. Breakfast is wine, olive oil, and “hurry bread” (groats soaked overnight and half-baked on flat stones from the watch fire or directly over the flame on “paddles,” the iron flat-plates of the catapults). The feed we all dread is “scratch,” millet porridge, but even this is preferable to “cicada's lunch,” meaning no grub at all. Tollo and Stephanos build in one starve-day in seven, to lean out our guts and get us used to what's coming.

Flag has adopted me, after his fashion, or I should say I have fastened onto him like a barnacle. At Marathus an incident occurs. We have gotten paid finally. To celebrate, my mates and I hunt up a local shop for a barbering; when we get back to camp, we can't find our purse. Lucas keeps this with him at all times; it holds our pooled stash. Now it's gone. This is serious. No pay is coming until next month, and we can't stand another siege of starvation. I go to Flag, tell him the last place we'd had our wallet is at the barber's.

“Show me,” he says.

He enlists Tollo and a Mack corporal called Little Red. The barber's dwelling and shop are the same, a mud-brick hut with a shade canopy out front and a cooking kitchen on the side. It's suppertime; the wife won't open the gate. She's a snippy bitch and dishes out a smart dose of sauce.

Flag kicks the slats in. The shops in town all lie in the market district, a choleric rat-run called the Terik, “pigeon.” In moments every stall-keeper in the lane has collected, all gibbering in their tongue and ordering us to screw off. The barber's shack is thick with urchins and grandfolks, with three or four brothers or cousins, young men, all armed and on their feet in a state of outrage. Flag is packing his hook, a wicked weapon used for unhorsing cavalry, with a short-sword on a shoulder sling; Tollo and Red wear their blades; Lucas and I do too but, God help us, we have no intention of using them. Flag makes straight for the barber. By signs and pidgin, he lets him know we want our money.

Get out! the fellow shouts back. Leave my home! I have taken nothing!

Flag seizes him by the gullet and jams him against the wall. Tollo and Little Red begin overturning furniture, what few sticks there are; they bowl over the cooking kettle, kicking the flat loaves across the floor. By now half the street is pressing tight about us, all bawling in indignation, and all proclaiming innocence. Lucas and I are certain we have made a mistake. We must've lost the money somewhere else! Leave these poor people alone!

The barber's face has gone purple. He is gagging and calling on the gods to witness his blamelessness.

“Flag! They're innocent! Let's go!”

Flag ignores me, dumps the barber, and snatches up a small boy who is clinging in terror to the old man's breeches.

“Whose brat is this?”

The haircutter makes no reply. No one does. But clearly the child is his.

Flag turns to Tollo. “Cut his foot off.”

Tollo and Little Red spreadeagle the boy. The child is screaming blue murder. Tollo unsheathes his edge. The mob begins brandishing their own daggers. Lucas and I beg Flag to stop. Flag looks to the barber. “Where's the money?” No response. To the mother. Nothing. He signs to Tollo. Up goes the sword.

At the last instant a girl-child wails, indicating a corner of the dirt floor. Her mother wallops her across the face. Chaos redoubles. Flag probes where the girl has pointed. Up comes our wallet.

Outside on the street, Lucas and I can't stop shaking.

“Liars and thieves,” Tollo is muttering. “Every one of 'em.”

We try to give Flag part of our recovered cash. He won't take it. “Mark one thing,” he says, directing our attention back to the barber's hut. “If Little Sis hadn't squealed, Mom and Pop would've let us take their son's foot.”

He is right.

“And would you have taken it?”

Flag doesn't answer. “They'll beat the hell out of that little girl now. Thrash her within an inch of her life.”

Three days later we're humping up the pass out of the Reghez Valley. I have a sixty-pound pannier across my back and a counter-pack, half that again, in front; the rope straps are gouging my shoulders raw. Flag falls into step alongside. “You're thinking again, aren't you?”

And he smiles and treks on.

To watch Flag march is like watching water flow. His skull is the color of parchment; the sun might as well be beating on stone. He can feel my gaze tracking him. “You're wondering what a soldier is, aren't you?”

I tell him I am.

He indicates a laden beast, mounting the track before us.

“We're mules, lad. Mules that kill.”

5.

It takes our column of replacements 127 days out of Tripolis to catch up, at last, with the trailing elements of Alexander's army. We have trekked 1,696 miles, according to the army surveyors (who measure the roads down to the half-hand's-breadth), crossing all of Syria and most of Mesopotamia, Media, Mardia, Hyrcania, and no small portions of Parthia and Areia. I have gone through three pairs of road-beaters and my march-pay twice over. My kit is rags. I arrive at the front—if such a term can be used for a war that is prosecuted across a theater 1,000 miles broad and 900 deep—already three months in debt. So does everyone else.

When you march long distances in column, you pass the time by landmarks. Say you come over a rise into a desert valley, a pan twenty or fifty miles across. You'll set your object as the hills on the far side and march to that, marking your progress as you approach. That will be your day. Or you'll pick out intermediate landmarks, little hills, washes, dry riverbeds—wadis or nullahs, as they call them out east.

You can see weather for miles, crossing Media and Hyrcania. Squalls play across the pans at midday. Rain falls on one section of the column but not another. You'll see precipitation sheet from the bellies of the clouds, never to reach the ground but burning away high in the heat of the air. Great shadows play across the plains, making the earth dark in one spot, bright in another, in shifting patterns as the clouds transit the sky. Thunderheads collect over the mountains; you get downpours late in the day.

Alexander's commanders will not stand for a body of men straggling in one long column; it's unsightly and unmilitary; you can't fight from such a formation. So when terrain permits, the troops are fanned out ten or fifteen columns across. This is good because when you reach camp, the whole body can catch up in an hour instead of four. The column packs up everything at night, so it's ready to go in the dark before dawn. Cavalry other than reconnaissance ride their horses sparingly on the march; they tramp on foot alongside, to conserve the animals' strength. Grooms lead a remount in each hand. Horses are never permitted to herd on their own, even at rivers where they water. Otherwise they'll revert to equine hierarchies and be worthless as cavalry.

Crossing Media, we see game in abundance. Gazelle and wild asses; the column spots them from miles, trailing their dust in the clear air. Hunting parties are organized like military operations: Divisions send mounted companies to envelop the game, circling as widely as twenty miles sometimes to cut off the herds' flight, drive them into rope pens if they have time to rig them, or simply run them to exhaustion on the open plain. Riders return with meat for the army's pots. This is great sport; everyone wants to go. It breaks the monotony.

An army passing through a territory attracts commerce and curiosity of every kind. Actors have come out from Ephesus and Smyrna; we have dancers and acrobats, harpers and reciters, poets, rhapsodes; even sophists offering lectures, which to my astonishment are actually attended. I took in a fascinating one on solid geometry in the middle of a thunderstorm on the High Line in Armenia. Between camps the caravan traders, or just natives loading up asses with anything they can sell, trek alongside the column, peddling dates and sheep, pistachio beer, eggs, meat, cheese. What do the lads crave most? Fresh onions. Back home onions go to flavor a stew. Out here you eat 'em raw. They taste sweet as apples. A man'll give half a day's pay for a good onion. They keep your teeth from falling out.

I have a fiancée at home. Her name is Danae. On the march I write letters to her in my head. I talk about money, not love. When we get married, Danae and I will need the equivalent of six years' pay to make an offer on a farm, since neither of us wish to be beholden to our families. I will volunteer for Forward Operations, first chance I get. Double pay. I cannot tell Danae this. She will worry.

There are many things a fellow cannot tell his sweetheart. Women for one. An army travels accompanied by a second army of whores and trollops, not to mention the camp wives, who constitute a more permanent auxiliary, and when these melt away in “wolf country,” enemy territory, their numbers are made up by locals. We have heard much about the Asiatic's sequestration of his women, and no doubt this is true in normal times. But when an army as laden with plunder as Alexander's passes through, even the most hawkeyed patriarch can't keep watch over his daughters forever. The maids dog the column, seeking novelty, freedom, romance, and even the lamest scuff can gin them down to nothing for a quick roll-me-over. The girls'll even stay to mend kit and do the laundry. Half the young cooches are blinkered—with child, that is—made so by our fellows passing through with Alexander months before. This doesn't stop us from stropping them. Not me of course, or Lucas. We hold true to our girls back home, much to the amusement of our comrades.

Tollo is the primary fig-hound. He's sluicing the natives two at a time. “One on each hip,” he says, “just to keep warm.” Tollo's Color Sergeant pay, counting bonuses, is four drachmas a day (four times my packet). You can buy a house for that here, or hire half a village to do any labor you want.

The army has its own language. “Steam” is soldiers' slang for women. Dish. Fig. Cooch. Hank or bert (from the native
tallabert,
“mother”) for an Afghan. The locals have their slang for us too. Mack. Scuff.
Bullah
(from their word for “stupid”). Sex is qum-qum. The enemy himself our lads call “Baz,” the most common name for an Afghan male—as in, “Baz is out there tonight.”

Women are of two types in Areia and Afghanistan. Those beneath the protection of fathers and brothers are called
tir bazal,
“the jewel.” If you so much as glance at them, their people will slit your throat. The other type has lost the protection of the clan. Maybe their male kin have been killed in feuds or war, or the females have committed some transgression and been cast out. These are the girls we Macks take up with. They're not tramps though. They have dignity. You have to marry them.

Marriage here is not like back home. One of my littermates, Philotas, met a girl in a village west of Susia. By night they were married. No ceremony; you just declare it and that's it. My mates make fun of me because I take wedlock seriously. That's how I feel. I can't accept these riteless, walk-away hitch-ups. They seem wrong to me.

We get mail on the column. The post from home catches up every ten days; the troops even get letters from the army out east. This from my mother:

You need not write me chatty notes, dear, nor do I care to learn the progress of the latest campaign. Just let me know you are well. Stay alive, my child, and come home to me.

A letter comes from my brother Elias, ahead with Alexander's corps in Afghanistan. It has no toll-seal. Mail from the fighting army travels free.

All letters report the same news:

Darius is dead.

The king of Persia has fallen, slain by his own generals as they flee before Alexander. In our column of replacements, we are cast down to hear this. The war will soon be over. We'll pack home as broke as we started.

Elias sounds in fine fettle.

Matthias, you hound! How are you? Have you snagged your first Asiatic cooch? Welcome to the fighting army, you poor scuff!

He is well, my brother says, except for a wound he downplays. He is in hospital now, as I said, at Phrada near the Great Salt Desert; that's how he has time to write.

The Persian war is drawing down, little brother. The enemy's big augers all seek terms. It's a capital show, these grandees coming in. They send their lieutenants first, under a flag, or their sons if they have them. Their mules are loaded with loot—“for Iskander.” That's Persian for Alexander. We take them in like wayward kittens. Our orders are to treat them as if they were sugar and we must carry them home on our tongues.

Great generals and governors of the Persians, nobles who have fought our fellows across all Asia—Artabazus, Phrataphernes, Nabarzanes, Autophradates, as well as the slayers of Darius: Satibarzanes and his cohort Barsaentes—have bent the knee and been received with clemency by Alexander. Who else can run the empire for him? Even the mercenaries Glaucus and Patron, commanders of Darius's crack heavy infantry, have come in with their commands and made their peace. They now form a unit of Alexander's army.

Only one enemy remains wild. The Persian general Bessus, with 8,000 Afghan cavalry and access to 30,000 more—Scythian raiders from beyond the Jaxartes. He is calling himself Darius's successor and raising an army to fight on.

Don't worry, little brother. His own generals can read the wind. They'll bring in his hat—with his head in it—soon enough.

In Areia, nearing the frontier of Afghanistan, we get our first chance outside of training to unsheathe our arms. Tollo and Flag are assigned, with half our company of mercenaries, to provide security for a train of supplies to be delivered to a village two days off the military highway. Lucas and I go along. Halfway out, in wild ravine country, a detachment of tribal riders shows itself on a ridge ahead. Tollo, Flag, and the mercs take off after them, leaving us rawbones with a few muleteers and natives to guard the train. Sure enough, as soon as our mates drop from sight, a party of thirty more bandits materializes. We are twelve, only four of us armed. The brigands are the most savage-looking villains we have ever seen. They have no fear of us whatever. They ride straight up to our goods and start helping themselves. We try to brass it out, shouting threats and brandishing our weapons. The foe brandishes back, with a good deal more credibility. Our natives have hotfooted it up the hill, clear of bowshot. Pretty soon we're up there too. Lucas wants to attack; he says we'll be court-martialed for cowardice if we don't. “Are you crazy?” declares Rags. “These sand-trotters'll murder us all.”

The bandits take everything. We feel like fools. Tollo and Flag return; without a word they mount a pursuit. When the raiders see our mob coming, they dump the loot and flee. We recover it all. “Don't lose a wink over this,” Tollo reassures us afterward. “You did right. It was my fault for leaving you.”

But we are chastened. We have seen our wits go blank with terror and felt our limbs turn to stone from fear.

On the march, the army lays over every five days to rest the stock. At home these would be off-days, spent in recreation or refurbishing of kit. Not in Alexander's army. Out east, we train.

We learn defense against cavalry. We learn hollow squares and moving screens; we learn how to feign a rush and how to recover. We even get to ride a little. For every primary mount, the grooms lead two remounts. These strings are the property of individual cavalrymen; in conventional warfare, the troopers would never let you near one. Not in this theater. Out here there's no such thing as a led horse. We are recruited, those on the books as Mounted Infantry. In the event of action, should our primary cavalry be drawn off, we will form an auxiliary of remounts to shield the column.

On we trek. We practice cordon operations; encirclement of villages. Our companies rehearse on dummy sites across Armenia and Mesopotamian Syria, then on the real thing in the Kurdish mountains east of the Tigris. The force surrounds a farm hamlet in the dark, to be in assault position at first light. The job is carried out in strict silence. Its purpose is to let no villager escape. The formation for assault is open order,

in three ranks. The same configuration is employed in pursuit of the foe. Its principle is the inverted swallowtail,

in which an individual of the foe is passed through the points, attacked by the wings, and finished off by the backs.

When the cordon rings the village, an avenue of escape is always left. Cavalry and missile troops conceal themselves on the flanks of this getaway lane. This is how we are taught to take prisoners, running them down as they flee (the highest-ranking are always first out), instead of attempting to selectively take captives in the confusion of the assault.