Virtues of War (26 page)

I credit his report. The field must have looked to him as he portrayed it. Yet from where I ride, at the fore of the Companion Cavalry, all is in order. Powerful divisions of both sides are engaged. Battles of monumental scale rage left, right, and center. Yet for Darius and me, the fatal blows remain undelivered. We occupy the maelstrom's eye.

The Companions advance, still at a walk. A hundred scythed chariots drive at us from the front. In thousands, Bactrian, Scythian, Sacae, and Massagetae horsemen charge upon us from the right. Preposterous as it sounds, every piece is right where it should be.

The first scythed chariot bursts through Balacrus's screen. Its driver is dead, dragged behind, entangled in the reins; three of the four horses are shot through with darts and bolts; they gallop, driven on by terror alone. The car plunges into our ranks, which part in wild haste, driven by our grooms afoot, amid the curses of riders and the bawling of beasts. A second and third cutter hurtle toward us, only to overturn out front beneath broadsides of shafts and javelins launched by Balacrus's Thracians and Agrianes. I have never seen such rage as that directed by our fellows against these machines. They hate them. Our horses' state is so high now they can barely be contained. At the left of each charger trots its groom, his right hand clutching the cheek piece of the bridle, holding the animal in check (no rider can do this alone under such conditions) while employing the weight of his body to keep the beast from bolting, as even the most impeccably trained horse will do under such conditions.

The condition is serious. If one mount flies, the whole troop will follow. Cleitus catches my eye. “Go now?” The temptation to attack prematurely is overwhelming. How can one “direct” such chaos? The attempt is excruciating. You feed one company into the fight, dispatch another to a different sector. Based on what? The sound of the brawl? A dispatch minutes old? The ordeal of command consists in this: that one makes decisions of fatal consequence based on ludicrously inadequate intelligence.

The din of bedlam ascends on the right. Tension mounts to an apogee. Riderless horses break from the gloom and bolt through our Companions' formation. I command Cleitus to hold. More cutters rush upon us. Every man and horse is coming out of his skin.

We keep advancing at a walk. One can still see. Despite cyclones of grit, vision remains possible through rifts opened by the wind. Now these, too, begin to occlude as the fight presses closer on the flank. Arrow shafts begin lancing in. Out front the clash between chariots and missile troops mounts to an excruciating pitch. In formation, one of our horses bolts, taking groom and rider with him. Two more rear in place. Terror is unstringing the animals. Cleitus at my shoulder: “Take them to a trot.”

I sign for it. We bump the pace; the horses settle. Beneath me Bucephalus is a mountain. He who on parade will stamp and plunge becomes, amid the trumpets, the soul of calm. I should steady him; it is he who steadies me.

Everything comes down to Aretes, out front somewhere with his four hundred Lancers. I send a third courier, after the one I sent succeeding Boar, and another after that. “Black!” I call Cleitus. If Aretes' squadrons can't charge, I will send the Royal. I can't pull out more; the fate of all rides on the Companions' rush at Darius.

Do I tell too much detail, Itanes? You must learn how events turn on real ground. The blindness of it, the dislocation, the luck. The foe's assault from the right presses so close now that defenders of our own flank guard, dueling the enemy lance-to-lance, break rearward across the wing of the Companions' formation. Spent arrow shafts clatter among our ranks. In moments our squadrons' cohesion will break.

Now Aretes charges.

We can't hear or see it, but we sense it from the dust and the feel of the field. “Contain your horses!” I bawl, though not even Black Cleitus at my shoulder can hear me. Aretes' orders are to find the soft belly where the Persians' drawing off of units to the flank has thinned their front—and charge into it. My Companions will follow.

But in the event (though we will not learn this till days later), when this soft spot appears, two thousand of the foe's Royal Indian Horse, recalled from the wing by Darius, emerge from the dust directly in the path upon which Aretes' four hundred have come to the gallop. I cannot see this. It is beyond my sight in the gloom, nor could I have seen it on the clearest field, so screened is my position by the collision between the scythed chariots and our archers and javelineers. Aretes recounted later that he believed in the moment that all was lost. He took his four hundred straight into the Royal Indian two thousand. He could think of no other course. He knew only, he said, that to balk would be fatal. He made the decision at the stretching gallop and communicated it to his men, neither by sound nor sign, but only by the direction in which he himself plunged.

For this act I awarded him, when we took Persepolis, five hundred talents of gold, a sum equal to half the yearly tribute of Athens's empire at its pinnacle of power.

Luck is no small part of war, and here, at this instant, another stroke breaks our way. As Black Cleitus draws the Royal Squadron rightward, to charge in Aretes' stead, should he fail, I come up on the right of his leading wedge. The formation I have ordered is what we call a “side and one”—that is, a wedge heavied up on one wing, in this case the right, because the Royal Squadron's role, replacing Aretes', is to break a lane through for the main body of the Companions, who will follow, and to shield this body's critical flank (its right as it wheels left and pushes behind the Persian front toward Darius) against the mass of the foe.

Fortune conspires to place me here, beside Cleitus, when his second in command, named Alexander, spurs out of the murk at stretching speed.

“Aretes is engaged!” Alexander shouts. It turns out that Cleitus, outstanding officer that he is, has sent scouts forward on his own the moment I called the Royal to the wing, and these riders have observed the appearance of the two thousand Indian cavalry—and seen Aretes hurl his Lancers into them. Where? Alexander points into the soup. We can hear the clash, ongoing, some points to the right.

The soft spot will be there.

I make two changes. I return the Royal Squadron to the fore of the Companions (I will ride, with Cleitus, at its point). And I bring up an additional squadron, the Bottiaean, into the position we call “fist”—that is, immediately to the rear of the Royal. I want power to penetrate.

Does it sound mad, Itanes, that I, with one-twentieth of Darius's force, lay designs to break through at his threshold and wring his royal neck?

I know what I have and haven't.

I know what he has and hasn't.

I hurl myself and my Companions into the murk. Great prizes are won only at great hazard.

T
wenty-
S
ix

THE BIG WEDGE

T
HE THRUST AT DARIUS COMES IN ONE GREAT WEDGE.
The Royal and Bottiaean squadrons comprise the point, with the Toronean, Anthemiot, and Amphipolitan making the right; the remaining Companion Cavalry squadrons compose the left, with the foot brigades of Royal Guardsmen extending this wing as they advance at the double beside the leftmost squadron of Companions; the Guardsmen yoke the cavalry to the two phalanx brigades, Coenus's and Perdiccas's, which make up the leftmost extremity of the Big Wedge.

This is one battle.

On the right, Cleander, Menidas, Aretes, Ariston, Attalus, and Brison fight another; the central phalanx fights a third; while on the left wing, Parmenio and Craterus duel the foe in a fourth. One may add a fifth and sixth. Our secondary phalanx clashes with elements of enemy horse and foot on the rear and left wing, while two miles back, in our forward camp, our disabled and noncombatants are being overrun by Royal Indian and Parthian cavalry seeking to rescue the queen and queen mother of Persia (who are not there, in fact, but in the main base camp, five miles to the rear).

No one of these struggles is visible from any other, nor is the breadth of any one discernible even to those within its sphere, so dense is the storm of grit and murk flung up by the feet and hooves of the contending multitudes.

From my post with the Companions, I can see nothing. I initiate the charge on sound alone—the clash of Aretes' Lancers against the Royal Indian Horse, which we can hear (or imagine we do) some points to the right and about three hundred yards forward.

What one unacquainted with battle does not understand is its terrible freight of fatigue. The weight of armor and weapons alone, just to bear on the parade ground, will break a man's back in an hour. And our soldier is not on the parade ground. He is in the field. He has marched under full kit, in all likelihood, half a day just to reach the ground of conflict. Has he got food in his belly? When did he last sleep? Is he sick or injured? Now add fear. Add excitement, add anticipation. There is a type of exhaustion called by the Greeks
apantlesis.
It is that enervation produced not by physical fatigue alone but also by strain on the nerves. An officer or soldier in this state is prey to make bad decisions, to fail to take actions clearly called for, to misapprehend obvious situations, and in general to become deaf, blind, and stupid. Worse, this state comes upon one with the suddenness of night and the power of a punch in the teeth. One minute a man is able; the next he is an imbecile.

This strain that a man experiences, a horse feels doubly—and a highly strung cavalry mount doubles that again. Horses cannot comprehend delay, or conservation of effort. The moment is all that exists for them, and in that moment they know only the command that you and I communicate. Is it any wonder they become so “high”? Their nerves are excruciatingly attuned to ours; they take on our fear and our excitement, and the fear and excitement of the other horses. Horses are herd animals: Dread is communicated from beast to beast instantaneously. And horses are flight animals: Their first impulse is to run. What holds them? Only their bond with us. For each horse is twinned with his rider, whose will to fight, and the union of trust he has forged over years with his animal, contains the beast and checks him from reverting to instinct. Remember, our horses have come up with us from foals. For many, we were present in their stalls at the hour of their births; our breath into their nostrils is the earliest sensation they have known. We have fed them and groomed them, curried and combed them, sat up nights when they were ill or hurt; thousands of hours we have trained together, in the ring and on the field. Not our wives or children, not Zeus Himself knows us as our horses do, or has labored in our company so many hours. Yet the truest mount will bolt; the bravest will fly. It is a wonder they remain at all, to such an unendurable pitch are their nerves wound in ranks awaiting action. Look in your charger's eye. He is wild still, for all your decade of labor, and poised so precariously between fidelity to you and the instincts of flight and fury, that one knows he can contain him no more than quicksilver or summer lightning.

I must strike fast. I must get to grips with Darius before the heart goes out of my horses and the heat bleeds away from my men.

We failed at Issus because our rush bogged down. The masses of enemy interposed between us and the king broke our momentum and gave Darius time to get away. We went too shallow. We didn't have enough push.

My object here at Gaugamela, in yoking to the Companions three brigades of fast infantry and two of heavy infantry, is to break through the Persian front
with enough force to keep going
—three hundred, four hundred yards into the foe's rear. I want to get behind Darius in force. I must be where I can cut him off if he runs.

The nonsoldier believes you can see on a battlefield. See what? The trooper on the ground is blind as a post, and even the cavalryman, from his mounted elevation, sees only smoke and dust. Our lead squadrons have barely spurred into the murk before we are stumbling over enemy infantry, themselves stampeding headlong for their lives; we dodge wrecks of scythed chariots with splendid horses dead and dying in their traces. Then, at once, a wall of enemy horse materializes as if spawned by the earth. The foe are Daans, mounted tribesmen of the eastern provinces; we can tell by their ponies, small and sturdy, and their
kurqans
—baggy trousers bloused at the knee. The Daans are about five hundred and are just then pulling out of the line, apparently to reinforce the units on their left, where Aretes is attacking. When our squadrons burst from the broth, the foe's ranks are faced away from us. They're more startled than we are. We are at the gallop, in a wedge a quarter mile across. The Daans' ranks tear open like a curtain and go up like a wall of flame.

I am at the point of the lead wedge of the Royal Squadron. The weight of all eight squadrons thunders behind me. Our mounted force is now at the identical point it was at Issus, when we broke through the archers and the King's Own. We have penetrated the enemy line, some quarter to half mile from its center, and are poised to wheel in column and launch ourselves at this post.

Where is Darius?

Between him and us stand four fronts of defenders: four thousand Persian, Susian, and Cadusian cavalry mixed with Persian, Mardian, and Carian archers; Patron's brigades of Greek heavy infantry; the five thousand spearmen of the Persian Apple Bearer Guard; and Tigranes with the regiments of Kinsman Cavalry, Darius's Royal Horse.

The wind, which gusts powerfully at Gaugamela between the plain and mountains, blows right to left across Darius's front. This means it is obscuring that sector into which we must turn and charge. Cleitus urges me to strike left at once, before the field becomes an ocean of murk. I may err, keeping on too long. But I cannot leave Darius an avenue of escape. I will not let him cheat me a second time. So I hold our track undeflected into the Persian rear. When at last I come left—four hundred yards deep—great thunderheads of chalk have been thrown up by the passage of our two thousand horses and these, piled before the wind, drift in a thick bank across the field.

We will come left and take Darius from behind. But suddenly in the blinding chalk, we run upon Patron's Greek mercenaries. These are five thousand of the enemy's crack heavy infantry, the foot guard stationed immediately on Darius's left. How can they be here now—in the king's rear, half a mile from the front? Have they witnessed the debacle of the scythed chariots and seen their Persian cohorts on both wings put to flight? Have their officers kept their heads? Have they pulled out of the line and dashed rearward at the double to take up a blocking position, defending their master from the direction in which he now faces the gravest peril? No matter: Here they are, square in our path, and forming up fast to take us on.

We simply run around them.

This is how cavalry works at its best. It does not squander its precious capital of men and horses in picturesque but wasteful melees and slugging matches. Instead it uses speed and mobility to cut off divisions of the foe, bypass them, and leave them in the dust. In moments Patron's foot troops are hundreds of yards in our rear.

Where is Darius?

He must be close, or Patron's troops would not have formed up on this site. He must be left, or they wouldn't have faced their defensive posture shielding that quarter.

I rein the Companions, sending scouts into the murk. The adventure-eager youth, afire to run off and join the cavalry, imagines battle as one grand and glorious rush at the gallop. What would such a hotblood think, to observe my commanders and me, at the epicenter of this monumental clash, halting our squadrons in place and, without haste, taking the time to dress and align our fighting front, to cover our flanks and rear, and even to recinch our kit and wipe the sweat and grime from our faces? Patience. Though I can hear the mayhem on all quarters, amplified grotesquely by the murk, and though I know that, even as I loiter, my countrymen are bleeding and dying for want of my thrust into the enemy's vitals, still I cannot prematurely sound the charge; I cannot plunge blindly into the soup. The moment is excruciating. Nor do our scouts come thundering punctually out of the gloom with certain word of the foe's position. In the event, they have become disoriented themselves, on this featureless field, and are only reacquired by a flock of our grooms, fanning out on foot into the billowing chalk.

Kill the King.

We must find Darius.

At last our riders return. Their leader is Sathon, Socrates Redbeard's son. The enemy is a quarter mile forward, he reports. The foe knows we have galloped round him; his companies have faced about, in order, to receive our assault.

“Where is Darius?”

“In the center.”

“Are you certain?”

“I saw his colors, sire.”

We charge.

But our scout has left out one thing, which he could not know—namely, that the knight Carmanes, captain of Darius's Household Guard, has ordered the royal standards to be displayed in the center of the line (where kings of Persia always fight) while withdrawing the monarch himself to the wing.

He fools me.

The Guards Captain fools me.

When our wedges strike the foe, Darius is already outside our right. I don't know this. None of us do. I spur Bucephalus straight for the king's colors. The melee is horse and foot commingled. The foe, recognizing my armor, hurls every champion at me, while my countrymen cry our antagonist's name and strain to locate him above the forest of spears and helmet crowns.

The Persian Royal Horse are commanded by Tigranes, champion of Issus and the most celebrated equestrian of Asia; his charger Bellacris, “Meteor,” is a gift from Darius, said to be worth twenty talents of gold. Around Tigranes fight the peerless knights Ariobates, Autophradates, Gobarzanes, Massages, Tissamenes, Bagoas, and Gobryas.

A champion strikes for me. It is Tigranes. I recognize him by the brilliance of his kit and the spectacular specimen of horseflesh he rides. Ariobates spurs at his shoulder. This man is unknown to me, but clearly he is a champion of exalted station. Black Cleitus rides at my side. (Telamon and Ptolemy remain on the right of the field, aiding Cleander, as do Love Locks and Peucestas; Hephaestion commands the
agema
of the Royal Guard.) Three Pages, none over nineteen, form my Bodyguard. Tigranes leads a matching line of Kinsman Cavalry. We crash together like waves.

“Iskander!”

Tigranes cries my name in Persian, claiming me as his own. His Meteor plows into Bucephalus like a trireme on the ram. The press swallows all. The heat sucks the breath out of you. The animals' necks, straining against each other, burn like surfaces of flame. Meteor's jaw is so close to my face that my cheek piece catches against his bit chain. His eye is wild as a monster in the sea. The horses lock up chest-to-chest, fighting their own equine war, while my antagonist and I clash like fencers, shaft against shaft, dueling for an opening. Tigranes could plunge his lance into Bucephalus's gorge as easily as I can sever Meteor's windpipe with my own. But he will not, nor will I.

“I am Tigranes!” my rival cries in Greek. I love the man. Here is a warrior! Here is a champion! I would strike at him sidearm from my right, seeking the vital flesh below the lip of his breastplate, but so densely pressed are the men and horses that I can neither incline to that side nor even move my right leg, which is pinned against Bucephalus's flank by the mass of another horse, my Page Andron's, though I cannot draw breath even to look. I strike across Bucephalus's neck, two-handed, seeking Tigranes' throat. But with the jousting horses, the warhead misses the mark, deflecting off the temple of his helmet, which is the conical type with ear guards and gorget, all gold. The killing point plunges over Tigranes' shoulder. He seizes the lance with his left hand, so far up the shaft that his fist touches mine, and thrusts his spear at me, uppercutting, with his right. The weapon is a seven-footer, cornel wood with a four-square iron point. The warhead takes me just outside the left nipple, tears through the composite of my corselet, and passes between my ribs and the inside of my left arm. I clamp tight to pin the weapon. Am I wounded? I can't tell if the lance has opened me up or missed me entirely. I know only that if I am to die, I will drag this man to hell at my side. I heave forward, atop Bucephalus's neck, as far as I can go with my right leg pinned by the horse beside me, pressing my lance with all my weight behind it, seeking either to wrench its shaft from my antagonist's grip or, if he will not let go, then to wrest him off balance. I will come clean off my horse if I have to and tear his throat out with my bare hands. But as the pair of us grapple, each clutching the shaft between us, the blow of a Persian mace takes me full force on the left shoulder, bowling me sidelong into Andron on my right, while a Macedonian lance, driven from the rear by Cleitus, though I cannot see in the press, plunges past Tigranes' carotid, catches the earpiece of his helmet, and wrenches him, headfirst, nearly from his seat. I see the strap rip and the helmet, propelled by the point of Cleitus's lance, tear free. Tigranes should spill, or his neck snap, but instead he recovers, so swiftly that he actually catches his helmet as it is tearing loose and turns, in the saddle, to sling it in fury at Cleitus.