Tides of War (41 page)
Authors: Steven Pressfield
From Thrasybulus to his fellow general Theramenes, the latter impatient at his star’s overshadowing beside the sun of Alcibiades.
…I have found it of great utility to regard him less as a man and more a force of nature. My concern alone is for Athens. I brought him back from exile, and stuck my neck on the block thereby, the way one confronting an insuperable enemy at sea calls down a great storm, or facing the foe on land enlists a mighty earthquake.
From the same letter:
…remember, my friend, that Alcibiades himself does not comprehend his gift and is ruled by it as much as ruling. His immodesty, however galling you may find it, is to him objectivity. He
is
superior. Why conceal it? To a mind such as his this course would be hypocrisy, and he is nothing if not the most frank of men.
Another:
…though his enemies style him a great double-crosser, in fact he is incapable of duplicity, and of all he has ever done, he has warned foe and friend long in advance.
The men loved Thrasybulus and feared and respected Theramenes, but Alcibiades they clasped to their hearts with a fierce solicitousness, as a magical child. Had he eaten? Had he slept? Fifty times a day sailors and marines approached me to inquire of their general’s well-being, as if he were a sorcerer’s lamp whose flame they feared would by heaven’s
jealousy be snuffed. The security party’s charge now turned upon its head, shielding our commander no longer from harm but the excessive affection of his own men and the relentless importunities of those trucklers and petition-pleaders who dogged his circuit day and night.
Then there were the women. They descended in clouds, not alone
hetairai,
courtesans, and
pornai,
common whores, but free women, maids and widows, sisters presented by their own brothers. More than once I must chase a lad pimping his mother. The dame’s response? “How ’bout you, then, mate?” Buck lieutenants screwed themselves witless, just on their commander’s castoffs.
As for Alcibiades himself, the allure of the debauch had abated. He didn’t need fornication; he had victory. He had changed. A becoming modesty settled about his shoulders like the plain marine’s cloak he wore, albeit clasped at the throat with a brooch of gold. He had become a new Alcibiades and he liked it. I never saw a man so revel in the triumphs of his comrades, absent envy, even and especially those who might be called his rivals, Thrasybulus and Theramenes. When a villa was vacated for him on Pennon Point at Sestos, he declined, not wishing to displace its occupants, and continued to bunk in the tent beside his ship, refusing even a floor till the carpenters framed it on their own while he was absent with the fleet. He became if not cheap, then frugal. Every spit went for the men, and every moment.
Correspondence. He posted a hundred letters a day. Entire watches were consumed with this, amid rotating shifts of secretaries, often through night and morn and into the next night. This was the grind of coalition-building, the day-by-day extension of influence and persuasion. “How can you stand this?” I asked him once. “Stand what?” he replied. He loved it. To him these letters were not chores but men; it was a symphony to him and at last he held the conductor’s stand.
There were other missives, the main in truth, whose lines he dictated late or scrawled in his own hand. These were the widow letters, the commendations of the maimed and fallen—ten, twenty, thirty a day. He directed these personally to the recipient himself if he were still alive, but often, as well, he had the rolls dispatched to father or mother or wife without the honored man’s knowledge. Can you imagine, Jason, the pride and relief such communications brought to those at home sick with fear for husbands and sons? I have met no few in subsequent
seasons; they hold these artifacts yet in vaults, extracted with reverence, to be read aloud to children and grandchildren of the valor of their fathers.
When he wished to honor a man of the fleet, he dispatched meat or wine with his compliments to that officer’s mess. He distinguished others by inclusion at his table. But to those he wished most to esteem, he sent not boons but trials. He singled them out for the most perilous duties, for in these, he said, he sent out lieutenants and got back captains. “Nothing he does,” as Endius had remarked, “is absent politics.”
He led not by edict but example. Rather than direct the commanders to intensify their training, he took his own wing to sea and commenced. Those drills he wished the fleet to master, his own squadrons practiced first. That mark he meant them to exceed, he drove his own ships to surpass. He did not command the fleet to embark before dawn; the captains simply arose to discover his ships gone, already at their exercise.
To his friend Adeimantus, a squadron commander:
…if force must be employed with a subordinate, take care that it be minimal. If I command you, “Pick up that bowl,” and set a swordpoint to your back, you will obey but no part will own the action. You will exculpate yourself, accounting, “He made me do it, I had no choice.” But if I only suggest and you comply, then you must own your compliance and, owning it, stand by it.
Later, when he took Byzantium, the tenor of the siege was, if such a word may be applied, cheerful. The men set to with a will, absent malingering and disgruntlement, and even the foe, in capitulation, appeared not downcast but sanguine, optimistic of the future.
The proper manner of investing a city is to present to the foe a choice of alternatives so constellated as to compel him to elect surrender or alliance, not as imposed upon him by force, but
of his own will.
A decision made in this way may not be disowned later, when we need our new ally to stand by us in future peril.
In the planning before Cyzicus, when Theramenes had presented to
the commanders the brilliant scheme of bait-and-wheel, so that in his scenario the foe was cut off on all sides, Alcibiades approved it with this alteration: the leaving to the enemy of an avenue of egress. “Not that he get away, but that he know he played the coward. And we not only destroy his forces on that day but break his spirit to face us again.”
In like manner he applied discipline to the fleet. He never ordered a man beaten but only banished from his mates’ company. Such correction, he believed, spared the offender’s spirit while spurring him to return with renewed vigor and will. If a man committed the same offense twice, he was exiled to the rear with the baggage and the cowards. By this measure and others Alcibiades made such posts pillories of shame.
I had participated in several actions with the younger Pericles, a squadron commander then and already preeminent among the corps. He was thrallbound by his commander. “It’s mediocrity, do you see, Pommo? Alcibiades has debarred it altogether. One would rather die than fall short of the mark. Remember the night we made a hash of the soundings off Elaeus? I was making my report, trying to put the best face on it. He didn’t utter a syllable. Just gave me a look. By the gods, I would sooner be flogged through the fleet than stand in its path again. It was a look that said, ‘I expected so much of you, Pericles, and you have let me down.’”
Corollary to the principle of minimal force was that of minimal supervision. When Alcibiades issued a combat assignment, he imparted the objective only, leaving the means to the officer himself. The more daunting the chore, the more informally he commanded it. I never saw him issue an order from behind a desk.
Always assign a man more than he believes himself capable of. Make him rise to the occasion. In this way you compel him to discover fresh resources, both in himself and others of his command, thus enlarging the capacity of each, while binding all beneath the exigencies of risk and glory.
Another to Adeimantus:
As we seek to make our enemies own their defeats at our hands, so we must make our friends own their victories. The less you give a
man, and have him succeed, the more he draws his achievement to his heart. Remember we may elevate the fleet in two ways only. By acquiring better men or making those we have better. Even were the former practicable I would disdain it, for a hired man may hire out to another master but a man who makes himself master stays loyal forever.
There was an oarsman of the
Mnemosyne
named Lysicles, who could not swim. His mates had exhausted all remedies. Alcibiades, learning of this, walked the man out into the sea one evening, some fifty yards from the fellow’s vessel anchored offshore. Such a sight was extraordinary to say the least; hundreds congregated, looking on. Alcibiades spoke to the man quietly for a number of moments. At once the fellow screwed his eyes shut and plunged into the foam. When he made it, the entire strand erupted.
What had Alcibiades said to the man?
“He told me I could do it, and made me believe him.”
When
Panegyris
and
Atalanta
were mauled at Nine-Mile Cove and their trierarchs blaming themselves had made their spirits disconsolate, he called the pair to his tent and, stripping before them, commanded them to regard the many wounds upon his body. “I’d rather have a man who has closed with the foe and bears the scars than all the bronze-and-brightwork of the regatta. I can find unscathed captains anywhere. But where will I get brave men like you and your crews?”
This to the younger Pericles and his officers, when they had made plea for additional vessels:
Never forget, gentlemen, that you command Athenians and that those elements which make our countrymen great are intangible. Daring and intelligence, adaptability and esprit. Put these in the bank for me and I will get you all the ships you need.
As he chastened men with banishment from himself, so he rewarded them with access. He loved to have his officers about him, particularly late at night as he worked. “Bear in mind, my friends, that access to your person is a mighty incentive to those in station beneath you. A smile, a kind word, a nickname spoken with affection.
Recall how we as boys gloried in the moments at our father’s knee, or how even now an invitation to dine with our commanders makes light of many a long pull into a hard wind. Don’t hoard your person, gentlemen. Money cannot buy the prize of your attention, and the men know it.”
He schooled his captains to think in terms of squadrons and wings, never single ships, and to bear in mind ever the fleet as a whole, which squadrons were where and how quickly they could be brought up, how swiftly one’s own may withdraw to their aid. He would react with fury to the report of vessels advancing out of formation. The phrase “in support of” permeated his orders. To any scheme his first question was “Who sails in support?”
In the advance he demanded ships “blade-to-blade,” that each draw courage from her mates’ proximity. At sea he maintained signal traffic night and day, to link all vessels as a unit. Casualties he refused to segregate, but the wounded must be borne home with their shipmates, no matter if the deck sprawl with litters and blood trail onto the oarsmen’s backs. Each must know he would never be abandoned, but his mates would bear him off. “None fears death more than the sea fighter, for the infantryman, falling, cedes his bones to the earth from which they may be recovered, but the sailor to the barren and pitiless main.”
This to the younger Pericles, when he heard he had lost his temper at one of his oarsmen:
The infantryman may fight without his captain and take to flight without him. But the sailor advances to battle yoked to his commander, with naught dissevering him from hell but his faith in you and a thumb’s-breadth of pine.
Alcibiades drilled the fleet tirelessly in self-presentation, to make few look like many and many like few. He practiced the exploitation of headlands and promontories to conceal our presence and numbers. He accustomed the men to launching at all weathers, for storms and squalls not only offered concealment but magnified the theater of terror with which to overawe the foe. In the great victory at Cyzicus he obscured the fleet in a downpour he had anticipated for months, intelligence of
the terrain having determined that at that hour at that season such weather could be counted upon.
Before he came, the men had tended to break up by specialties, marines and infantry disdaining the
nautai,
topside oarsmen despising holdsmen, and cavalry styling themselves superior to all. Alcibiades effaced these distinctions not with chastisement, but with glory. Later, when Thrasyllus came out from Athens with a thousand heavy infantry and five thousand sailors trained as javelineers, but suffered defeat at Ephesus, Alcibiades’ men would not let them enter the camp; they who had never been beaten disdaining their countrymen who had let the enemy erect a trophy to their shame. Alcibiades broke this up by pitting them side by side against main-force Spartans. Victory again effaced all distinctions.
He sought to keep fresh those squadrons not on campaign or pillage by employing them to bewitch the civil populace. The report of Athenian men-of-war, even two or three anchoring in a cove, would draw the locals from miles. Far from spurning these gawkers, Alcibiades ordered them haled aboard. Let them see what battleship and battle crew look like. Lads he sought especially to beguile, for their youth makes them seek heroes and models of emulation. They will tell us everything. Intelligence of tides, currents, and weather he prized above silver. Fishermen, whom the Spartans despised, he ordained favorites. No dinner lacked at least one of these characters, debriefed later for quirks of tide and channel, storm and season.
Under fire I cannot read the chart, but a pilot at my shoulder who says steer there where the rip runs
.
Often he led raids himself, materializing from the darkness to strike a harbor with ax and brand, or sailing in in broad daylight, compelling the populace to fear him more than the garrison who occupied them. He loved to snatch from their beds mayors and magistrates. These he often interrogated in person, restoring them to home with gifts, his object to abash them with the might of the fleet,
