Virtues of War (20 page)

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COUNCILS OF WAR

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T TAKES DARIUS TWENTY-THREE MONTHS
to raise another army after Issus. As with the first, he marshals and trains it at Babylon. This time I will go to him. This time we will duel beyond the Euphrates.

It is three years now since our army has crossed from Europe. The expeditionary force has appended to its conquests Phoenicia, both Hollow and Mesopotamian Syria, Tyre, Sidon, Gaza, Samaria, Palestine, and Egypt. I have become Defender of Yahweh, Sword of Baal, Pharaoh of the Nile. The sun priests have anointed me Child of Ra, Boatman of Osiris, son of Ammon. I embrace all honors, but especially the religious ones. They are worth armies. The Persians were blind, when they ruled Egypt, to insult the gods of the land. There is no surer way to make yourself hated; whereas to take up the native deities wins the people's love, and at no cost. Heaven speaks with the same voice in Memphis and in Macedon; I despise the man, however learned, who does not grant this. God is God, in whatever form He chooses to appear. I worship Him as Zeus, Ammon, Jehovah, Apis, Baal; lion-limbed, jackal-headed, bearded, behorned; in the form of man, woman, sphinx, bull, and virgin. I believe in them all.

The king, my father taught me, is the people's intercessor with heaven. He invokes the Creator's blessing before the seed goes into the ground and proffers thanksgiving at harvest's bounty. Before every army marches out, every vessel sails, every enterprise originates, he presides. At every crisis he entreats God's counsel and interprets it. If the king is in favor with heaven, so is the kingdom. What miscreant is so perverse as to spurn the blessing of the Almighty?

Tyre and Gaza trusted in the strength of their fortifications and compelled me to besiege them. What a waste of blood and treasure! The lives of a hundred and ninety good men were squandered over six months in consequence of Tyrian stubbornness, and Gaza cost another thirty-six and a hundred and eleven days. The bastards nearly corked me twice, with a catapult bolt through my breast and a stone that nearly made powder of my skull. Had some malign god deprived them of their senses? Did they imagine that I would permit a state to command strategic ports in my rear, by which my enemies could assail me? Did they dream that I might pass benignly on, leaving their nation intact as an example to others that defiance of my will was the path to preservation? My envoys sought to make the leading men of Tyre and Gaza see reason; I dispatched letters beneath my own hand. I pledged to make their cities richer, freer, safer. Still they resisted. They compelled me to make examples of them.

What I abhor most about such obduracy is that it robs me of the occasion to be magnanimous. Do you understand? The enemy will not see chivalry. He obliges me to fight not as a knight but as a butcher—and for this he must pay with his own ruin.

The world we see is but a shadow, Itanes, an adumbration of the True World, the Invisible World, which resides beneath. What is this realm? Not What Is, but What Will Be. The future. Necessity is the name we give to that mechanism by which the Infinite produces its works. The manifest arising out of the unmanifest. God reigns in both worlds. But He permits only His favorites to glimpse the world to come.

I felt at home in Egypt. I could happily have been a priest. In truth I am a warrior-priest, who marches where the Deity directs, in the service of Necessity and Fate. Nor is such a notion vain or self-infatuated. Consider: Persia's time has passed. In the Invisible World, Darius's empire has already fallen. Who am I, except the agent of that end, which already exists in the Other Realm and at whose birth I assist in this one?

At Antioch in Syria I held a great feast in honor of Zeus and the Muses. Ten thousand bullocks I sacrificed to the Olympians, to Heracles, Bellerophon, and all the gods and heroes of the East, beseeching their benediction for the enterprise to come.

The campaign of Gaugamela (or what would become the campaign of Gaugamela) would be by far the most complex of the war. When I called the Macedonians and allies together at the vizier's palace in Antioch, I asked Parmenio to prepare a paper on the challenges the corps would face. I have it still. Here is the script he recited from:

“The advance into Mesopotamia will require a march of between six hundred and eight hundred miles, depending on the route, much of it across waterless desert. We will be separated from our bases on the coast and thus from resupply by sea. Everything we need, we must pack on our backs or wring from the country. Further, we advance now through ‘rough territories' in which we have few agents or men in place.

“Numbers. We must see to the feeding and maintenance of forty-seven thousand combatants and all their gear, plus sixty-seven hundred primary mounts and eleven thousand remounts. Baggage animals will number above fifteen thousand. In addition, the army has acquired a multitude of dependents—wives and mistresses, children, in-laws; we pack even grandmothers these days. Drinking water will present a predicament even when we have reached the Euphrates, for I hate to trust our guts to piss driven over silt, which is what that river is. Heat and sun will be worse. In summer, all reports confirm, the plains north of Babylon are fit only for creatures born with fangs or scales. The country has swallowed armies. Yet we must fight in the heat, because of the harvest dates. Leaving the seacoast in spring, we take the early wheat and barley with us; arriving in Mesopotamia in late summer, we take the second crop, milk-ripe if we're ahead of schedule, fully headed if we dawdle. That is, if Darius has not garnered or torched it, in which case we shall fight in hell on empty bellies.

“Babylon lies above the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, both great rivers, unfordable at any point within a hundred miles of the city. One or both must be bridged. This will be no mean feat in the face of an army exceeding a million. The country along the Euphrates is dense with crops; canals and irrigation works will block us at every turn. The plain beyond is featureless waste. Wander a mile from camp and we'll never see you again. Darius has summoned to Babylon every fighting nation of his empire. Infantry and cavalry of those eastern provinces absent at Issus—Scythians, Areians, Parthians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Indians—have joined Darius's army now and are training at Babylon as we speak. This is the breadbasket of his empire; he will defend it with everything he's got. The plains north on which he aims to fight us are broad and treeless, ideal for old-fashioned Asiatic warfare. The enemy will employ scythe-bearing chariots, mailed cataphracts, perhaps even war elephants. And he will be recruiting from horse tribesmen of the East—Daans and Massagetae, Sacae and Afghans and Arachosians—whose limitless grasslands produce war stock without number. The provinces of Media and Hyrcania alone can bring forty thousand horse, I am told, and the steppe satrapies beyond are even richer in this resource.”

Parmenio concludes his presentation and sits. The hall, which is roofed in cedar and columned in alabaster, falls tomb-silent.

“Craterus, cheer us up!”

Craterus's assignment is forward supply. He cites the cities, towns, and villages by which we must pass and what native agents have been contracted with for supplies and forage, guides, pack animals, water. Depots have been established at intervals between Damascus and Thapsacus, where we will cross the Euphrates. Beyond there, we must live off the land. Craterus brings forward exiles from Darius, traders, caravan runners, mountain tribesmen. They describe the country through which we must trek. Most of us have heard it already. But I want my officers to hear it again in one another's company. I want them to take it in as a corps.

“What about wine?” Ptolemy asks.

This is the first laugh. Love Locks has that duty. His agents have identified breweries of rice and date palm beer; estate vineyards and “pockmarks,” local stills that produce a liquor made from pistachios and palm sap; vile but drinkable in a pinch. He will capture them all, Love Locks vows, and, by Zeus, suck them dry on his own, if we don't catch him first. A chorus of good-natured derision assails him.

How much cash do we have? From Damascus, twenty thousand talents of gold; from Tyre, Gaza, and Jerusalem, another fifteen thousand; Egypt, eight thousand. From the cities of the seaboard, six thousand more.

This is fifty times the pot we had when we set out, but still not a tenth of what Darius holds and will use against us.

“How hot is the Euphrates Valley?” “How swift is the Tigris?” “How many are the enemy?” Each general has his sphere of responsibility. Each has his aides and adjutants; often it is they who do the answering.

I don't believe these councils accomplish much in the instant; we've heard it all before and will hear it a hundred times more in a hundred other caucuses. But I want my officers to see one another and hear one another speak. Particularly the mercenaries and allies, who understandably feel less central to the expedition than the Macedonians.

This army, as all armies, is riven by faction and jealousy—of infantry, the Old Guard, Philip's contemporaries, who feel resentment toward the New Men, my age; the Companion Cavalry of Old Macedon, raised by Philip, mistrust those of New, favored, they fear, by me. Then the Greek infantry serving under compulsion, whom nobody trusts, and their cousins, the mercenary foot, who keep to themselves, so no one knows what they think. The allied and hired horse are suspect because, being mounted, they can bolt any time they want; next the Thracians and Odrysians who barely even speak Greek; the crack Thessalian Heavy Horse, haughty to all save the Companions, from whom they demand respect, which is not always given; the javelineers and peltasts of Thrace and Agriania; the Old Mercenaries, who came over with us from Europe, hard as horn; the young bucks, who burn for action, perhaps too brightly; the foreigners and late arrivals; Armenians and Cappadocians; Syrians and Egyptians; renegades of Cilicia and Phoenicia who have joined since Issus; the Greek mercenaries who served originally under Darius; not to mention the Paeonian and Illyrian horsemen and the new infantry of the Peloponnese. Let them hear one another. Let them look in one another's eyes. I tilt the council's tenor toward magnification of the foe; it knits our bickering camps.

Parmenio is our father; there is comfort in his encyclopedic knowledge and exhaustive preparation. Ptolemy is razor-keen; he can sell you anything. Our best soldier is Craterus, and most profane; his speeches are spare as a Spartan's. The men love him. Perdiccas's ambition is as naked as his arrogance, but he knows his game; Seleucus excels all in physical courage; Coenus in cunning; while Hephaestion is a knight out of Homer. I speak little myself. I learned this from my father.

I nod to Lysimachus, say, or Simmias, indicating that I wish him to speak to the subject at hand. I love to feature junior officers, particularly those with whom the company is unfamiliar. One Angelis, a route engineer, describes a type of pontoon bridge he and his men have been developing. It relies not on pilings or claw anchors (the first burdensome, the second unreliable) but employs wicker crates filled with stones. He has tested it at the Orontes and the Jordan, rivers with silt-bottomed channels like the Tigris and Euphrates; he believes he can span a thousand feet in a day and a night and put across not just men but horses. “Heavy pile drivers needn't be borne across country by the baggage train; we can cut planks and cables on-site of local materials, which reports confirm to be abundant, and we don't even need to carry the anchors, but they too can be cobbled together on the spot.”

I call Menidas to speak, colonel of the mercenary cavalry, and Aretes of the Royal Lancers. Few know these men, though they come of noble Macedonian stock, as both are recent and untried replacements for well-loved commanders. Yet our fate will ride on their will and grit. When Menidas falters in his speech, unaccustomed to addressing so illustrious a body, I cross from my place and settle in the chair at his side. Together we field questions; I pour wine for his parched throat. He finds his voice. Craterus names him a “dark hand,” slang for a prodigy who lays low out of cunning. The tent responds with a roar. I clap Menidas's shoulder. He will be fine.

Midnight comes and goes. I call for a late supper. Confident as we are, the numbers are still staggering against us. We are fifty thousand; the foe may be a million. Of course such a figure is ludicrous, as it tallies in every trollop and laundry urchin; still, we will face conscript infantry five times our total and cavalry outnumbering us even more. As the conclave breaks, Craterus gives speech to the fear on every man's mind. “Of devices that the enemy may employ, Alexander, which concerns you most?”

I reply that I have only one dread: “That Darius will flee and not face us in battle.”

The pavilion erupts.

At Marathus in Hollow Syria, a letter has arrived from Darius. In it, he offers me his empire west of the river Halys (a second letter extends this to the Euphrates) with ten thousand talents of gold; he will give me the hand of his daughter, he says, and asks that I return to him his wife and son and mother, whom we have captured after Issus.

I reply:

Your ancestors invaded my country and worked grievous harm to Greeks and Macedonians, though we had previously done nothing to them. My father was assassinated by agents in your employ, as you yourself have boasted in correspondence published before all the world. You bribe my allies to make war on me, conspire with my friends for my murder. You started this war, not I.

I have vanquished in the field first those you sent against me, then you yourself and all your army. Therefore, do not address me as invader, but as conqueror. If you want anything, come to me. Ask for your mother, your wife and children; you shall have them, and whatever else you can persuade me to give. But send to me not as an equal, but as your king, and the Lord of Asia. And if you contest this, then stand your ground and fight and do not run away, for I will follow you wherever you go.