Virtues of War (21 page)

When I write that I will give Darius whatever he asks if he but come to me, I mean it. I feel no rancor toward the man. I respect him. I would make him my friend and ally. He can have anything but his empire. That is mine, and I will take it.

T
wenty-
O
ne

THE ADVANCE INTO MESOPOTAMIA

A
nabasis
IS A MILITARY WORD.
It means a “march to the Interior.” In early summer, three years after the army's crossing to Asia, our anabasis seeking Darius begins.

The corps departs Tyre on the seacoast on a raw blustery dawn, making for Thapsacus, where we intend to cross the Euphrates. I have sent Hephaestion ahead with two squadrons of Companion Cavalry, fifteen hundred allied infantry, half the archers and Agrianians, and all seven hundred of Menidas's mercenary horse. He is to seize the city and throw two spans across the river, whose breadth is eight hundred yards at that point.

Tyre to Thapsacus is two hundred fifty miles. Hephaestion will arrive by midsummer and set to work; our main body should catch up at the season's scorching peak. From Thapsacus to Babylon is another four hundred and fifty miles, by the Royal Road down the Euphrates. In the heat at that season, the corps cannot be expected to average more than fifteen miles a day. Certainly I intend to push it no harder. So: middle to late fall. We will face Darius then.

I have selected Hephaestion for the work at Thapsacus, and not Craterus or another, on the chance of intrigue. Darius and his staff will reckon that site as my likely first objective; the king is certain to send a strong detachment north from Babylon to keep an eye on me or even to contest my crossing. There may be a chance, if we are clever, to bring the commander of this division over to our side, if not now, then later. Hephaestion will throw his bridges nine-tenths of the way across the river and hold up till our main army arrives. The Persians will shout insults from the farther bank, in Greek if their numbers include hired infantry, which they will. Who better than Hephaestion to turn this occasion to our advantage? I have authorized him to make any deal he can with the Persian commander. If none can be struck in the moment, Hephaestion is to communicate to the officer that Alexander watches him, and he is a man (meaning me) who knows how to reward an act of friendship.

Our main body's route of march, departing from the coast ten days after Hephaestion, is inland via Damascus. I have commanded the provincial governor to produce on-site every armorer and swordsmith of Hollow and Rough Syria with all their tools and wares. The army lays over five days, giving the soldiers time to refit their kit for the coming fight. Damascus's market is called the Terik, “pigeon.” These birds are considered gods by the Syrians; they flock in numbers uncountable and are as self-satisfied as cats.

A prodigy occurs in the marketplace. One of our sergeants, seeking his dinner, snatches a roosting
terik
and, ignorant of local reverence, wrings its neck. The quarter erupts; in moments, hundreds mob the square, shrieking in outrage. The mart, as I said, is an arsenal of armorers' and swordsmiths' shops; our fellow and his mates find themselves hemmed by armed Damascenes, howling for their blood. A general riot looms, ready to wreck the entire expedition. Suddenly the pigeon stirs in our man's hand. It is alive! The sergeant opens his fingers; the bird wings safely away. A thousand Syrians drop onto their faces, worshiping heaven.

Damascus to Homs is a six-day trek of ninety miles. A column on the march is always prey to portent and rumor. The men are bored; they gossip like housedames. What of the incident in the marketplace? Is the pigeon Darius? Will he flutter free of Alexander's grasp? Or is the sergeant our army, preserved from slaughter by a miracle?

A two-day march of thirty miles brings us to Hamah; then five days, seventy miles, to Aleppo. On route a message arrives from Hephaestion ahead at Thapsacus: Arimmas, my appointee as governor of Mesopotamian Syria, has failed to provide the forward magazines of grain and feed the corps will need for the advance beyond the Euphrates. My first impulse is to make an example of him, but Hephaestion, anticipating this in his dispatch, requests clemency for the fellow. The scale of the enterprise has overwhelmed Arimmas; his failing is incapacity, not treachery, for which I must share the blame, elevating him to an office beyond his gifts. I remove him and send him home. Pasturage, fortunately, is abundant where we camp now, in the Orontes valley; a call to Antioch for muleteers brings in seventeen hundred. I put the whole army to work. We load up and move out.

We are advancing east now, into the empire. An alteration takes place in the men's demeanor. I am riding beside Telamon, on the wing of the column, when I sense the revolution.

“Can you feel it?”

He acknowledges. “Fear.”

Each mile now carries the army farther from territory we have conquered, farther from our bases on the sea. We enter the foe's domain, his stronghold. The men glance over their shoulders despite themselves, toward the road receding behind them, thinking how far it stretches from supply and safety.

Fifteen thousand reinforcements were supposed to arrive at Tripolis on the coast. Are they vital to our success? No. But their nonappearance, first at Damascus, then at Homs, now at Aleppo, sends a shudder of evil luck through the column. How can the commander counter? Here is something the instructors of war do not teach: the art of confronting the irrational, of disarming the groundless and the unknown.

We as officers debate our routes and strategies. What we forget is that the men do the same. They are not stupid. They see the country change; they know what they're marching into. In their tents and around their cook fires, they chew over every fresh piece of intelligence. We in the command post have our sources; the corporals and private soldiers have theirs too. Daylong they interrogate the natives tracking the column, the rabble of the towns we pass through, the whores and sutlers of the general crowd, and, of course, one another. A racehorse cannot gallop the column's length faster than the newest rumor or the freshest fear.

Two stages on, at Dura Na, the column comes upon a site where Darius's army encamped eighteen months ago, in its advance toward what became the battle of Issus. Army junk spreads everywhere; you can see the lanes and latrines and the great square entrenchment whose breastworks, studded with palisade stakes and wicker hurdles, are still being stripped by the locals for firewood. On such military highways, one comes often upon the camps of vanished armies. I make it a point never to overnight on them. It's bad luck. And, in this case, I don't want the men to be unnerved by how small our force is alongside Darius's (we will fill only a fifth of the space the foe's host encamped on).

But our fellows see it. How can they not? I feel their stride change. They mutter now. How many thousands did the Persians have in this camp? How many more when we face them next? I trot alongside the column.

“Brothers, will you give me five more miles before we camp?”

Let us stretch past the foe's fort. Let the men see how strong our pace is, so they boast that our army makes two camps where the glue-footed Persian makes three.

But fear dogs the column. In camp that night an incident occurs involving a fearsome weapon our soldiers have never seen.

In any army there are resourceful fellows who can scrounge up treasure from a hill of dung. Two of ours are sergeants of the phalanx, called by the men “Patch” and “Repatch,” for their habit of forbidding their mates to throw anything away. Their prize this time: a Persian scythed chariot.

Apparently a local bandit made off with the machine during Darius's advance a year and a half ago; Patch and Repatch, nosing about, have got wind of its existence and, publishing a reward among the natives, have enticed the outlaw to bring it in.

The chariot sets off a sensation. Our fellows throng about it.

“By Zeus, how'd you like to stand up to that iron . . .”

“I'd sooner shave with it.”

“Take a look, mates. You'll be hiking on your knees after that runs over you.”

Wicked-looking blades extend from both axles of the chariot; others are mounted on the frame and the front of the yoke pole. The bandit claims that Darius had a hundred of these “cutters” when he marched against us eighteen months ago, but he left them here, on this side of the mountains, believing the terrain in Cilicia too rough to permit their use. That's why we didn't see them at Issus. Our fellows collect about the chariot now, conjuring the havoc five score of these machines would wreak, driven at the gallop into a massed formation. Our sergeant Patch voices the prevailing sentiment: “Let's have a few hundred of these bastards on
our
side!”

Another curiosity brought in by the locals are the “crow's feet,” with which Darius had intended to sow the floor of that earlier battlefield against our cavalry—and which he no doubt will use on this coming one. These devices are made of four iron spikes yoked at a single axis. Any way you strew them, one spike always points straight up.

From Dura Na a three-day march of forty-five miles brings the army to Thapsacus on the Euphrates. The date is 2 Hecatombeion, high summer. A pall of smoke hangs above the plain beyond the river, where forward parties of Persian cavalry are scorching the earth. Darius, we learn, continues augmenting his forces at Babylon, between four and five hundred miles south. His army now totals one million two hundred thousand.

A multitude of such scale, however preposterous in fact or unworkable in action, cannot fail to strike terror into the breasts of those who believe they must face it. Crossing camp on foot, I come upon our friend Gunnysack, hunkered in the dust with a score of comrades, drawing schemes with a stick.

“Are you an artist too, Sergeant?”

He is sketching a line of over a million men. How wide a front? How deep? Can such a host be possible?

“Sire, are we really going up against so many?”

“Maybe more, if you count whores and scullery lads.”

“And are you not afraid, sire?”

“I would be—if I were Darius and had to face us.”

The Persian has sent two mounted brigades north ahead of his army, one of three thousand under his cousin Satropates, another of six thousand under Mazaeus, governor of Babylonia. Their assignment is to devastate the country into which we advance and to contest all river crossings. We learn this from Hephaestion, who has, as I had hoped, parleyed with Mazaeus personally.

Mazaeus is an interesting fellow. He is something of a gangster. A Persian and adherent of the royal house, he has governed provinces for thirty years—first in Cilicia alone, then as supreme satrap of Phoenicia, Cilicia, and both Syrias. He received his warrant of appointment to Babylonia not from Darius but from his predecessor, Artaxerxes Ochus. Darius wished to remove him upon his accession, so the popular account declares, but Mazaeus had in the course of his tenure insinuated himself so powerfully into that peculiar Babylonian underworld called
ashtara,
“the Code,” that he could not be ousted without bringing down the entire regional economy.

Mazaeus is the richest private individual in the empire; his breeding stable contains eight hundred stallions and sixteen thousand mares. He is said to have fathered a thousand sons. But what marks him out is his openhandedness to the people. The grandest secular feast of the Babylonian year is the Mazaeid, at which its host provides meat for tens of thousands and distributes grain in such quantities that families live on the issue all year long. Mazaeus is fat. His mounts are draft horses, not cavalry ponies. And he is not above poking fun at himself. At his festival each year, it is said, he takes the choral stage dressed as a woman and warbles in such a convincing key that none can pick him out from the real thing.

Withdrawing before our force, Mazaeus has let us take several prisoners. These confirm Darius's army at one million two hundred thousand. Hephaestion throws a pontoon bridge across the last uncompleted span; we cross in five days. I rest the army four days in the plain while we bring up the siege train and the heavy baggage.

A decision must be made on which route to take to Babylon. Shall we march south, directly down the Euphrates, or cross east to the Tigris and turn south from there? I call a council.

The foe's vast numbers dominate all talk. The army prattles of nothing else, and even my generals are spooked and anxious. Old feuds surface. Tempers grow short; mates snap testily at one another.

How is one to command? By consensus of his subordinates? Listen indeed. Weigh and evaluate. Then decide yourself. Are you stumped at the crossroads? Pick one way and don't look back. Nothing is worse than indecision. Be wrong, but be wrong decisively. Can you please your constituents? Never let me hear that word! The men are never happy with anything. The march is always too long, the way always too rough. What works with them? Hardship. Give your men something that can't be done, not something that can. Then place yourself at first hazard. The Spartan commander Lysander made the distinction between boldness and courage. We must have both. The audacity to conceive the strike and the belly to carry it out.

All that being said, how
does
one make decisions? By rationality? My tutor Aristotle could classify the world, but couldn't find his way to the village square. One must dive deeper than reason. The Thracians of Bithynia trust no decision unless they make it drunk. They know something we don't. A lion never makes a bad decision. Is he guided by reason? Is an eagle “rational”?

Rationality is superstition by another name.

Go deep, my friend. Touch the daimon. Do I believe in signs and omens? I believe in the Unseen. I believe in the Unmanifest, the Yet To Be. Great commanders do not temper their measures to What Is; they bring forth What May Be.