Virtues of War (25 page)

I spur back to the Light Horse. Ariston, their commander, comes back from the rear at the gallop.

“Are you trying to miss the show?”

My tone lets him know I'm not angry. He reports on his dash to the rear. Attalus and the javelineers, on foot, have fallen behind; he, Ariston, has got them on the run to catch up. The archers and Cleander's vet mercs are at the double too, Ariston reports. I commend him. He is thinking and acting like a commander.

I tell him what Menidas and Aretes will do. “Drop back and cover the foot troops. Come up only if you see our wing cavalry hard-pressed.”

I dispatch a rider of my own to Cleander, calling for three thousand vet merc infantry to hurry forward; the remaining thirty-seven hundred to maintain their position sealing the flank, coming to the fore only should the situation become desperate.

I spur with my suite back to the Lancers. Cheers erupt at my apparition. The foe is closer, three-fifths of a mile, and plainly visible now as Ariston's Light Horse pulls out to the rear. In few words I give Aretes the scheme. He is a wild weed, this fellow, just twenty-four years old and in awe of no one, including me. I have had him up on charges a month prior, for bringing me the head of a Persian cavalry commander instead of the living man to interrogate. Who better now?

“Don't burn up on the first rush,” I instruct him and his captains. “Up and back. Keep your wedges under control. Rally when you cross past Menidas and do it again.”

Aretes gives me a grin.

“Will you reprove me, Alexander, if I bring you another head?”

Here comes the foe, at the canter.

“Stay alive. I need you.”

Aretes' spurs bite. The Lancers shoot forward.

Our troopers have rehearsed this evolution a thousand times and worked it in action a hundred. It goes like this. Menidas's fifties up front will hurl themselves into the mass of the charging enemy. But they will not seek a melee; they will simply rip through, breaking up the foe's formation as much as they can, then bolting at the gallop out the far side. It is impossible for a body of horsemen not to pursue when they see the foe in flight. And if that foe (meaning us, meaning Menidas) flees in disorder, or feigned disorder, the pursuers will fall at once into a matching state. Bactrians are desert nomads; the concept of unit cohesion is alien to them, as are all tactics beyond charge, circle, and withdraw. They are horsemen but not cavalry, warriors but not an army. Watch, now, what happens. . . .

Menidas rushes and tears through. Half the foe keep charging; the other half, in a whooping pack, wheel to chase Menidas. In that moment, Aretes' Lancers hit them from the flank. It is not necessary to produce casualties to stop cavalry; just break up its rush. The enemy's mass, disordered now by our crisscrossing wedges, loses resolution. The foe sees our companies on his flanks and rear. He reins-in. He balks. Such reflex is primal; it cannot be prevailed over except by disciplined, impeccably officered troops, and the tribal Bactrians are anything but that.

Now Cleander's vet mercs sprint from the rear. These are not heavy infantry weighted down with forty pounds of shield and plate, but bareheaded peltasts and foot lancers, armed with the twelve-foot spear, a wicked weapon against cavalry that has lost its momentum and cohesion. Our fellows swarm in contourless orders called “clouds” and “strings.” How can the foe go after them? Only one-on-one, and to do that, the enemy must break up his ranks even further. Our men fight in pairs and triples, inflicting casualties upon the milling horsemen by rushing in, plying their lances, then scampering clear. The foe peels apart and gallops away to regroup.

I cannot stay. I must get back to the Companions.

Cleander tells me later that his executive officer Myrinus kept count of the rushes and counterrushes of the day's fight on the wing. Nineteen times the enemy hurled his divisions upon this corps, and nineteen times our flankers threw them back. What can be said of such men? On parade they look second-raters. Pretty girls pass them over, favoring the dazzle of the Companion Cavalry and the dash of the Royal Guard. But here in this most epochal of victories, these unglamorous companies will make all else possible. The vet mercs of Arcadia and Achaea—I have known these men all my life. Telamon served first in their company. The youngest at Gaugamela was forty. I can name two hundred over sixty. No soldier is a peer for the veteran. With campaigners of a certain age, one never finds a coward; they have all run off or been killed. A seasoned man knows patience and self-command. Give me a veteran corporal and keep a captain; I'll take a mature captain over a general. Nor is the long-timer's speed or strength diminished far from the youth's. In the first rush that day, I saw a cloud of thirty Achaeans go after a pod of Bactrian horsemen. One wing headed the foe's rush, turning it into the belly of the string, while the opposite closed. The vets' long lances worked terrible execution. In moments twenty of the foe became ten, and ten five.

The second wave the foe sends from the flank are Scythians—Sacae and Massagetae—steppe raiders who fight with the bow and the battle-axe. Our Lancers and Paeonians cut concourses through them. In this way the battle whipsaws, with each side penetrating the other, putting it to flight, then retiring behind a covering screen of supporting units to regroup, re-form, rearm (pulling the dead and wounded from the field, along with every still-usable lance, axe, and javelin), then attacking again, amid the caustic grit and alkali and the crusty deadfoot ground that wears horses and men down like treading in glue.

In conventional battle, clashes on the wing are over as soon as the main advance begins. Not at Gaugamela. The fight on the right goes on as long as the entire affray, and on the left, even longer. Its front is half a mile, its depth that and more. The scale of the clash enlarges minute by minute, as each side feeds in fresh divisions. Bessus, governor of Bactria, commands Darius's left; under orders from his king he draws off from the Persian center first three thousand horse, then six, then eight. I can counter only from divisions already composing my right flank; we need every other man and mount for the primary assault. Bessus's extractions come from the troops fronting the king's own person. We can see their masses, mantled in dust, as they pull out of the line behind the screen of scythed chariots, which holds, poised, as our front advances to five hundred yards, four fifty, four.

Our main line still advances at a walk. A quarter mile separates us from Darius's front.

I have returned to the Companions from the flank. The army books show eleven aides and couriers in my rotation that day; I employ only two for the center and left; the other nine shuttle continually to the right. Every message coming in says the same: Send help. And every one going back: Hang on.

I can't spare men, so I send champions. Telamon and Love Locks, Ptolemy and Peucestas. I want to dispatch Black Cleitus but he won't go; he saved my life at the Granicus and he intends to do it again here.

We can see Darius's station now. The colors of his Guard regiments collect about him, with his own royal pennants snapping overhead. Massed foot troops front his post—Greek mercenaries and his own Royal Apple Bearer Guard. His four-horse chariot stands, though we can't see it, amid squadrons of Kinsman Cavalry, twenty or thirty ranks back from the front.

We can no longer see the fight on our right; storms of murk obscure it. We can hear it though. It sounds like an earthquake. Fronting the Companions, I have Balacrus with five hundred Agrianian javelineers and the same number of Thracian archers and darters. The companies on the wing cry for them. But I need them here. I need them to stop Darius's scythed chariots when they come.

At three hundred yards, they do.

The foe's front is a hundred cars across. The machines strain from the blocks with a tantalizing indolence. We can see but not hear the drivers' whips. Sun-dazzle flashes off the scythes as the chariots work to speed. It seems to take forever. “The cars are heavy,” Cleitus remarks, “packing all that iron.”

The cutters' front is two-thirds of a mile across. It makes straight for our squadrons of Companion Cavalry and, left of them, Hephaestion's and Nicanor's Royal Guardsmen and the rightmost two regiments, Perdiccas's and Coenus's, of the phalanx. Cleitus looks on with absolute calm. “Beautiful, aren't they?”

I sign to him and Philotas: Open order! Hold silence. . . .

“All captains, eyes on me!”

I look left, across two miles of field. This is the last moment when even a quarter of the fight is visible from my vantage. Darius's chariots are charging there too. Fifty toward the meat of our phalanx, fifty more into Parmenio's guard on our left. The foe's conventional cavalry will make the next wave. Twenty thousand of Armenia and Cappadocia, Syria and Mesopotamia, Media, Parthia, Tapuria, Areia, Hyrcania, and Sogdiana. Zeus help you, Craterus. Heaven preserve you, Parmenio.

I glance right, to the dust and murk. Somewhere in there, beyond the chariots' killing zone but engulfed in the battle on the wing, fight Aretes' eight hundred Royal Lancers, my best mounted shock troops, short of the Companions. The courier next in rotation is a sixteen-year-old Page named Demades. They call him “Boar” for his spiky mane. He will die delivering the message I now charge him with.

“Aretes from Alexander: Pull half your Lancers; when the scythed chariots' rush has been broken, hurl your wedges at the thinnest sector of the enemy's front. Wherever you judge that to be.”

The Page's pupils are the size of bread plates.

“Say it back to me, Boar.”

He does, verbatim.

“Boar, I'll drink with you in Babylon!”

He spurs into the gloom.

Out front, Balacrus's darters attack the cutters in clouds. “At the horses!” I hear Philotas shout, as if anyone can hear. “Throw at the horses!”

Scythed chariots must attack in lanes. The teams have to maintain intervals right and left, so as not to foul one another. In these gaps, our brave javelineers work their havoc. These superb troops, who can hit a foot-wide plank at fifty yards, launch their second salvos while the first is still in the air, and their third as the chariots hurtle upon them. Our archers loose broadsides point-blank. In moments, the cutters' rush breaks apart. The crusty underfooting is our ally; it mires the heavy chariots' wheels. The chalk won't let the machines get to full flying speed. I see one four-horse hurtling straight toward us as its leftmost charger takes a dart flush at the base of the neck. The animal overends in the traces, taking the whole team with him and launching the driver like a doll. The team to its left is struck by no missile; only the shock of the fusillade and the sight and sound of men racing on foot in their sight line sends the animals shying in terror; the car careers wildly right, across the lanes of its fellows. Other machines swerve to avoid its blades. In instants a sector of a dozen chariots is hurled into chaos. Into the riot pour Balacrus's missile troops. I had hoped and believed that their volleys would impede the foe's rush; in the event they rout it entirely. Scythed chariots must not only attack in lanes; they must maintain a solid front. Otherwise the enemy, ourselves, can simply open ranks and let the lone car through. But in the heat of action, the braver and faster drivers outlash the laggards, so that additional gaps develop along the axis as well as the front, leaving isolated both chariots too fast and too slow. Our archers and javelineers can assault these from the flanks without fear of the scythes.

I send my next courier with the same message I gave Boar. Go! In case Boar hasn't gotten through.

On my immediate right, the battle of the flank rages without letup. Each side's squadrons have broken through the other's so repeatedly, we will learn later, that across the field an observer might remark as many of our fellows on their side as their own, and as many of theirs on ours. The brawl is not concentrated upon any single front or post; one sees neither massed melees nor heaps of men cut down together. Rather individuals fall with a terrible randomness across the breadth of the pitch. Riders are picked off in ones and twos as their mounts are brought down or tumble or give way of exhaustion. Upon a site, momentum alternates with a grisly caprice as one horseman, striving valiantly beneath the foe's assault, is retrieved by the charge of his comrades, only to have these in turn cut off and massacred by a counterrush of those who had moments earlier fled before them. Engagements involving hundreds pass without a man suffering a scratch, while two-man skirmishes swell into routs as wings of horse or clouds of foot appear from the murk to wreathe the foe beyond escape. Blown horses cave in beneath the weight of their riders. Mounts' hearts burst from exertion. A horse pushed past his limit “ties up.” His muscles seize; he breaks down. Others expire of heat and shock. Scores succumb to terror alone. When the enemy finally turns and takes flight, horses on both sides are frothing not foam but blood. Hundreds lie foundered upon the field. Those not slain or leg-broken have been worked so to exhaustion that they can never be used again. These are fine animals, quality stock trained from birth and loved by their men to a depth that no one who has not served in a mounted corps can understand. To lose a brave horse is almost as bad as to lose a man; worse in its way, for no horse understands why he fights; he does so only for love of us. His loss is as cruel as the death of a child. There is no solace for it.

At what stage does the battle now stand? I spoke afterward to Onesicritus (who would become my fleet steersman in India), who remained in camp and was observing from the heights, three miles back. The sight, he reported, gave fresh meaning to the word
pandemonium.
Onesicritus was thoroughly familiar with our battle plan and possessed as well an excellent conception of the Persians' order; yet, even with these held firmly in mind, he declared, he could make no sense of the spectacle sprawling across the plain beneath him. It seemed to him as if the field had not only inverted but revolved upon its axis, so that what should have been left was right and what ought to have been fore had become aft. Compounding this chaos were the towering clouds of alkaline dust, which rendered ghostly the movements of units and wings and from which ascended such sounds as rendered it impossible for any man with a bent toward philosophy, so Onesicritus attested, to declare the race of humans anything but mad.