God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

The smaller a town is, the smaller its phalanx. Some towns have as few as three or four hundred hoplites. That means they’ve never served in a bigger phalanx – they usually don’t form deep enough, and they aren’t used to the terror of a dozen spear-butts with long bronze points licking around their heads. Oh – the rear ranks can be difficult.

  But the worst is that the danger spots in a phalanx are always the joins – the places where two contingents line up – say Athens and Thebes. Those two files don’t know each other – don’t trust each other, don’t lap their shields or anything like it. In fact, believe it or not, men from different towns or nations will often leave a gap, even though they know – they know – that the gap is a death warrant. Their distrust for other men is so physical they cannot close that gap. I’ve watched contingents of Medes and Persians do it, watched Aegyptians do it – and at Chaeronea, the centre of the allied army had a dozen little contingents and they had more joins than an old pot that’s been thrice repaired.

  In our army, of course, we had contingents of about two thousand – every one the same. All Macedonian, or like enough. We drilled them together. We had no joins. Our pots never needed repair.

  Their centre fractured, as an old pot will when it takes a blow.

  That transformed the battle, but it didn’t give us a victory. The hypaspists and our right were still reeling back – the Athenians scented victory, and who could blame them? Traditionally, when an army’s strong right was broken, the game was won, and the hypaspists were barely hanging together. They were still plodding backwards. The noblest thing I can say about them is that they didn’t break, and I think anyone else would have.

  But the crushing of the centre halted the Theban advance. Or perhaps the Thebans had never intended to fully support Athens. That, too, was part of Greek warfare. Leaving an ally to die was an old tradition – especially with two allies who hated each other.

  Alexander was chewing his lip. His eyes went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth – like a caged lynx I had seen once at Pella. A desperate animal.

  On our right, the foot companions to the left of Philip’s elite began to bleed men from their rear rank.

  ‘How can this be happening!’ asked Alexander.

  Hephaestion looked at me. I didn’t have an answer.

  It looked to me like a race between two men ripping sheets of linen. Would our centre blow through theirs? Or would our right collapse? I feared with every heartbeat that the call would go up that Philip was down, or dead.

  Alexander’s eyes stopped darting about and fixed on the centre.

  ‘Here we go,’ he said.

  Remember, he was eighteen, and this was his first battle.

  He saw it, he made the call and he led it. And by the gods, he never flinched once he made the call.

  ‘Wedge on me!’ he shouted. I pulled in at his back – not my normal position, but I was right there and we were doing this thing right then, I could see.

  He grabbed Hephaestion’s bridle.

  ‘Go to Erygius – tell him to take four troops from the left and fix the Sacred band in place.’ He looked at his best friend. ‘Do you understand?’

  Hephaestion never really understood. ‘I can take the message,’ he said.

  Alexander had an eye to the men forming behind us and another on the battle in front of us.

  ‘Do you understand, Ptolemy?’ he asked.

  I knew exactly what he needed. But I wanted to charge with him. To glory. I saw what he had seen – minutes too late, but I knew, now, that Alexander was about to win the battle.

  But being a loyal servant of a great prince is not all wine and gold. ‘Yes, lord,’ I said. In that moment, I hated Hephaestion, as the bitch had a look of triumph – I was sent away, and he was to stay with his lord.

  ‘Take command of the left of the cavalry and do it,’ Alexander said. Never one to do things by halves.

  I saluted, gathered my reins and rode for it.

  Erygius was busy packing his men into the prince’s giant wedge when I rode up.

  ‘Erygius – Alexander says I’m to take all four flank troops and go for the Sacred Band.’

  If the old Lesbian was angered to be supplanted, he didn’t make a fuss. His trumpeter called and the men behind him began to move – cursing to have to change and change again, something all soldiers hate – and Erygius turned his horse.

  ‘We’re going to charge the Sacred Band? Is he insane?’

  ‘All we have to do is pin them in place,’ I said.

  Then Erygius nodded. ‘I see.’ He knelt on his horse’s back and peered under his hand through the thick dust.

  ‘I’m going to go ahead with . . .’ I looked around, found that Polystratus had followed me. My men, of course, were part of Alexander’s great wedge. ‘Polystratus here. Bring the whole body in a column of troops around the left – see the big fir tree by the river? Make that your left marker. I’ll meet you there – or just keep coming up the stream. See?’

  Erygius peered and nodded. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said.

  I leaned forward on to Poseidon’s neck, and we were off like a bolt from a stone-thrower.

  We went across the back of the army – by coincidence, across the backs of the two taxeis that I had helped to raise and equip. The indecisiveness of the Thebans had probably saved their lives, and they were clamouring to fight. In front of the Thebans, three or four men in brilliant armour were arguing.

  The Sacred Band – the finest soldiers in the world – were standing in confident ranks, at the far left of our line. Just three hundred men. Three hundred Olympic athletes, more like. Even a stade away, they looked noble.

  More important, they were about to move to my right – opening a gap.

  This is war. What is as plain as the nose on your face becomes complex and fraught with peril. Men make decisions in haste, with limited information, surrounded by death. The Thebans decided to move the Sacred Band to the place that was threatened – an absurd decision. Philip decided to take his best troops uphill into the enemy without support – then was too proud to ask for help . . .

  Alexander identified the one weakness in the enemy line, worked through a way to exploit it and acted.

  Erygius reached the foot of the hill by the tree, two hundred companions in a tight column behind him.

  Alexander’s wedge was formed. He raised his sword. I waved to Erygius. He led the cavalry up the hill in a column. And he was smart enough to start echeloning them forward into line even as he came.

  I rode over to the left file of the newest taxeis. ‘I’m about to take my cavalry through here,’ I said. ‘Can I have another half a stade?’

  The file leaders started to call out.

  The taxeis commander ran towards me.

  The Sacred Band commander noticed me. He looked right at me. We were three hundred strides apart, but I swear I saw his eyes widen.

  Alexander’s charge struck the gap in the centre. I saw it happen – in some ways, I saw more of it than I would have seen if I’d been at his shoulder.

  Erygius had the line formed.

  The taxiarch came to my right boot. ‘No orders in an hour! What’s happening?’

  ‘Alexander has just won the battle,’ I said. ‘All we have to do is keep the Thebans from winning it back. When my horse goes forward, you come with me. You hit them in front.’

  ‘They’ll kill my boys.’ He looked at me – curiously; he was speaking as one veteran to another.

  ‘Only for a minute,’ I said.

  Erygius was almost up to me. ‘Stay with the horse!’ I roared to the infantrymen. They all knew me – I’d handed most of them their first helmets. ‘Hold the Sacred Band for a minute, and your names will live for ever!’

  One of my best speeches. They roared, and to our front, the Sacred Band commander realised that he’d just given up the safe ground on the flank and now his army had no place to make a stand.

  I got my horse into my place on the right o
f the centre troop. ‘Rhomboid left!’ I roared, and my trumpeters called it.

  The infantry started forward – just fast enough that the Sacred Band no longer had time to march back on to their ground.

  When you are sparring, there comes a moment when you miss a parry – it can be dreadful, because there can be several heartbeats during which you know how much pain is coming. When two boys who hate each other are fighting with wooden swords, there can actually be time to cringe. I’ve done it.

  That’s how the Sacred Band must have felt.

  Our phalanx was well ordered; morale was good, the troopers down behind their small shields, their long spears licking away at the enemy, and they marched forward briskly, with flutes playing to mark the time.

  My cavalry were slow off the mark – the product of too many formation changes and wheels, so that the slower men were behind the manoeuvre and the best men were annoyed by the apparent indecision. Erygius had swung them from a column of troops into line, eight deep – now we needed to pass the gap to the left of the phalanx, and that meant forming column on the leftmost troop, and it looked to me as if the order was given before some of the flank men had got into place from the last manoeuvre.

  There’s not enough papyrus growing on the Nile to give me space to write everything I want to say about the drill of cavalry, but all the priests in the world couldn’t describe the depths of my ignorance at seventeen. I didn’t know then that there’s a moment in a real fight where all manoeuvre goes out of the window, and the good men fight and the poor men cower behind them.

  So instead of ignoring the debacle, I rode over, halted the column and gave them time to form.

  It was the sort of decision young people make, when they are determined to do a thing well – correctly. The way they’ve been trained, and know it should be done.

  It was a decision that cost a hundred men their lives. Because when our eager, well-formed, well-drilled farm boys hit the Sacred Band, those killers cut them down as a slave cuts weeds in the garden. I have never, before or since, seen anything like it. Our front ranks rippled and moved – rippled and moved – and it took me a moment to realise that the file leaders were being cut down, replaced by the men behind them, cut down in their turn . . .

  I’m sure it didn’t happen this way – but in memory, there’s a fine mist of blood over the whole thing. A man was dying every time my heart beat, and my heart was beating pretty fast.

  I can make an argument that my delay with the cavalry gave us the battle – the Sacred Band focused on the Macedonian pikemen in front of them, and ignored the much greater threat of my four troops of companions.

  But that’s what Aristotle called a ‘false rationalisation’. After the fact, one can excuse anything – and weak men do. But here, beneath his tomb, in the comfort of the gods, I say that I got a generation of Pellan farm boys killed because I wanted my ranks dressed more neatly, and I knew it. No one ever mentioned it to me. I never even saw an accusation from them, the poor sods. They saw me as a hero.

  Well, well. I’m an old man, and look! I’m maudlin. Cheer up. We’re coming to some good parts, and your pater’s in most of ’em.

  We went forward at a trot, in a column of half-squadrons. The earlier shift of ground by the Sacred Band left a broad alley on their left, between their end file leader and the marsh that had been covering their flank. We trotted into the open ground, even as the farm boys to our right died like butchered animals. We could hear them die.

  But they didn’t give much more ground than the space left when men fell. That’s what I meant before, when I said that sometimes inexperience is everything. They knew the cavalry was coming, they’d been told to hold for a minute, and as far as they knew, this is what happened when hoplites fought.

  In fact, they were up against the worst nightmare in all the world of war, and they were standing their ground. Too stupid to run, really. But stupid or brave or what have you, they beat the Sacred Band. What we did was to kill them.

  It was like the sort of thing you dream about, when you are thirteen, curling in a tight ball under your blanket trying to keep warm, back smarting from a whipping, and you want to go somewhere else in your head, be someone else, someone brave and noble and incredibly tough, who can never be whipped, never be beaten, never dirty or late for class or threatened with rape. Or at least, I dreamed of such stuff – of riding at the head of my troops, being in the right place at the right time, wheeling my squadrons, charging into the shieldless flank of my enemies and chewing them to red ruin before my invincible spear . . .

  Come on, son – don’t you dream of such stuff?

  Well, I did. Incessantly.

  And here I was.

  I raised my spear – someone’s spear . . .

  ‘Column will form line by wheeling by half-squadrons to the right!’ I roared. Just like that. Made you jump. Hah! I still have the voice.

  And they did.

  The Sacred Band must have known – right then – that they were dead men.

  They got their end files faced my way.

  You are too young to have been in a fight – let me tell this my way. Depth is everything, even when the men in the back aren’t fighting. They are your insurance against disaster, their weight at your back steadies you, and their spear-points guarantee that if the man next to you falls, there’s someone to step up into his place.

  When we appeared on their flanks, the Sacred Band was fighting thirty-six files wide and eight deep. Chewing their way through three times their number in Macedonian recruits.

  Then they faced their flank files. That meant that the whole left end of their formation had no support behind them – all those men turned to face me. Not to mention the miracle of discipline it is to face your flank files while fighting to the front. I had to do it later – several times – and only the best men can.

  So immediately, some of the pressure slackened against our infantry. And you must remember – this is a big battle, the line six stades long, with each army almost two thousand files of eight to sixteen men wide – and I’m telling you about what was happening in the end forty files. Forty of two thousand – what’s that? One fiftieth, that’s how much of the battlefield I owned. And remember while I tell you this – the other forty-nine fiftieths of the line were also fighting. Somewhere, Philip was stumbling back, cursing, and somewhere else to his left, the foot companions were getting their butts handed to them by a bunch of pompous Athenians – in the middle, Alexander had burst through the back of the wreckage of the allied centre, and somewhere else again, the Theban line infantry was starting to give a little ground to the Macedonians and none of us knew that any of these things were happening.

  Walk. As soon as my whole line was in motion, Erygius had his trumpeter blow trot. I angled my path across the front of the cavalry and raised my spear. I was damned if the Mytileneian veteran was going to lead this charge. This was my charge.

  In the cavalry school, when you are a page, the instructors – all men with a lot of fighting behind them – say that the crucial moment in a cavalry charge is when you are five horse lengths from the enemy spear-points. They knew what they were talking about. There is some complex mechanism – the sort of thing Aristotle would have loved to analyse – whereby man and horse make a nested set of decisions. I suspect it is the distance at which the horse can really see the spears. The horse has to decide for itself – over, around, through, back. And the rider – at once master and passenger – can convey determination or indecision with the slightest shift of his arse. Horses know.

  I knew the moment I got out in front that the Sacred Band had their spear-points down and we were not going over them.

  So I turned my horse and raced for the rear corner of their formation, as my charge dissolved behind me.

  The companions baulked.

  In storybooks, cavalrymen ride infantrymen down – crashing in through their spear-points, hewing to the right and left.

  Not in real
life. In real life, no horse will go through a formed, unshaken body of men – even if they are armed only with pitchforks or their fists. Daimon is everything in a fight between infantry and cavalry. The daimon that motivates men to fight, to stand, to flinch, to run – that daimon.

  The Sacred Band were only eight ranks deep, so they had only eight files facing me.

  The end two troops were actually well past the end of their line. I raced for them, caught the attention of their phylarchs and started them in a wheel – a broad sweeping wheel into the flank and rear of the Sacred Band.

  Some of the men in the rear ranks turned, and some didn’t.

  I’m a quick learner. Having halted once to dress my ranks and missed an opportunity, this time I didn’t wait for perfection. As soon as I saw that at least one troop leader had the idea, I led like a Macedonian should.

  I set Poseidon’s head at a gap in the enemy ranks where the fourth and fifth men in the rear rank were arguing. The corner of the enemy body was a mess.

  This is where horseflesh means a great deal, because Poseidon was smart, strong and well trained. So I let him go. I didn’t aim him – he aimed me.

  And then – then, it was just me and the Sacred Band. About eight of them, at the right rear corner of their original formation – meaning that I was facing file closers and right file men, the very best of the best, except for the front rank.

  I didn’t think of all that. I don’t think I thought of anything, except that it was good to be me.

  Spears came up, but Poseidon had made his call and I made mine. I didn’t have a lance – they were never as popular then as they are now. I had a heavy hunting spear, a longche, which Polystratus had put in my hand, and I threw it. It went somewhere – who can tell in a fight?

  I got my sword out after I hit their line. Poseidon got a spear in his hindquarters, and I got one right in the gut – a perfect shot, except that my cuirass turned the point and my knees were strong – I rocked, but I didn’t come off, and the point slid over my shoulder and the shaft rang my bell – remember, I had no helmet.

  And then my sword was in my hand – a long, heavy kopis. I cut down and back – a school shot, the one you practise endlessly for mounted combat, and for a reason – and caught something. I remember thinking that this wasn’t so bad – that I was doing my duty.