He swept off to the left, towards Parmenio, and we started forward, and the cheering followed him.
Four stades, then three. Then two. Now Alexander was coming back down the line from the left, his cloak flying behind him, the sun gilding his fair hair, and the phalanx roared for him, a wall of sound like our wall of shields. At a stade, we all halted at a gesture from the king – he held his hand out, and the army stopped.
It was magnificent, a word I use too often.
He rode off to the left, to the head of his cavalry, and the trumpets blared, and we went forward.
At that point, I dismounted. Being on a horse gives you a fine view of a battlefield, especially when everyone else is on foot. But Greeks and Macedonians expect their taxiarchs to lead from the front, not from the middle or the back. That’s just the way it is.
I took my aspis from Polystratus, and my favourite spear, about twice the height of a man, heavy as a tree, of old ash, tipped in heavy steel at one end, quite a long blade, and tipped in bronze at the other, quite a short saurouter. Every man to his own taste. My spear was a man’s height shorter than a sarissa. The sarissa is a recruit’s weapon, anyway.
Half a stade on. Twenty horse lengths, and we could see their line as clear as anything, and individual helmets, and the precipitous drop to the river bed. I wanted to panic, but I was too busy yelling for my lads to close up and trying to get my cheek-plates tied together. My hands were shaking too hard, and if I stopped walking, the line would leave me behind – or stop with me.
I remember every one of the last fifty paces before the Pindarus river. We had the worst ground to cover, into the face of the most dangerous men on the enemy side.
And then there was a mighty blare of trumpets from the Persians, and arrows flew from their Psiloi line. I assume that every man shot something, and fifteen thousand arrows were launched and fell in a hail as dense as the morning’s rain. I got six in my aspis.
The trumpets blared again, and another volley flew.
We’d shuddered to a stop under the barrage. I’d seen it before – men can be shot to a halt. We had a lot of men down. Some would rise again and many wouldn’t.
I remember saying ‘Fuck it’ aloud. I didn’t think of Thaïs, or Pella, or my farm, or any of that. What I thought was that I wanted to get it over with.
‘Follow me!’ I roared, and ran forward into the arrow storm.
I could tell you a lot of stories I heard from other men, but I’ll be honest – that’s all I remember of the Battle of Issus, until Perdiccas’s taxeis broke. Obviously we went forward into the river, but I don’t remember a moment of it. We went up the far bank. I know that the enemy guards officers made a stupid mistake and defended the riverbank from the very edge, as if it were a wall, and that meant that our spears went into their legs, at first, and they lost men, and we pushed them back. But when they learned to stand a horse length back from the bank, they started killing our front-rankers as soon as we got up the sandy bank.
As the fighting went on, that bank started to collapse. It was sand and gravel, fairly sharp cut in the early fighting, but after an hour it was a ramp of dead men and collapsed gravel, and I imagine somebody thought we’d fight our way up it in the end.
Not me. I was cut down twice, both times by those terrifying silver apples that could knock a man unconscious right through a good helmet. Both times, my men pulled me out of the fighting.
When I came to the second time, I was woozy and I vomited, over and over, and my head felt soft and spongy and there was a lot of blood in my hair.
My taxeis was standing in the river, and the Persians were standing on the far bank, jeering at us, and my men weren’t even pretending to push forward. Once in a while, a Persian officer would lean out with a bow and shoot one of my officers or file leaders. But that was better than trying the ramp of dead again.
Isokles was holding my shoulders, and Marsyas was holding my hair.
I drank a lot of wine from Polystratus’s canteen. As in, the whole canteen.
Hope you’re getting the picture.
Polystratus leaned in close. ‘Things are going to shit by the hypaspitoi,’ he said.
So I mounted his horse and rode about a hundred feet, my head pounding and my limbs uncertain.
It was like watching a dyke break when a river floods.
I don’t know where they came from, but there were thousands of Greek mercenaries, and they’d broken through, and they were coming into Perdiccas’s flank. And Perdiccas’s men had had enough. They were running. I couldn’t see the hypaspitoi. I didn’t know that Alexander was, even then, trying to kill Darius, or that he’d broken the enemy line. All I saw was dust and the collapse of our centre.
And let me tell one thing from where Perdiccas stood. He says he never knew how Greeks penetrated our line. His men were stuck in like mine, and unable to break through, just like mine, and suddenly they were struck in the flank by a battering ram of well-formed infantry. It was so bad that most of his front-rankers died. Virtually a generation of leadership in a veteran phalanx, dead in heartbeats. My namesake, Ptolemy son of Seleucus, died there. Parmenio’s bastard son Attalus died there. We lost good men at the rate of water draining from a pool.
I rode back to my taxeis – just a few horse lengths, and lost in the battle haze.
Thank the gods for the horse.
‘Back-step! March!’ I bellowed.
Back-stepping is when the hoplite backs from the enemy but with his face still looking the enemy in the eye. Only the best troops, like the best horses, can do it. But my lads were only too happy to leave the killing zone between the banks of the river. And we’d worn both banks to ramps. I’m sure it was bad enough, backing up the near bank, but they got it done.
When the right file leader (the one who should have been next to me) was at my left foot, I ordered ‘Halt!’
Isokles came running out of the haze of dust.
His was the rightmost company.
‘Form to the right,’ I said. ‘We’re about to be hit in the flank.’
I’d backed the taxeis far enough that he could simply wheel his thirty files to the right. Then Marsyas marched – the Spartan way – by files to the right and reformed his front – to Isokles’ left. Wrong place in the line, but we had practised this – and every other possible disaster. Thanks to Isokles.
‘Go to Parmenio and get a squadron of cavalry,’ I said to Polystratus. ‘I don’t care who they are. Tell him the whole centre is going to collapse and Perdiccas is already gone.’
And then the Greeks hit Isokles.
That’s all the time we had. Perhaps the time a man takes to make a speech in the Assembly. But all those brave men – Meleager son of Neoptolymus, Parmenio’s bastard; Ptolemy of Selucus and Leon son of Amyntas and all of them – they died to buy us those fleeting heartbeats, and we honoured their deaths by using the time as best we could.
The Greeks hit us, and Isokles’ men gave way ten paces. Marsyas’s men went back far enough that they disordered Pyrrhus’s company where they stood ready.
There were so many Greeks. I remember my heart falling as I realised that we had lost the battle.
I dismounted and ran to the rear of Pyrrhus’s right file.
‘About face!’ I roared. Maybe I squeaked it. But they brought their sarissas upright and faced about – a terrible muddle – fighting all around us, and Marsyas’s rear files being pushed in among us.
‘Follow me!’ I yelled. Pyrrhus was ten men away, and his men were not in any order at all, but the Greek formation was wider than ours by half as many again, and I was determined to fight the turning motion of the overlap with an attack of my own.
As it turned out, all of Pyrrhus’s men and all of Cleomenes’ assumed the order was for them, and the whole lot of them – more than five hundred men – followed me into the Greeks, leaving no one facing the Persian guards across the river.
Nor were we in any order at all. We were a mob.
It was all man to man. Vicious, brutal and utterly devoid of tactics. Had these been Memnon’s men, we’d have been dead. Praise Ares, the only veterans of Memnon’s were in my ranks, at my back.
I remember crashing into a very young Greek, knocking him flat with my greater weight, and putting my spear into him. That never happens in a line fight. But here – it was every man for himself in the dust.
The sarissas were useless, and most of my veterans simply dropped them for their swords. The sarissa is a fine team weapon, but has no use at all man to man.
Then it was just fighting.
We lost.
They seemed to have an inexhaustible number of Greeks and Ionians. It was incredible – slow, almost nightmare-like. The initial shock of the open, confused fighting gave way to a gradual, almost glacial collapse into a line fight.
We lost, but we lost slowly. Cleomenes quite wisely sent his mounted messengers down the line to Craterus to tell him what was happening, and we lost ground, step by step, and the Greeks kept pushing our flanks and driving south, away from the river, trying to turn us.
We died.
Let me tell you how war works. I had, at the start of the day, about eight hundred veterans of Memnon’s and about nine hundred Macedonian recruits. At the end of the day, I had about seven hundred veterans of Memnon and about three hundred Macedonian recruits. The young die, and the old fight on.
Back and back we went.
Praise to Ares, some of Perdiccas’s men – and he himself – joined us on our southern flank. But every time we tried to stand, we were pushed back by numbers.
Over the next hour, we lost two hundred paces.
But now I’ll tell you what didn’t happen.
The Persian guards didn’t charge us in our exposed flank. I don’t know if they didn’t want to get their feet wet, or they didn’t know what was happening, or they were worried for their own king, who even then was being hunted like prey by Alexander – but they had it in their power to win the battle – one killing blow at us, and the centre was gone.
That man – the commander of Darius’s foot guards – lost Issus.
I was wounded – really wounded, a thrust from a spear that went through the top of my thorax and lodged in my breastbone – about the time that Craterus arrived with the rear files of his taxeis to try and steady mine. It still wasn’t enough. But his timing was good, because about twenty heartbeats after he slapped my shoulder and told me the king was coming, I was on my face in the blood and sand.
And that, for me, was the end of the Battle of Issus.
I suspect you know what happened, but here it is – Alexander launched his blow at the first roar of the trumpets, smashed through the line facing him and made straight for Darius, intending to kill him. Say what you will, it was a fine plan. It was a fine plan because it mostly worked.
Darius hadn’t planned on a fast battle, but on a long, slow slogging match. Darius made two mistakes – he didn’t keep a big cavalry reserve, and he assumed that we wouldn’t fight along the river front. What happened is that our failed phalanx attack still had the effect of locking all his drilled troops – his Greeks – in place while Alexander rode across his rear.
At some point, some bright Greek realised that Alexander’s charge had left the flank of the hypaspitoi hanging in the air, and the Greeks turned our flanks. Callisthenes did some very careful writing in the Military Journal to suggest that we’d lost so many officers – more than a hundred – in winning. We lost all those men – and their followers – in losing.
But Darius lost faster than we lost. I’ve heard Kineas’s version, and I’ve heard Amyntas’s version, and Parmenio didn’t really do all that well – in fact, it’s one of his poorest performances. Cleitus openly said – much later – that Parmenio left the king to get isolated behind the Persian lines and die, and kept his men together so he could retreat in good order.
I don’t buy that, either.
What really happened is that Alexander, let loose in the rear of the enemy, spread panic while chasing Darius – he got so close to the Great King that Darius’s left-hand dagger scored our king’s thigh.
The irony is that it all came down to culture.
In our culture, the king is king while he is winning. He’s worthless if he is losing. So our king attacked and kept attacking.
In the empire, they’ll do anything to protect the Great King, and when he is threatened, they hustle him out of danger. So while the battle teetered in the balance – when, in fact, those Greek mercenaries had it in the bag – Darius was dragged from the field by his cousins, and Polystratus reached Alexander. That’s right. Polystratus ignored me. He didn’t go to Parmenio. He went to Alexander, right through the gap in the Persian lines.
According to Polystratus, Alexander looked back at the dust cloud over the river, spat and said, ‘By Zeus my father, do I have to do everything myself ?’
But he came back, crashed into the rear of the Greeks and the day was ours.
I wasn’t there. I was halfway along the road to Hades.
It took me five days to recover enough to leave my beautiful Persian bed – we took their camp and got all our baggage back, although not our slaves, of course. Now we had all new slaves.
I missed all the fun. I missed Alexander meeting Darius’s wife and mother, which I gather was worth seeing – the older matron, perhaps the most dignified woman I’ve ever known, managed to assume that Hephaestion was the King of Macedon, and who wouldn’t? He was taller and handsomer and didn’t look like an insane street urchin, which our king always did, the day after a fight.
Give the old lady credit. Our army was mad with victory, and every woman in that camp got raped. Hideous, ugly – I’m no fan of rape – but that’s what happened. In Persia, a raped woman can be executed for adultery. That’s fair, eh? Lucky them. So when the king and Hephaestion and a dozen other men came into their tent, they assumed that they were for it – especially as the lot of them were as fair as any group of thirty women on the face of the world. Forgive Sisygambis her error. But I gather that it was fantastic theatre.
And Alexander kissed her gently and said, ‘Never fear. For he, too, is Alexander.’
Alexander visited the wounded, handed out the prizes as if we were the Greeks before Troy (and never doubt that under those blond curls, he thought that we were the Greeks before Troy) and praised everyone. Kineas was made bravest of the allies – he’d fallen across the river, deep in the Persian ranks, and lots of people saw this act of insane heroism. And he lived, the lucky bastard. And a dozen of us who fell holding the centre got garlands, as well. I got one. Perdiccas got one. My young Cleomenes got one.
We had a lot of dead. Alexander held a moving funeral, complete with oration, and we burned the corpses.
We were rich. Every man in the army got enough loot out of that fantastic camp to retire. We were done. Victors. We had done it, and beaten the Great King.
Alexander let us believe that for three days. I knew better immediately, of course – Thaïs was by my side (in later years, she said it was to keep me from the Persian girls) and she already had reports of Darius gathering troops in the eastern valleys. He was a tough fighter. And he was not beaten.
TWENTY-THREE
The greatest victory in Greek – or Macedonian – history earned us a week. Then we were off down the coast road, headed for Syria.
To say that Alexander was insufferable doesn’t do justice to his behaviour. He retold the story of his daring charge and his chase of King Darius, of their brief struggle hand to hand, of Darius’s attack with a dagger after his sword broke, of his own brilliance in overcoming the captain of Darius’s guard while simultaneously holding Darius himself at bay.
It was all true. He
had a hundred witnesses, and he liked nothing better than to make Philotas, for instance, tell how he, the king, had rescued Philotas when his horse went down and he took a wound. He insisted that I tell how and why I had sent for help, so that he could explain how he had come into the rear of the enemy Greeks like a god from a machine in a play.
It was his first victory that was all his own, against the Persians. He had triumphed – with his own feats of arms, his own battle plan, an army that followed him. Parmenio played a very small part in the battle, and that Alexander couldn’t let anyone forget.
We were weeks travelling south along the coast, through the mountains and back to the coast of Phoenicia, and every night I heard the story of Issus again.
One afternoon, when I was with the king, we rode off the road in answer to a summons from Ariston, who was commanding the advance guard. We went north from the road a stade or two, and there was a statue. It was magnificent and barbarous all at once, in black basalt.
It depicted an ancient king in a high crown, with his fingers raised on his right hand. I had to look at them from several angles before I realised that he was in the act of snapping his fingers.
I laughed.
The king shrugged at Ariston.
Ariston had the look of a man who had tried to play the courtier and please his king, and failed. He shrugged. ‘The peasants said he was the greatest king in the history of the world,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d want to see him.’
Alexander made a face.
‘Who is he?’ he asked.
Ariston spoke briefly to a Syrian, who cowered in the dirt. The man raised his face, like a dog expecting a bone. His Greek was halting.
‘He is the Great King Ashurbanipal,’ Ariston said.
‘What does the inscription say?’ Alexander asked. ‘I know who Ashurbanipal was. He ruled the world – or enough of it that it didn’t matter.’
Ariston spoke to the cowering Syrian.
He laughed, slapped his thigh and turned to the king. ‘According to this peasant, the inscription says, “Eat! Drink! Fuck! And the rest is not worth this!”’
God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 62