The first assault on Gaza – the only memorable thing about it is how badly we were suckered and how the army felt when they discovered that the king was not coming. I don’t think we’d ever assaulted anything – gone into action anywhere – without Alexander at our head. That’s what kings of Macedon do.
It is typical, I guess, of Macedonian soldiers that no man – not even the king – was ever any better than his last performance. It took them a few weeks to forget his brilliant courage – his virtually maniacal courage.
I heard it all while I buckled on my battered cuirass, once a brilliant glare of gilded bronze and now a dented, scraped and battered remnant of its once proud self, missing both silver nipples and with ringties replacing the hinges I had had and which had been ruined by the hot sand. I had new armour coming, too.
My thorax reminded me of a statue we had had in the gardens when I was a boy. My father loved it, but it had been taken to the barns to be cleaned one winter, and somehow dropped. That’s how my thorax looked, and my helmet was worse, and I was a taxiarch.
But I digress. I had to replace Isokles as company officer and as my second-in-command. Marsyas was the obvious choice. He was a friend of the king, and his brother, Antigonus, was an increasingly important man – he had just won us a fine victory over Phrygians in the north, and without him our supply lines would have been severed repeatedly and no new recruits would be reaching our army. Marsyas himself was a fine officer, if you took into account that he had his nose in the air and his head in the clouds.
He loved Thaïs, though. So I made him swear to her by Aphrodite, his chosen goddess, of whom Thaïs was a priestess, that he would never let a woman come between his duty and his men again. And on his own account, before the end of the Siege of Tyre, he went to Cleomenes and apologised for his hubris, and they were reconciled – indeed, like proper gentlemen, they were better friends than before.
Ahh. I am avoiding the first assault on Gaza. I will digress again and again. Here, pour me some more wine, there, boy.
Marsyas told me that men were complaining that the king was sulking in his tent, or worse. And moments later, I heard the same from Cleomenes.
And with that in my head, I went to the king’s pre-assault briefing. It was dark, and despite the summer, cold. All the army’s senior officers were there, and they gathered in two distinct groups. That had never happened before. One group around Parmenio, and the other around Hephaestion. Ugly.
Alexander was not in armour. It’s true – perhaps he was damned either way, but as the only man not in armour, he accentuated the fact that he was not going up the ramps and we were. Or rather – Philotas was not going up the ramps, and neither was Attalus or Amyntas, but they were in armour, as if to indicate their support.
As it happened, when the king moved to the centre to discuss the assault, I could smell him and he reeked of spikenard. I had never known him even to experiment with perfume, and he smelled – very strongly.
Diades had drawn a view of the city on a large board in charcoal, and the king pointed out our assault positions and the timing of the assaults. It was all routine, and yet somehow, every word he said struck us as odd – because he was perfumed and clean and wearing clothes more suited to a bedchamber than to the field. Hephaestion was in armour – a panoply that had once been at least as magnificent as my best, and now looked as bad or worse.
Alexander dismissed us without a smile or a speech. In fact, his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. And then he went back into his tent, and we went to our units.
I remember the first assault well. My pezhetaeroi were in the first wave on the southernmost ramp, and we went as soon as we had light to see the uneven footing. That uneven footing saved my life, too. I was the first man up the ramp, and I went fast – determined to be the first man on the wall, because if you must lead an assault on a city, you have no choice but to be a hero.
I must digress, again. In Macedon – in Sparta, in Athens and even in gods-cursed Thebes – officers led from in front. The wastage among Athenian strategoi was always incredible. Men in front die. Macedonian taxiarchoi had a better survival rate only because we wore lots of armour and trained as pages to overcome anything in hand-to-hand combat. But one of the things I remember about the pre-dawn minutes at Gaza was the fear. My men were afraid, and I was afraid, and my recruits were jittery, even the many among them who were themselves veterans. I didn’t want to lead the assault. I wanted to go and join Alexander and wear perfume.
My hands shook.
I had a great deal of trouble getting my cheek-plates tied together.
My knees were weak, and my forearms felt as if I’d spent the night lifting weights.
Because, like my men, I’d done too much. Tyre was too close behind us. Alexander owed us a rest, and we hadn’t had one.
Off to my left, a red flag was lifted from the tower that was closest to the king’s command pavilion.
I sprang up from rock to rock, and the arrows fell like sleet in the Thracian mountains, and my big aspis was hit again and again, and my poor old helmet took another battering.
I took one quick look when I was almost at the base of the socle. I wanted to hit the base of the breach just right. There were a dozen men just inside the breach, with heavy bows, shooting as fast as they could, and even as I looked, another arrow thudded into my aspis and I stumbled, and my left foot went into something that cracked under my weight and suddenly I was down, my left leg deep in the dirt and stone of the ramp, and something went over my head with the sound of summer thunder – or the sound of a sheet of papyrus being torn asunder by an enraged merchant. Whatever it was snapped my neck around and tore the crest right off my old helmet.
Pyrrhus, who had been with me since he was a child, simply exploded. An arm and his head flew off, and behind him, a dozen more men died in a hideous fleshy mess.
There was a ballista in the breach. Even as I tried to pull my left leg free, the men in the breach were cranking the great bow back into position and the men on the walls above the breach were throwing boiling linseed oil into our faces. I only caught a little – perhaps a cupful – on my shoulder above my shield arm, but the pain spurred me and I got my left leg free and almost vomited, because my foot had collapsed the ribcage of a corpse and my leg had slid into the body cavity – a mass of corruption and maggots – and the smell of death stuck to me like glue.
And I went up the breach anyway, because after Tyre . . .
I reached the ballista well before it was loaded, and threw my light spear into the nearest man and then my heavy spear – not really meant to be thrown – into an archer, and he and the loader fell across the enormous bow, and I drew my sword – a heavy kopis – from under my arm and continued the draw into a cut – to the rope holding the bow wound against its drum. The men on the bow screamed as the bowstring slammed into their soft bodies.
A wave of Macedonians joined me in the breach, and we killed every man we found there. And then we went down the rubble on the far side of the breach into the town.
At Tyre and Halicarnassus, the defenders had built mud walls behind the breach, to channel our attacks and make the breach a trap, but Batis had gone one better.
He let us into the town – he had more town to use for depth – and had built little battlefields for his garrison to use to fight inside the town. The houses were heavy and often stone-built, and between them there were barricades across the narrow streets – low enough to tempt assault, and high enough that such assaults weren’t worth much – the more so as every barricade was flanked by the towers of the tallest houses on the street, and every pair of towers had a small garrison of archers and slingers. Some of the barricades had a ballista. And some of the houses had assault groups waiting for us to pass them.
It was a nightmare.
When you assault a town, you know that the easiest way to achieve victory is to break the enemy’s will to resist. There comes a point in an assault when the town has so many
soldiers flooding it that the defenders either surrender or simply allow themselves to die. The expectation of every man in an assault is that it is his duty to penetrate as deeply into the town as possible to cause panic.
Batis used all that against us. Our men came up the breaches like heroes and went into the town, where he wanted us to be – inside his defences, and far from the support of our dominating artillery. His defenders had superb morale, and they faced us resolutely, no matter where we met them in the town. And indeed, early on, they abandoned some positions – I assume to lure us deeper into the web of streets.
I am proud of my performance as a taxiarch that day, because I didn’t lose my head. Oh – I was fooled. I may have penetrated as deeply into the town as any Macedonian. I know that I was enraged by Pyrrhus’s death and I killed my way over a barricade despite a hail of stones. But as we overwhelmed our second barricade, losing a dozen good men in the process, I began to look around.
I had about a hundred men with me, and far too many of the officers – good for my group, bad news for my assault as a whole. I remember killing my way over the second barricade, and pausing to drink water from my canteen. I found that my strap had broken, or been cut, and I turned to Cleomenes and stopped him – carefully, as his blood was up.
‘Water, brother?’ I asked, and because I had to pop my cheek-plates to drink, I could hear and see when the enemy ambush began to filter into the street behind us.
‘Ware!’ I bellowed, and all the men on the barricade turned, and we made a shield wall – fifteen or twenty of us – and we held them. Please do not mistake me – the Persians and the Nabataeans at Gaza were brave men and well led, but they were never a match for us in combat. They lacked the armour, and they lacked the mettle. They hit us and we broke them and then we chased them back down the alley.
And now I really had time to look around, and what I saw was that we were not actually taking ground – that every stone house had defenders, and we were receiving a constant and deadly barrage wherever we went.
The problem I had – the problem every strategos always has – was information.
I gathered the men I had and we stormed a house. The fighting was bestial – kopis and xiphos against short spear and knife in rooms no larger than a large himation laid on the ground, through doorways so narrow and so low that a child would have to stoop to enter, and up steeply turning stairs that rotated to the right to cramp a fighter. At every check, the enemy put an archer or two behind a few swordsmen.
I couldn’t take more than a room or two at a time, and then I had to exchange out of the front rank. It was true of every man – fighting inside a city is a terrifying thing, every blow is a death blow. But as with fighting at night, discipline and armour make all the difference.
In the end, we stormed the tower and exterminated the garrison at the top, throwing the last bodies to the street below.
Now I could see.
There were fires throughout the town, and the dirt streets – the alleys – raised clouds of dust, so that a pall seemed to hang over the town, lit red and yellow by the flames in the early light.
It was actually quite beautiful.
But the pattern leaped to the eye. We were not penetrating the town. We were being funnelled down four corridors for the convenience of the garrison – a corridor for every breach – and each corridor led to a maze of alleys and barricades.
I stayed there for a long time. Long enough to catch my breath. Long enough for the sweat on my abdomen to start to dry. Because I had to be right.
Then I ordered my hyperetes to sound the recall.
I was the first. I remain proud of my decision.
Alexander did not feel the same way.
‘You what?’ he asked, his arms crossed. ‘You ran?’
I stank of death, and I was covered in soot, and I had two wounds. I had prepared myself for the encounter, and when I was clear of the breach, I ran – ran – all the way around the wall to Perdiccas to find him in his breach, and he, too, was coming out. And I promised him I’d explain to Alexander. I had set my mind to it as I climbed back up our siege mound, and I went straight to his tent.
And I was still not ready. I had my logic all prepared, and the king needed to know what Batis had done.
He smelled of spikenard, and he didn’t have a mark on him. He shrugged. ‘Perhaps I have grown used to uninterrupted victory. Or perhaps I simply cannot expect as much when I’m not there in person. I know what fear is, Ptolemy. You are forgiven.’
I suspect my mouth opened and closed like that of a fish. I don’t remember that part. What I remember is my head screaming at me to keep my mouth shut.
‘Fuck you!’ I roared at him. Alas. ‘You weren’t there – Lord King. You have no idea what we faced, and you think I panicked? You’re fucking right you should do it yourself. Because if you continue to talk like that, you may have to!’
Wise, carefully considered words they were not. I turned on my heel and walked away. But he had it coming, and then some.
The thing is, Alexander was . . . Alexander. God, monster, man, inhuman – all of them in one body.
So while Thaïs washed the crap and blood from my body, and my rage simmered and I tried – tried hard – not to turn it on my lover – Alexander came in. He had four Hetaeroi with him, and he was in armour.
He had a baton in his hand, and he put it carefully on my camp bed and came immediately to my side. He sniffed, made a face and sniffed the wound in the top of my shoulder, where you could see the white fat oozing out through the blood.
‘Do you have a wound gone bad?’ he asked. ‘You stink like a bad wound.’
‘I stepped in a corpse,’ I said, my tone carefully neutral.
‘Ah,’ he said. He took a cloth from Thaïs and cleaned my shoulder wound with what I can only call tender ruthlessness – he was as quick as he could be. He was very good with wounds.
It was all I could do not to cry out, or just cry.
When he dipped the cloth into the hot water, he said, ‘I am sorry, Ptolemy. Not fighting – I cannot do it. I cannot cower in the rear. It makes me a woman. In too many ways.’
Thaïs sniffed and muttered something about childbirth.
Alexander ignored her. ‘I should have been there. But I’m told it was a trap.’
‘A well-laid defence – a trap if we were foolish enough to come into it.’ I began to breathe more easily. My first thought when he entered the tent was that I was to be stripped of my command.
‘And perhaps, had I led today, I would have died.’ He shrugged. ‘I will lead the next.’
‘Tomorrow?’ I asked. In truth, I felt weary to the bone. It was still early morning, and I wanted to sleep.
He shook his head. ‘This was bad. We lost – three hundred pezhetaeroi, and perhaps more. I will let our men rest. Five days. And then I’ll take the Hetaeroi and the hypaspitoi.’ He smiled.
I knew what men would say in camp. That my men hadn’t been up to it. But neither could we assault every time, and my men didn’t have anything to prove. I took two breaths to fight down the urge to demand to participate, and then I nodded. ‘Bless you, Lord King, for coming to me.’
He put a hand on my good shoulder. ‘I love you, Ptolemy. Even when I behave thoughtlessly.’ He kissed me on the cheek and left the tent.
Go ahead. Hate that.
I couldn’t.
I don’t remember how many days passed – ah, here it is, in the Journal. Three days.
I probably slept for two of them.
My taxeis came out of the siege lines at midnight. Morale wasn’t bad – the new armour was coming in any day, I’d just given a small pay rise to all the married men in my regiment and I’d bought meat far away at Jerusalem and had it driven on the hoof into our camp, and every man knew he had a dinner of lamb to look forward to. In fact, I was spending money as an orator spends hot air, but my men needed it or they were going to collapse. All the taxiarchs were doing all they could.<
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I heard Parmenio, playing Polis with Craterus, mutter that the best thing that could happen to us was that Darius would get up the nerve to attack us, because that would put spine back in the pikemen. Parmenio was deeply depressed. His shoulders slumped, and he spoke slowly and very seldom, and he and his sons had become isolated.
At any rate, we were filtering down off the siege mounds north of the city, far from the breach that had killed seventy of my men, when we heard the unmistakable sounds of combat from all the way around the city.
I was already down at the base of the siege mound, on the road that Diades had built and kept clear for rapid troop movements. I had a habit of forming the men every night before dinner, to ‘pass the word’, as we used to say, and that night it stood me in good stead.
‘Files from the left by fours – to the left – march!’ I shouted, and ran to their head. Each group of four files marched forward to the road and then wheeled in fours to the left, forming a column four wide on the road from a phalanx eight deep. Simple stuff – if you drill every day.
As soon as the first fours were on the road, I trotted to their head. ‘At the double! Follow me!’
It was six stades around the wall to where we heard fighting. We were not sprinting, but we made it in time.
When we came up to the southernmost siege mound – territory we knew all too well, as it is where our own assault had jumped off – there was a vicious fight – a dust cloud, darkness falling and several thousand enemy troops engaged on the front face of our siege mound. They’d clearly made it into our works, because one of our batteries was aflame, and the smell of naphtha was in the air. Amyntas’s taxeis was broken – I could see his phylarchs rallying men to my right. And the hypaspitoi were fully engaged. I looked for Alexander.
I couldn’t see him.
God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great Page 70