The Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  The foe sees this also: that we advance upon him in the oblique. Our right leads. In other words, our foremost brigade—Antipater’s—is singled up on the Sacred Band. This tells the enemy we will strike there first. I reinforce this notion by sending my missile troops, now, to rain hell upon the Sacred Band, and only the Sacred Band.

  I have told you what the foe sees. Now consider what he doesn’t. He doesn’t see my heavy cavalry. I have four squadrons of Companions, eight hundred eighty-one men, immediately to the rear of the phalanx and concealed by its dust and its hedge of upright sarissas—and two more squadrons, under Hephaestion, held back on the left, to assault the foe’s right when it starts to pivot forward. In any event, the enemy discounts cavalry. In any event he holds it in contempt.

  Four hundred yards. Our javelineers out front concentrate their fire on the Sacred Band. We can hear the concussion a quarter mile away. I want the enemy to believe this is where our assault will come; I want the Sacred Band to brace, as it has planned, for my all-out attack upon it. Nor is this missile assault a ruse or formality. Our javelineers of Agriania are not boys and old men pitching spikes (like the foe’s skirmishers, whom our fellows have chased with ease from the field), but the most skilled and lethal missile troops in the world. They are mountain tribesmen, allies of the north, whose sons may not call themselves men until they have brought down with one cast a boar or a lion. Downwind, their best men can sling a dart two hundred yards; point-blank their casts routinely splinter two-inch planks.

  Three fifty. Our javelineers launch their missiles from so close to the foe, they can see the irises within the sockets of his helmets of bronze. Each dart weighs three to five pounds, with a warhead of solid iron. The enemy holds. He hunkers behind his bronze and oak shields and endures.

  Three hundred. The first wounded, skirmishers of the foe, come underfoot. The horses smell blood. Between my knees Bucephalus shudders like a warship coming on to ram. I don’t touch the reins; his pride will not bear it. Just a shift, with my seat; he collects beneath me.

  I am out front now with my Bodyguard and couriers, in the interval between our rightmost phalanx brigades, Antipater’s and Coenus’s. Two fifty. Our javelineers fall back in strings of ten, withdrawing between the files of the advancing infantry. We can see clearly now the scarlet and gold of the Sacred Band. The foe’s captains, out before their squares, are pointing out our battle standards, singling up, just as we have.

  Suddenly Telamon reins at my shoulder. “Pigstickers!” He points ahead. Reinforcements are pouring in behind the foe. It is not till after the fight that we will learn from captured colors that these units are the Heracles regiment, which had been Epaminondas’s, a city brigade second only to the Sacred Band in the illustriousness of its complement, and two county regiments (meaning farmers, tough Boeotian yeomen), the Cadmus and the Electra—the same divisions that overran Sparta a generation ago. In the event, I have no idea of the identity of these companies, but I see the blades of their twelve-foot pikes as they hasten into position in the rear of the Sacred Band.

  It is the moment. I feel Black Cleitus’s eyes on me, and Telamon’s and Redbeard’s and those of all the squadrons. Can I tell you how happy I am? In moments we may all be slain. My mates accept this. So do I. Death is nothing alongside this dynamis, our will to fight.

  One hundred fifty. I sign to Telamon: “Sarissas to the attack.”

  On the trumpet’s blare, the first five ranks of the sixteen-deep squares lower their pikes to the horizontal. Again the theater this presents to the foe is terrifying. Because of their great length, the sarissas do not descend sharply or crisply; instead their shafts lower to the attack deliberately, almost languorously. The war cry roars from forty-five hundred throats. The foe answers; we hear his hymn and anthem. Officers of the Sacred Band withdraw to their posts in the forward ranks. They lap shields with their mates. Their front forms, solid bronze. Every man plants his soles and, calling upon heaven, strengthens his knees to withstand our assault.

  Warfare is theater, I have said, and the essence of theater is artifice.

  What we show, we will not do.

  What we don’t show, we will do.

  One hundred. Again I signal the trumpet. It looks to the Sacred Band in that moment as if Antipater’s brigade, our rightmost, singled up upon the Band, will charge straight at it.

  But it doesn’t. Instead, on the trumpet, Antipater’s front comes half left. The warheads of his regiments’ leveled sarissas swing on the diagonal, centering no longer on the Sacred Band, but on the militia units on the Band’s right. Antipater’s brigade, already advancing in the oblique, simply squares its front and launches into the attack.

  The Sacred Band has braced to receive the assault. But no assault comes. Instead the foe finds himself staring at a hundred yards of empty dirt.

  Now, as I launch Antipater’s brigade diagonally across the Sacred Band’s front, I do something else. I wheel my four squadrons of Companion Cavalry (Hephaestion holds the final two in the deep left rear) from their post behind my rightmost infantry brigades, where they have been screened from the enemy’s sight by the phalanx’s vertical sarissas, and gallop at their head to our right wing, behind Antipater’s attacking brigade. The squadrons of horse come from line of squares to column of wedges. This is the formation called Dragon’s Teeth. Each wedge is a tooth and each tooth follows the tooth before it.

  Our Companion Cavalry is running “round the turning post,” like racehorses in the hippodrome. When we clear Antipater’s right wing, we will come left in a column of wedges and charge the foe with all the speed and violence we possess.

  Do the captains of the Sacred Band see this? Indeed they do. By now they reckon my scheme completely. But they are caught between two evils. Come forward to attack Antipater’s brigade (which has, by its diagonal crossing, exposed its right flank), and my cavalry will rip into them on their own exposed left. Stand fast and Antipater will eat their flanking units alive. Either way, I will pile into them at the gallop with eight hundred cavalry charging boot-to-boot.

  The foe sees what is coming. But he can do nothing about it. He is all heavy infantry. His bulk is rooted to the earth. He has as much chance against us as the tree has against the axe.

  As the Sacred Band comes forward (as it must, to attack Antipater’s brigade in flank), our wedges of Companion Cavalry appear on their left, hurtling toward them. The foe’s reinforcing companies of the Heracles, Cadmus, and Electra regiments must flood forward now, filling the breach created by the Sacred Band’s charge. We can see their captains shouting and gesticulating for this, and their gallant ranks straining to obey.

  Infantry is mass and immobility.

  Cavalry is speed and shock.

  A gap opens between the Sacred Band and its supporting units. Into this gap I charge.

  Bucephalus is first to strike the foe. My horse is a prodigy. He stands seventeen hands high and weighs over twelve hundred pounds. His hooves on the earth make tracks broad as skillets; his quarters are the size of regimental kettles. I cannot imagine the terror that must have seized that initial warrior of the Sacred Band as my stallion’s driving knees crashed upon him, followed by the massive bulk of his iron-armored chest. The front parted before me with a sound like rending metal. I could feel Cleitus and Telamon behind me on the left, Socrates Redbeard on the right.

  A cavalry charge is nothing grander than a directed stampede. Men have believed that horses will refuse to overrun massed infantry, as they will balk at running into a wall of stone. But horses are herd animals, and in the madness of the rush, they will follow the leader headlong off a cliff. In the formation of the wedge, where the commander’s horse is alone at the point, the mounts of the succeeding chevrons are not following their own eyes and senses; they’re following the lead horse. And if the leader is brave enough or reckless enough, spurred on by a rider impetuous enough, the trailers must follow. The same instinct that drives a herd off a precipice will pro
pel it into massed infantry.

  The foot-knights of Thebes cannot believe the mounted foe is mad enough to hurl himself upon their elevated spear points. But here we are. The shaft of my lance snaps in two against the shield of some spectacularly valorous fellow, whose own eight-footer splinters in the same instant against the iron plate lapping Bucephalus’s chest. The foe’s eyes fasten on mine through the slits of our helmets; I read his fury and exasperation, matching my own, at the cursedness of our mutually rotten luck. Down he plunges beneath Bucephalus’s knees; in a moment his helmet is staved. I feel revulsion at the waste of such a gallant heart and vow to myself for the thousandth time that I, come to power, will never again permit Greek to work slaughter against Greek.

  Muralists depict the clash of cavalry with lances thrusting, sabers slashing. But in the crush it is the horse who does the damage, not the man. The rider in a melee is, to all purposes, out of his mind. So is his mount, and he, the rider, must use this against the foe. Hemmed by shouting, weapon-wielding men, the animal’s instincts supersede all training. Bucephalus rears and plunges, as a stallion will in the wild. He kicks at anything behind him and strikes with his teeth at any flesh he can reach. When a horse senses something moving beneath his belly, he will stamp with his hooves, as at a snake or wolf. Heaven help the man, fallen beneath him in combat. All these instincts the cavalryman must employ against the foe. But the lead rider can have only one object: punch through. Keep moving. The man at the point draws the wedge behind him. If he stalls, the whole rush founders.

  We are ten deep into the mass of the foe. A sea of helmets and spear points boils beneath me. I claw for my saber, but in the initial crash, the sheath has ruptured; I can’t get the jammed blade out. For an instant I consider shouting to Cleitus or Telamon, “Firewood!,” the cavalryman’s cry when his lance shatters and he must get another. But no, it would be infamous to strip a comrade for my own need. Instead I tear off my helmet and hoist it overhead, intending to strike with it as a weapon. At once cheers erupt. A lucky star has watched over my career, and here at its inception it does not fail. The Companions take the stunt as a gesture of triumph. It is seen even by the ranks of our pikemen, at that instant crashing to grips along the Theban front. They too salute it ecstatically; I hear them surge forward and see the foe give back before their press. I reelevate the helmet and sling it with all my strength across the ranks of the foe. With a great cry, our infantry falls upon them. The enemy’s reinforcements give way. Our first wedge punches through.

  A highway opens before us. We are in the clear. The foe’s camp is fifty yards ahead; it is already in full flight. Telamon overhauls me and tosses me his lance. The wedges re-form upon my colors. We charge from the rear. Each fifty is one tooth of the dragon, and each tooth tears off a steak from the meat of the foe.

  The enemy has no chance against our attacking divisions. What infantryman with his eight-foot spear or militiaman with his twelve-foot pike can stand against the phalanx man with his eighteen-foot sarissa? And our Companion Cavalry, on fire for glory, would that day have overrun Olympus itself.

  In minutes the struggle on my wing breaks down into three clashes. Against the river the foot companies of the enemy’s right, which have come forward against our allied infantry, are being taken in flank and rear by Hephaestion’s squadrons of horse. Our divisions under Amyntas and Nicolaus pin them from the front; they are being massacred. In the center, Coenus’s brigade has locked up with the foe’s militia foot; a titanic brawl rages amid storms of dust and cries of carnage. On our wing, the Sacred Band and its reinforcing regiments have been cut off. Our heavy cavalry assaults them from the rear; sarissa infantry hems them from the front. The enemy’s elite corps is enveloped. Now the blood work of slaughter begins.

  When a unit has been cut off from its supporting wings, its resistance becomes a matter solely of the character and courage of its components. In this, no corps I have ever dueled excelled the Sacred Band of Thebes. Their extinction was inevitable from the moment our first squadron penetrated their front. Yet the Three Hundred not only stood fast but rallied the militia troops of their own complement and the citizen regiments on their flank, compelling them by their own valor to emulation. One fought, it seemed, not warriors but champions. Timon, the Olympic boxer, slew two of our chargers, so we heard later, the second with his bare hands, breaking the animal’s neck. Thootes, the pancratist, would not go down, despite three lances in his guts and half his face hacked away. The chronicle of the foe’s individual gallantry filled two rolls in the dispatches. But greater yet was the way he held together. Though the penetrations of our wedges had broken up the initial four thousand into first three and then five severed companies, these units managed, by rushes upon our fronts in the breaks of our rushes upon them, to recombine and re-form into a fighting square. They fought their way out, first to the lone cypress that marked their original front, then to a low wall where their camp laundry had been hung, and after that to the kitchen camp of their servants, where they formed up again behind a row of cooking trenches. Not a man showed his back. Always our force advanced against lapped shields and thrusting spears. And if we drew breath, even for an instant, the champions of the Sacred Band rushed upon us.

  It is a brutal and graceless business to finish off a compact body of men who resist bravely and will not yield. In this, the sarissa phalanx is without peer, as the foe’s shorter spears cannot get within five feet of the Macedonian front, while our men can cut the enemy down at will, and, in fact, the only real problem we faced was fatigue and the efficient rotation of rested men into the line to press the slaughter. The foe’s thousands became hundreds, and his hundreds scores.

  You could hear voices of individual officers of the foe crying out to their comrades to sell their lives dearly. I called to them to see sense and surrender. They would not. At several points in the melee, stout fellows of the foe closed ranks into knots of bronze and iron and sought to break out through the ocean of Macedonians enveloping them. Though these individuals fought with the desperation of self-preservation, they had no hope, as our ranks were too deep and too stoutly disciplined and officered. Our fellows crowded in from all quarters, at points twenty and thirty deep, elevating their sarissas to the vertical and pushing with their elbows and shoulders upon the backs of the men in the ranks before them. The brave warriors of the foe expired amid this press, going down like drowning men in the sea.

  At such point it becomes the victor’s responsibility to calculate the consequence of excessive slaughter and to direct the cessation of strife. I cry cease and call out again to the foe to capitulate. He still refuses. A courier gallops up from my father, summoning me to an assembly of commanders. Hephaestion’s squadrons, triumphant, have joined us now from the wing; other riders spur up in joy from Parmenio in the center. Victory in every quarter! It is over. We have won! I feel no fatigue, only elation, and a monumental sense of relief.

  I set Antipater and Coenus to oversee the finish of the Sacred Band, with orders to spare as many as they can, dishonoring none. With Hephaestion I transit the hinter ground on the track of my father’s courier. It is the type of field a cavalryman dreams of. We are in the enemy rear; our companies range without opposition. Everywhere the foe is in flight. I am just clasping Hephaestion’s arm in congratulation, when I see Coenus’s adjutant Polemarchus overhauling us from the wing. He gallops up, begrimed and breathless.

  “The last of the Sacred Band, Alexander . . . some are taking their own lives. What shall we do?”

  Eight

  THE SACRED BAND

  THE SURVIVORS OF THE SACRED BAND are about two score. They have been disarmed now by Antipater and Coenus and stripped of all means of harming themselves. It is minutes after the fight. The scene is as heartbreaking as it is ghastly. All who have survived are maimed and disabled, no few horribly, yet somehow they have managed to crawl or hobble or drag one another onto one spot, the sand bank where their corps had first taken station. The l
one cypress overstands them, looking like a tree of hell.

  I ride up with Hephaestion and Polemarchus. One of the foe has had both legs crushed, beneath our Companions’ hooves no doubt, and been blinded, among other wounds; how many it is impossible to tell beneath the matting of blood and grime that coats his arms, face, beard, and breast. This warrior, knowing his countrymen have been vanquished and the main of his comrades slain, hauls himself onto one elbow, begging the victors for death. Around him several hundred Macedonians and allies have collected, gawking at the beaten men as if they were bears in a pound.

  In a hundred battles this is the rarest sight: men who stand and fight to the death. It never happens. Even the most elite units, when they know they are beaten, will seek terms or contrive measures to extricate themselves from their predicament. Yet the Sacred Band has stood and died. The survivors make no move to bind their wounds, some even opening them, seeking to bleed their substance into the sand. They have guts, these bastards. It is a measure, further, of their hatred for us, their identification of us as aliens, non-Greeks.

  Philotas rides up from the right of the field. He is Parmenio’s eldest son, commander this day of Philip’s Companion Cavalry, and my father’s favorite. He hates the Thebans with a blood passion, which is enflamed further by the sight of their magnificent valor.

  “Who do you think you are, the Spartans at Thermopylae?” He ranges before them on his tall black, Adamantine. “Do you take us for Persians, you sons of whores?”

  My men are elated, as victors are always, to have survived trial of death. They gape at these knights of Thebes, of whom they had been thoroughly terrified so few moments past.