The Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  “They want to see you, Alexander.”

  “See me for what?” I cannot imagine what plea or petition such a host would assemble to present.

  “To see you,” the seer repeats. “To look upon you.”

  Overnight, it seems, my stature has vaulted to the firmament. Hundreds line the lane, pressing so densely that my Pages must break a path simply for me to get through. “Alexander!” a man cries. At once the multitude takes it up. “Alexander! Alexander!” In such throat as I have never heard, even for Philip, my countrymen cry my name.

  “Extend your arms, lord,” Aristander urges. “Acknowledge the army.”

  I obey. Citations redouble.

  For days afterward, I cannot take the air without hundreds trailing me about in extraordinary demonstrations of devotion. When I query a soldier directly as to why he and the others follow me so, he answers as if it were the most obvious thing in the world: “To be sure you are all right, sire. To make certain you lack nothing.”

  Telamon observes this phenomenon with interest. When I convey to him my uneasy sense that the army does not adhere to me as myself but as something other, he replies, “Indeed, your daimon.”

  It is my daimon the men see, not me. It is he who has brought them victory, he to whom their hopes have become attached, and he whom they fear to lose. I must embrace this, Telamon declares, as a consequence of triumph and celebrity. “You have ceased to be Alexander,” he says, “and become ‘Alexander.’”

  The second anecdote is not a story really, only a moment.

  Soldiers are sad after victory. I don’t know why. A melancholy seems to descend in the aftercourse of success. This takes the whole army after the battle at the Granicus, but it strikes with particular force a cook of one mess named Admetus. This fellow is the most celebrated field chef of the army. His imagination rises to all occasions; he can always be counted upon, it seems, to concoct some dazzling dish out of nothing.

  After the slaughter, however, Admetus loses all spirit. Images of carnage torment his slumber; he cannot bring himself even to cut up a goose. An army can go sour over such a seemingly trifling matter. I summon the fellow to my tent, intending to buck up his spirits. Before I can speak, a groan of despair breaks from his breast. “What is that sound?” he wails. “By heaven’s tears, what is that horrible cry?”

  I hear nothing.

  “There, lord. Surely you must hear it!”

  Now I do. Outside the tent: a musical chord, sorrowfully keening.

  The entire company rises, Pages and Bodyguards together, and crosses to the portal to look outside. There, before the Guardsmen’s square, stands a brace of stacked arms. Twenty-four sarissas arrayed in upright order for the night.

  The wind piping across their shafts produces the mournful chord.

  The cook Admetus stands transfixed. We all do. It seems this melancholy keening will be the blow that cracks his heart.

  Observing this, one of the grooms, a lad we call “Underfoot,” approaches the cook and addresses him in the tenderest tone. “The sarissas are singing,” he declares.

  The cook turns to the groom with an expression of wonder, as if the lad has materialized for the sole purpose of ministering to his distress. “They sing, yes,” says the cook. “But why so sad?”

  The groom takes his fellow’s hand with exquisite solicitousness. “The sarissas know their work is war. They are sorry for this. They cry for the suffering they cause.” And he sings in a pure, clear tenor:

  The sarissa’s song is a sad song

  He pipes it soft and low.

  I would ply a gentler trade, says he,

  But war is all I know.

  Admetus absorbs this with profound thoughtfulness. The company holds, breathless as dawn.

  “Thank you,” the cook addresses the groom, and then, straightening, turns to me. “I’ll be all right now, sire.” And back he tramps to his stock and ladle.

  I am telling this story on campaign in Cappadocia—thirteen months after the battle at the Granicus—when a courier gallops up with the report that Memnon, besieging Mytilene, has fallen to a sudden fever. He is dead. I weep, not only out of respect for the brilliant Rhodian, though I feel that in abundance, but for the role of chance and luck in the affairs of men, and the knowledge of how tenuous is our hold, all of us, upon this thing we call life.

  The man I have feared most is gone. His worth was armies.

  This means, at last and for certain, that Darius must come forth and fight.

  Book Five

  CONTEMPT FOR DEATH

  Twelve

  MIGHTY WORKS

  IT IS THE MONTH OF Ksatriyas HERE IN INDIA, “Warrior’s Month.” I have taken a hunting party into the hills, partly for relief from the heat of the plains, but mostly just to gain a respite from the camp and her woes.

  The spring monsoons have begun. The river has risen three feet, a staggering amount (we can measure by the stone steps that descend from the waterfronts of the native villages), and has burst its banks, where the levees do not contain it, adding a sixteenth of a mile to its breadth. How will I get across now? The camp has had to be reconfigured twice, the siege train and heavy baggage moved to higher ground each time. More man-hours have been spent by the army throwing up dikes and digging drainage channels than in training for the coming assault.

  An outbreak of bottomland fever has hit the camp. The scourge strikes with utter randomness; no one knows what you catch it from, and no measure of medicine works against it. Its victims expire in a raving delirium. This is the kind of freak calamity that turns already-superstitious troops into chattering twits and drives otherwise-brave men to cluster in knots, gloomy and prey to every portent and prodigy.

  We have deserters now (so far, only of the mercenaries and foreign troops) but in numbers sufficient that I dare not fall-in the corps in its entirety, lest the men see how many are the gaps in formation. Can you grasp, Itanes, from what I have told you of Chaeronea and the Granicus, how unthinkable such a state would have been in this army a few years ago?

  But the gravest threat has come, again, from the company of Malcontents.

  Their numbers, as I have said, are about three hundred, mostly veterans of the phalanx, with a few disaffected Royal Guardsmen. I have segregated these grumblers as a physician quarantines the contagious. Now they approach me, requesting discharge as a unit. Their petition, presented through their new officers Matthias and Crow (who have been unable to squelch it), is proffered respectfully and according to custom. It cites the unit’s and individuals’ years of honorable service, their innumerable citations, and the losses they have sustained without complaint. Nor is it without precedent. I have released a number of allied and hired outfits by just this process. No Macedonian company has been let go, but only because none has asked. This is no joke. If a homegrown unit revolts, it will be the end of the army. I cannot sleep for fear of this, and my generals are in a state.

  Aggravating the case is a quirk in the corps’s configuration. My table of organization permits no staff officers at brigade level or lower. I want all my commanders to be fighting officers; I don’t want anyone the men don’t respect. The system makes each captain and colonel do double duty, handling administrative chores as well as training his unit and leading it in action. This has worked till now. As I am in my officers’ company constantly, at meals and in the field, the result is, I know everything that goes on in the army—what man has gotten a local girl pregnant; who feels neglected and passed over—and I can act upon this knowledge. But in recent campaigns, since Afghanistan, to be precise, an unwholesome change has come about. My officers now keep things from me. They withhold unsettling information, in fear for themselves of my fits of anger (which have gotten worse, I know, and for which I have myself alone to blame) and to protect the men under them. They dare not report a seditious outburst or an instance of disgruntlement, dreading my wrath.

  Hephaestion’s presence has until recently provided an avenue
of reparation. An officer with a petition, although reluctant to approach me personally, has always known he could speak with Hephaestion aside, and that he, at the proper moment, would relay the man’s concern to me. Now this channel has failed as well, as Hephaestion has been promoted to Parmenio’s post of Number Two and now appears, to the men, too exalted to approach. So I have lost my ears.

  There used to be no surprises in the army; I was on top of everything. Now irruptions burst forth fully blown. By the time I learn of trouble, it can be dealt with only by extreme measures.

  This hunt in the hills, thank heaven, has cleared our heads. The generals’ party is composed of Hephaestion and Craterus, Perdiccas and Ptolemy. About sixty attend them. Telamon and Eumenes head the private party, what we call “the King’s List.” We’re after black leopard. Several have been spotted outside the perimeter, driven down from the hills by the rains. The beaters’ party has scoured the mountain all day, without stumbling upon so much as a cross-eyed hare. A riotous chase breaks out just before sunset, involving a band of wild asses, which ends with several spills and a couple of cracked skulls, no harm done. We get nothing, the beasts being far too fleet on their home barrens, but the run has blown the croup out of our gorges and the fog out of our heads. Now, in grand fettle, we lounge around fires over a stew of bustard, shot by the cooks’ boys, with highland peas, Ismarian wine, and barley bread plucked steaming from the ground ovens.

  “I have decided,” I declare, “to divert the river.”

  Laughter greets this. My generals regard me as if I have made a felicitous jest.

  “It will be an undertaking,” I continue, “of monumental scale, involving every man and beast in the army.” I sign to Diades, the corps’s chief engineer, who built the massive siege works at Tyre and Gaza, and whom I have included this day in the King’s List. He rises and crosses to my side, carrying what my companions can clearly see are rolls of engineering plans and draftsman’s sketches. “My intention, gentlemen,” I say, “is not merely to turn the river into the plain to expire ignobly in swamp or slough, but to redirect it via stone earthworks in such a way as to make its new course permanent, and, by the way, provide us a dry passage to attack the foe.”

  My mates are not laughing now. To their credit, they already begin to grasp the vision.

  Diades speaks. He’s a sturdy fellow, bald as a hen’s egg, and, like all engineers, practical as a pensioner. He has examined the ground, he states, and believes the job can be done. “Where the river turns, above the camp, is an outrunner of impermeable shale from the Salt Range. A new channel can be excavated and carried west to the base of the hills; the land lies low there and will carry the river, or at least a substantial portion of it. As for labor, we have beyond fifty thousand in troops alone, with matching numbers of locals in service and the general crowd. The treasury holds gold without limit, to hire more strong backs. Of horses and mules, we have twenty thousand. We even have elephants.”

  The labor, he says, will be hard but require no special skill. It’s just digging and shoring. “Once we get the river’s head turned, its own force will drive the channel in the direction we have pointed it. It will do our work for us.” The engineer smiles at the council’s skeptical faces. “Because a thing has never been done, gentlemen, is no reason to say it cannot be. And, in my view, no reason not to try.”

  The idea has just enough madness to catch on.

  “Hard work is good for morale,” Ptolemy observes. “It’ll give the men something to bitch about instead of their troubles.”

  “I like it,” says Craterus. “It lets us attack the river, instead of the river attacking us.”

  Eumenes, my Counsel of War, cites a further advantage. “An army needs something grand to capture its imagination. In Pericles’ phrase,

  Mighty deeds and mighty works.”

  “And,” adds Perdiccas, “it’ll shut the Malcontents up.” He proposes assigning this company a prominent place in the dig. “If they malinger, the army will see it and their prestige will suffer; if they work hard, their state of mind will improve.”

  Hephaestion suggests competition to fire the men’s spirits. Assign divisions to parallel sectors; set prizes for the first to finish. “Or establish a quota for number of yards of earth moved in, say, six days. If an outfit finishes in five, it gets the extra day off.”

  Craterus proposes a grand prize for the overall. “Then the unit finishing six days’ work in five will elect to keep working, to hold the edge over its rivals.”

  I tell my mates I am thinking of sending to Ecbatana for money. The central treasury is there. One hundred eighty thousand talents of gold. I want to bring up thirty thousand, for pay and prizes and just for the heat of it. What do they think?

  Ptolemy embraces it. “It excites men when there’s big money in a camp.”

  “Better than women,” agrees Perdiccas.

  Craterus: “Because money buys women!”

  My generals approve. Massing money is like massing troops. It means power. It presages a forward push.

  I see our young officer, Crow, lean forward. He is mortified at his Malcontents’ petition for discharge; he will do anything to repair the confidence I have reposed in him.

  “Speak up, Lieutenant. Don’t be shy.”

  “I was thinking, sire, if you do send back for the gold, don’t announce it. Keep it secret.”

  That, all agree, will be impossible.

  “Exactly, my lord. Let the men find out by rumor. This will treble the power of publication, and will excite the fellows further, to believe that you have something bold and brilliant still to come.”

  “By Heracles,” declares Ptolemy, “give this man a step!” Meaning promote him to captain. Everyone laughs.

  I see Matthias too burns to contribute. “Anything else, gentlemen?”

  The older lieutenant suggests we send for sculptors, to carve images in the stone facings of the new channel. “Labor in this heat will be hell on the men, sire. Let them look up to noble likenesses in progress, and let them know that these will outlast them and memorialize their toil.

  Here men under Alexander turned this mighty river.”

  “And whose,” I ask, “shall these likenesses be?”

  “Your own, lord, of course. But more . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “The men. The men themselves.”

  A chorus of knuckle raps seconds this motion.

  “Each division of the army has its own distinctive kit. Let us have them, sire: the oryx horns of Bactria, the kestrel plumes of Sogdiana, our own lions and wolves, so that a man at the end of his labor may lift his eyes and say, ‘The grandchildren of my grandchildren will look one day upon what I and my mates have wrought.’”

  I approve. We all do. I commend Crow and Matthias; diverting the river was their idea.

  As for my own part, I say, here is what I will do. “I will strip and join in the labor. It inspires the men to see their king toiling at their shoulders. Who will not wish to boast, ‘I outshoveled Alexander!’ This will be better than medicine for me and the gods’ own tonic for the men. When one outfit surpasses another, I will shower the victors with bonuses and praise, and this will animate all other divisions to strive for excellence.”

  Craterus brings up how our enemy Porus will respond. Will he counter?

  I don’t care. “My quarrel is not with this king of India, but with our own men. We suffer a crisis of the spirit. If the corps possessed dynamis, we would need none of this. We would have crossed this river a month ago and be marching now to the Shore of Ocean and the Limits of the Earth.”

  All night we talk of this object. How much farther can it be? Beyond the Ganges, that we know. But how distant is that? No guide can tell us. I cannot overstate how this excites me. To stand where no man of the West has stood before! To behold that which none has seen! And forever to be the first!

  Do you think me vain or self-inflated? Consider: What has Almighty Zeus portioned ou
t for man, save this earth? Heaven He has kept for Himself. But this sphere here, beneath this sky, we mortals may roam with naught to hem us but our own will and imagination. Do you know what faculty I claim in myself as preeminent beyond all rivals? Not warcraft or conquest. Certainly not politics.

  Imagination.

  I can see Earth’s Limit. It shines before my inner eye like a city of crystal, though I know, when I reach there, it will be but a shingly strand beneath an alien sky. No matter. It is Earth’s Ultimate, of which not Heracles or Perseus have dreamt, but only I.

  What will I seize when at last I stand upon that shore? Nothing. I shall not even bend to pick up a stone or shell, but only clasp my mates’ hands and gaze with them upon the Eastern Ocean.

  That’s what I want.

  That’s all I want.

  Do you understand, Itanes? Beyond all titles and conquests, I am, in the end, just a boy, who wishes for nothing grander than to ramble with his friends and look out for what waits beyond the next hill.

  But this digression has carried us apart from our story. Let us return to the Granicus and its aftercourse.

  Thirteen

  KILL THE KING

  YOU HAVE ACCESS, ITANES, to the army daybooks for the months succeeding the battle of the Granicus. They list the cities of Asia Minor that came over or fell to us in the sequel. I gave the Greek states their freedom and exempted them from tribute. Caria is non-Greek; I restored her queen, Ada, and accepted this lady’s offer to adopt me as a son; I gave the Carians back their old laws, which the Persians had proscribed, and did not claim tribute as a conqueror but as a son. Lydia I set free, and Mysia, and both Phrygias, asking only the tribute exacted by Darius before me. One hundred and sixteen cities fell to us. We had started in early summer, to take the harvest as it came in; by the next spring, all Asia Minor from the Bosporus to Pamphylia was in our hands.