The Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  I split the corps into its five columns and fan out across the steppe. Even these wild Sacae and Massagetae have villages. Even they have sites of refuge where they winter. For six days we drive north across these badlands, trailing hoof strikes and wagon traces. My column takes the left wing, with Coenus’s, Hephaestion’s, Craterus’s, and Perdiccas’s spanning right. Our front is a hundred miles. My orders are to leave nothing living.

  At the seventh noon a rider gallops in from Coenus. Hephaestion’s column in the center, he reports, has come upon a broad trail—the foe remarshaling. Hephaestion has not waited for help, but driven in pursuit alone.

  It takes all day to cross the fifty miles to the trail. From ten we see smoke. At three we run onto foot troops of Coenus’s column; they report that his fast cavalry and Craterus’s have joined the clash initiated by Hephaestion. Spitamenes’ Scyths are in full flight north, on their runt ponies, bolting into the dark.

  “What’s that smoke?”

  “The Wolf’s camp.”

  My column enters at dusk. Telamon and Love Locks ride at my shoulder. The encampment is not one village but several, strung out for half a mile along a broad sandy wash beneath chalk bluffs. Every tent and wagon has been burned. The earth is black beneath a scouring of gale-driven snow.

  Entering, we can make out the site’s contours. It is a fine camp, Telamon observes. “Well wooded, good water, shielded by the bluffs. The Scyths probably use it every winter.”

  We can see the foe’s bodies now. Men of fighting age, cut down defending the camp. Their numbers are too many to count, but clearly the total is in hundreds. In the site’s center, a stockade of wagons—fifty or sixty—has been hastily thrown up. Behind this the enemy’s women and children have taken shelter. It requires scant imagination to reconstruct the massacre.

  Hephaestion, arriving on site first and knowing that the other Macedonian commanders would be judging him when they caught up, has taken against the foe the sternest possible measures. We can see where the enemy has flung together his ring of wagons, and where Hephaestion’s men have piled timber and dry brush and set it alight. The wind has done the rest. We can make out, too, places around the circle where individuals of the foe, women and children mostly, driven to desperation, have bolted clear and been cut down by our spears and javelins.

  Craterus’s column, right of Hephaestion’s, must have arrived not long before ours. We can see Craterus himself now, on foot amid a crowd of Macedonians. He is clapping someone’s back in congratulation. We can’t hear his speech—we’re too far away—but clearly it is something in the way of “Outstanding! That’s more like it!”

  The man he is acclaiming is Hephaestion.

  We skirt the blackened ring of wagons. In such a conflagration, the slain are not burned to death, but asphyxiated; the holocaust sucks the wind out of their breasts, suffocating them. They are already dead by the time the flames consume their flesh. This knowledge makes no less grisly, however, the sight of infants blackened like charcoal or mothers incinerated to skeletons of ash.

  I approach the circle around Hephaestion. Like Craterus, he has not yet seen me. But I see him. Upon his face sits such an expression of woe as I would give everything I own never to have seen.

  He sees me now and brings himself under control. He speaks nothing of the massacre, this night or the next. But two evenings subsequent, in camp on the trek back to Maracanda, he and Craterus clash violently.

  No one, since the corps marched out from Macedon, has ever applied anything but the loftiest moral purpose to our campaign. Now Hephaestion denounces this, declaring our cause “wicked” and “unholy.”

  Craterus replies at once and with anger. “There is no right or wrong in warfare, Hephaestion, only victor and vanquished. It is because you have no belly for this truth,” he declares, “that you are not a soldier and never will be.”

  “If being a soldier means being like you, then I choose to be anything other.”

  I command them both to break off. But the rivalry between them has built up over a decade. Neither can live with it any longer.

  “All actions of war are legitimate,” Craterus proclaims, “if they are taken in the service of victory.”

  “All actions? Including massacres of women and children?”

  “Such retribution,” declares Craterus, “the foe brings upon himself—”

  “How convenient for you!”

  “—brings upon himself, I say, by his defiance of our will and his refusal to see reason. Such slaughters are committed by the foe’s hand, not ours.”

  Hephaestion only smiles, his lips declining in articulation of despair.

  “No, my friend,” he says after a moment, addressing not Craterus alone but me and all the company, and himself as well. “It is our hands that drive the sword into their breast, and our hands, stained with their innocent blood, that can never be made clean.”

  We reach Maracanda on the ninth day. I inter Cleitus’s corpse with what little simulacrum of honor can be mustered. It is the nadir of the war, for me and for the army.

  My estrangement from Hephaestion, though more painful than ever, has evolved to that state, at least, in which he and I can address each other with absolute candor. When, again alone with me, he declares this campaign “odious,” I cite great Pericles of Athens, who, speaking of his city’s empire, stated that

  it may have been wrong for us to take it, but now that we have it, it is certainly dangerous for us to let it go.

  “Ah!” my mate replies, “then you admit the possibility that this Butcher’s War—and we who prosecute it—may be wicked and unjust.”

  I smile at his clever turn. “If we are wicked, my friend, then Almighty Zeus Himself has founded our iniquity. For He and no other has established the imperative of conquest within our hearts. Not in mine alone, or yours, but in every man in this army and in all the armies of the earth.” I indicate the bronze of Zeus Hetaireios upon my writing stand. “Plead your case not to me, Hephaestion, but to Him.”

  That night I make up my mind. I will end this campaign of massacre, before it destroys us all, and remarshal the corps to cross into India.

  We must have a good war.

  We must have a war with honor.

  Book Nine

  LOVE FOR ONE’S ENEMY

  Thirty- Three

  THE NAKED WISE MEN

  A SECOND MONSOON FLOOD HAS SWEPT THE CAMP. Tents have been carried off with all their tackle; every lane is mud. The site is on elevated ground and drains swiftly, but the men’s state of mind remains foul and one cannot even train but every hour must be spent in repair of equipment and rehabilitation of the corps. The Indian heat remains stupefying. In the wet, the men’s feet go to rot; horses’ hooves swell and turn tender. The rain is warm as piss, but you cannot stand under it; it descends in volumes unimaginable. Only the bullocks and elephants can bear it, enduring with the patience of the East.

  At the river’s edge stand two villages, Oxila and Adaspila. These have incorporated themselves into the city which is our camp, including their women and children and their milk cows, who do, respectively, the army’s laundry and supply its curds and cheese.

  Also integrated into our sphere have become the gymnosophists, the “naked wise men” of India. One sees them at dawn descending to the river, where they bathe and chant. At dusk they return and set tiny lighted lamps, made of a leaf, oil, and a wick, adrift upon the current. It is a sight of great charm. Scores of these fellows tenant the camp (infest is Craterus’s word). They are of all ages, youths to ancients, burnt black by the sun, and slender as stalks. I have feared that our fellows would prove haughty with them, kicking them out of the public way as they did the inhabitants of Babylon, but the opposite has transpired; our Macedonians have adopted these sadhus as patriarchs, and this affection has been returned by the sages, who regard our rough corps with an amused and patient beneficence.

  We dine this evening, my officers and I, on a terrace of te
ak overlooking the river. The talk is of an incident earlier today. My party had been crossing that quadrant of the camp that abuts Oxila village. One of my Pages, a bright lad named Agathon, was striding ahead to clear the lane, when he came upon a troupe of gymnosophists taking the sun in the public way. These declined to vacate for my passage. An altercation broke out between the boy and several vendors, who took up the cudgels on the renunciants’ behalf. A crowd gathered. By the time I arrived, a full-blown incident was in progress. The nut of the quarrel was this: Who was more worthy to possess the right-of-way—Alexander or the gymnosophists? As I reined-in, Agathon stood in spirited exchange with the eldest of the wise men. Indicating me, the lad declared, “This man has conquered the world! What have you done?” The philosopher replied without an instant’s hesitation, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”

  I laughed with delight. At once our party yielded. I asked the sage what I could do for him, declaring that he could name any boon and I would grant it. “That fruit in your hand,” he said. I was holding a fine ripe pear. When I gave it to him, he handed it, to eat, to a boy at his side.

  Next day I hold a review of the army. Such inspections are invaluable to reinspirit demoralized troops. The fellows grumble mightily over the work to get ready, but once in formation, when they behold the scale and order of the army and the brilliance of its kit, their hearts cannot but be lifted to feel themselves part of such an illustrious corps. The sight does me good too. At home I would take three hours to complete the review, but in this heat, even a third of that will drop a man faint. So I make it quick and permit the companies to stand easy.

  It is a far different army from the one that embarked from Europe eight years ago, or departed Afghanistan one season past. On the left wing, our brilliant Thessalian cavalry is gone, granted discharge at Ecbatana. In their stead we have free Afghan, Scythian, and Bactrian cohorts. Such tribesmen cannot be trained to fight like Europeans, but with their tattooed faces and panther skin–bedecked ponies, they add a dash of color and savagery. Tigranes’ Successors’ Cavalry, all-Persian but trained to Macedonian tactics, have joined us at Zadracarta. Andromachus’s mercenary cavalry remains, though their commander has fallen, massacred by Spitamenes on the River Polytimenus. My archers are now Median and Indian, not Macedonian, and my lancers Parthian and Massagetae. The only units unaltered are Sitalces’ Thracian darters (though Sitalces himself remains in Media, his son Sadocus taking his command) and the javelineers of Agriania. Replacements appear each spring like the hyacinth; I have sons, and even grandsons, of my originals, serving with distinction equal to their fathers’.

  The core of the line remains the brigades of the phalanx (seven now in India, instead of six), though even these are no longer all-Macedonian; some companies are less than half homegrowns. New commanders abound—Alcetas, Antigenes, White Cleitus, Tauron, Gorgias, Peithon, Cassander, Nearchus, and others. At Zariaspa in Afghanistan, 21,600 reinforcements caught up from Greece and Macedonia. These and other units, including Patron’s Greek mercenaries and six thousand Royal Syrian Lancers under Asclepiodorus, comprise the bulk of my light infantry. I have Daan horse archers now, who once fought under the Grey Wolf, and six thousand Royal Taxilean foot bowmen. Cleander’s vet mercs are still with me, though Cleander himself remains at Ecbatana. Black Cleitus dead, I have taken the Royal Squadron as my own (with the Anthemiot, Amphipolitan, and Bottiaean), calling it the agema of the Companions. I muster the Companion Cavalry in regiments now, composed of two squadrons each, and have brought its numbers from eighteen hundred to above four thousand, including numerous Persians, Medians, Lydians, Syrians, and Cappadocians.

  Is there dissension? Macedonians comprise now only two-fifths of the corps; they bitterly resent the Asiatic units I have brought in, particularly the Persians, who cannot, the Macedonians point out, even pronounce my name. I am “Iskander” to them. That I am charmed by this infuriates my countrymen, and the more senior the man, the more violent his agitation. I have twelve thousand youths of Egypt and forty thousand Persians in training with the sarissa right now in their home provinces; the Macedonians, though they never cease griping at their own pay and posting, cannot endure the thought of being replaced by foreigners.

  I come now to the Malcontents. Their station in the review is as a seam unit between the Royal Guardsmen and Perdiccas’s brigade of the phalanx. They look sharp, I admit. What a shame that I must stick them here, between units of unimpeachable loyalty, to hold them, if not by love, then by iron.

  To inspire enthusiasm among the corps, I have formed new units, with new names and new colors. The most celebrated is the Silver Shields. This division was constituted at first only of the agema of the Royal Guardsmen; soon I extended it to all three Guard regiments and have enlarged it further since then to include veterans of the phalanx who have distinguished themselves in the campaign against Spitamenes. The rivets of their shields and breastplates are real silver, by weight six months’ pay, though the tale is untrue that men pare shavings and spend them as specie.

  New units. Native officers. These are the tricks the commander must conjure to “feed the monster,” the army’s never-satiated appetite for recognition, honor, and novelty. But even these are not enough. Now, on the evening terrace after the review, my officers wrangle over the feigned river crossings and sham embarkations I insist we make each night to wear out Porus’s sentries by the repetition of false alarms. Thessalus, the famous actor, has come out from Athens. He is fascinated by life with the army. It’s just like the theater!

  “As you employ counterfeit evolutions, Alexander, to prevent the enemy from discerning your true designs, so does the dramatist. He starts his play, making much, say, of a crisis in the life of a king, seducing us by such theatrics into believing that the tale is about ambition, shall we say, or honor or greed. Only at the climax do we realize that this has all been a false front; the play’s true theme is the working out of an individual’s destiny beneath his own hand. And when this strikes us at the finish, it arrives with the emotional equivalent of one of your celebrated cavalry charges. The dramatist may have peopled his play with oracles and portents, prodigies and divine interventions; still, we in the audience come to see that the protagonist’s choices alone have made him who he is and brought him to his end. This is tragedy. For which of us can rise above what he is? Tragedy is the arrest of a man by his own nature. He is blind to it. He cannot transcend it. If he could, it would not be tragedy. And tragedy’s power derives from our own realization, commoner as well as king, that life truly is like that. We have fashioned our ruin with our own hands. All, perhaps, save these gymnosophists, who seem to seek ruin first, only to flourish in its midst!”

  The party laughs and applauds. All but Hephaestion, who has become attached to these sages of India and is distressed to hear their labors dismissed with condescension. He defends them.

  “These are not barbarians, Thessalus. They are not slavish, as the Babylonians, or idolatrous, as the men of Egypt. Their philosophy is ancient, profound, and subtle. It is a warrior philosophy. In my inquiries I have only scratched its surface, but it has impressed me deeply. Contrary to your assertion, my friend, I declare that these sadhus have indeed risen above who they are. For surely they were not born to the state in which we now discover them, but have arrived at it only after many trials and much labor.”

  Laughter and profane jibes salute this; Hephaestion bears these with good humor. It is a source of great joy to me to see him restored to grace, now that the army has moved on from Afghanistan, both in his eyes and mine, and in those of the company. Telamon looks on, as gratified as I.

  “What are these yogis seeking,” Hephaestion continues, “by their voluntary poverty and renunciation? They aspire, I believe, to locate their persons in God. They seek to see the world as the Deity sees it and to act toward it as He acts. They assay this not in arrogance, but humility. Don’t scoff, gentlemen. Consider our friend Thessalus’s analogy of the
playwright. The dramatist is the god of his own play; each character is a creature of his imagination. And though the vision of these players is limited to their own self-interest, the playwright can and must ‘see the whole field.’ As he has empathy for all his characters, even the villains (or he could not write their parts), so must the Almighty look upon us and our world. This is the state, I believe, to which the gymnosophists aspire. Not callous indifference, but benevolent impartiality. The yogi seeks to love the wicked as well as the just, recognizing in each a brother soul on its journey through benightedness.”

  A chorus of knuckle raps approves this. Now Ptolemy summons Telamon to speak, recounting that he has seen the mercenary interview several of these ascetics. “In truth, our Arcadian seems more like one of these mendicants than one of us! For although he accepts pay for his labor at arms and never tires of testifying to the virtue of this, I notice he is always dead broke and gives away everything he gets as soon as he gets it.” He calls Telamon to give us a speech.

  “On what subject?”

  “The Code of the Mercenary.”

  Gales of hilarity salute this. We have all heard it so often. When Telamon declines, Love Locks rises in his stead and, taking up a posture modeled impeccably on the Arcadian’s, clasping his beard exactly after Telamon’s fashion, mimics the mercenary’s speech so exactly that the group, in delight, rains coins upon him and nearly drowns his speech with laughter.

  “I do not serve money; I make money serve me. At campaign’s close, I care for neither praise nor condemnation. I want money. I want to be paid. In that way, war is just work. I am not attached to it. Campaigning for money detaches me from the object of my commander’s desire. I serve for the serving only, fight for the fighting only, tramp for the tramping only.”