Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  After the Granicus I forbade looting. The army had crossed to Asia as a force of liberation; no act of pillage must sully its standing in this light. The spoils we took came from Darius’s treasuries in the cities we set free.

  The needs of the army came first, beasts before men, for without horses and asses and mules, the corps can strike no faster than we can run and bear forward nothing more than we can load on our backs. Next, gold to shore up supply lines to the rear; ships and ports; communications with Antipater’s garrison force in Greece and Macedonia; depots and magazines for the coming advance; money to bribe enemies, cash to aid friends, fees for our benefactors, bribes for forward spies and men in place; gifts and remissions for new allies, games and sacrifices for old. The men must be given time and means to carouse; they have earned it. To those newly married, I grant furlough and send them home—six hundred men, including Coenus, Love Locks, Payday. Let them spend the winter months bundled beside their brides, to return in spring, knowing they have an heir on the way.

  Now the army’s wages and, with both hands, their bonuses. I spend more time on this than any occupation save reconnaissance and forward supply. It is imperative that spoils be distributed equitably. Let no brave man go uncited and no coward unscourged. Letters of commendation. At Sardis in Lydia, where the army lays over to consolidate its initial advance, I employ no fewer than forty secretaries, toiling in shifts, to whom I dictate correspondence. It is my object to know the name and exploits of every man in the army. I can’t of course, but I will put names to thirty and forty new faces a day. Buckets of treasure come in, golden cups and goblets of silver; I turn them at once to him who has bled in our country’s cause. If I can, I set the gift in the man’s hand myself; if not, it comes with my compliments in writing, something the man can send home with pride to father and mother, or hold in safekeeping for his wife and child. The wine is superb along the Aegean coast; when a batch pleases me, I save out a portion and send it to an officer I wish to honor, with a note saying Alexander has enjoyed this wine with his friends and wishes him to share it with his own.

  I never let the men see me sleep. I rise before they wake and remain at work when they go to their slumber. When they drink, I drink with them; when they dance, I dance too. If I remain late at wine, I rise on steady legs and let my officers see it. When the sun blazes, I endure its heat without complaint; I sleep on the ground on campaign and on a plain cot in camp, and when we move across open country I train as we go, racing on foot and on horseback. Of treasure, let my countrymen see I take none for myself, save articles of honor—a horse or a fine piece of armor—but set all at their service and the service of our goal.

  Darius.

  The Lord of Asia remains in Babylon, eight hundred miles east. Shall we go after him or let him come to us? Where shall we meet? When? With what forces?

  In my country we have a game called Kill the King. It is played by two sides of boys on horseback, on a field with a goal line at each end. The lad with the ball is King. He tries to dash across the enemy’s goal; his mates defend him. When the King falls, his side loses.

  The grand designs for the war against Persia is no more complicated than that.

  Kill the King.

  Night after night as we advance down the coast, my generals and I crowd round the map table, poring over charts and reconnaissance reports, harvest projections, dispatches from forward agents and men in place. Craterus is my most aggressive commander; he wants to strike at once for the interior, for Babylon and Susa, where Darius holds his treasure and almost certainly will marshal his next army. “Get to him now,” Craterus urges, “before he can raise a multitude so vast we can’t hope to contest it.”

  Parmenio leads the Old Guard. He too fears an iron-to-iron clash against an army of millions. “Let us not tempt heaven, Alexander, but be content with the conquests Almighty Zeus has granted us. No European army has even dreamt of holding the lands we do. If Darius offers concessions, take them.”

  Nightly the factions clash, till the hour comes for me to set them still. I have learned from my father; I wait for an occasion, in this case Parmenio’s Naming Day, which we in Macedon celebrate as Greeks do birthdays, when the senior general will feel most honored—and be most conscious of the passing years. I hold till midnight. Wine and meat have made us mellow. I make no show of royal prerogative, but speak as a soldier only, to soldiers like myself.

  “Gentlemen, in campaigning against Darius we must not lose sight of this fundamental truth: Our foe rules not a nation but an empire. His allies are not friends but subject states. He rules them by might indeed, but more by a kind of myth: the fiction of his own invincibility.

  “We war, my friends, not with the King but with this myth.

  “Do I fear Darius’s millions? Never. Let him bring half of Asia if he will. The more troops he crowds upon the field, the more he encumbers himself with superfluous arms and the greater the burden he places upon his commanders and his corps of supply. My father taught me this and I believe it: Scale of arms is worthless beyond that number of men who can march from one camp to another and arrive in one day. That is our army. Forty-odd thousand, no more. Let Darius spread his multitudes from horizon to horizon; when we strike at his heart with speed and power, the mob will flee like so many hares.

  “Craterus, my friend, and you other young officers, to you I say: We will not rush into the interior, however tempting such a bold strike may appear. If we march on Babylon while Darius’s myth holds intact, the city will resist; we will find ourselves besieging a fortress whose circuit walls are forty miles round and a hundred and fifty feet high. But if we defeat the king in the field, Babylon’s gates will open to us on their own.

  “Remember, to capture dirt means nothing while the king’s myth endures.

  “Nor, gentlemen, may we seek to steal Darius’s realm by ruse or cunning. Let us bring his army into the field, not before it is ready, and not constituted of hastily assembled or inferior troops. Rather, let his force come in its fullest preparedness, flush with Asia’s finest men. Where the king is in person, I will strike. Where his mightiest champions stand, you will attack. Then, with our victory, not only does the Lord of the East fall but also the legend that sustains him.

  “No, Parmenio, we will not settle for a fingerhold at the margins of Darius’s empire. We will take it all. Persepolis is only halfway. My aim is to seize every province that Persia ever held, even India, and press on to Ocean’s Shore at the Ends of the Earth. I will suffer no negotiations with Darius and accept no accommodation short of unconditional surrender.”

  Bold business plays best, and grand aims fire men’s hearts. Hephaestion is with me, as are Craterus, Ptolemy, and Perdiccas. Seleucus and Philotas warm to the notion fast. Only those who have cut their teeth under Philip—Parmenio, Meleager, and Amyntas Andromenes (Antigonus One-Eye I have posted to Phrygia as governor)—fear such confidence is self-deceiving. I will speak to each in private. I will grant them concessions, give steps to their favorites, gift them whatever they want to bring them over, till they are with me buckle-and-strap. If they won’t come, I’ll get rid of them. Yes, even Parmenio.

  “Have you heard, my friends, how a crocodile devours a bullock? He starts at the feet and eats his way up to the heart. This is how we shall flush Darius. We’ll gulp down his empire, one state at a time. We won’t rush. We’ll take the seaport cities, cutting off the foe’s fleet from her harbors and naval bases. We’ll advance from no territory until our rear is secure and our lines of supply solid and unbroken. Let the Persian come to us. Let him stretch from his home ground, not us from ours.”

  For months after the battle of the Granicus, we paint-in blank spots on the map, shoring up posts and consolidating gains. We train. We rehearse. We build new roads and repair old ones. With spring, our newlyweds return from furlough. With them come thirty-two hundred reinforcements of infantry and five hundred of horse. The people at home are ecstatic at our success. I have loaded C
oenus, Payday, and Love Locks with gold for recruitment bonuses; instead they have had to fight off volunteers in hundreds, so intoxicating is the prospect of riches and adventure in the East. All winter we have fought in Phrygia and Cappadocia, across the Halys and along the spine of the Taurus. The enemy are hill tribes mostly, wild free fellows who value liberty before life. I love them. What do I want from them? Only their friendship. When at last they believe this, they come in trailing gift colts and bridles of gold.

  My eye remains on Darius. The king toils at Babylon, every report tells, raising and training a second army. I have set Hephaestion to run our agents and spies. He briefs me once a day, and the council every five. He gives this report at Gordium in Phrygia:

  “The Persians have no standing army as such, beyond Darius’s Kinsman Cavalry, six thousand, including the knights of the One Thousand Families, and the king’s Household Guard, the ten thousand Immortals. The force he is raising now to contest us must be assembled contingent by contingent from the provinces of the empire, the easternmost of which are a thousand miles from Persepolis and even farther from Babylon. It will take months for his governors to raise this levy and months more to muster it in one place. Then the multitude must be armed and trained.

  “Clearly Darius will not stand pat after the debacle of the Granicus. He will rethink armament and tactics. The command will be his own. With him now, our agents report, are Arsames, Rheomithres, and Atizyes, who fought against us at the Granicus and will pass up no occasion to apprise the king of amendments and correctives. Darius has called to his court Tigranes, the most celebrated cavalry commander of Asia, and his own brother Oxathres, a great champion over six and a half feet tall, as well as the royal kinsmen Nabarzanes, Datis, Masistes, Megabates, Autophradates, Tissamenes, Phrataphernes, Datames, and Orontobates—who commanded with Memnon at Halicarnassus—all of whom are renowned for valor and horsemanship and all of whom bring, from the hereditary retainers of their provinces, powerful contingents of cavalry. Darius has also summoned to Babylon Mentor’s son Thymondas, who, spies inform us, has fast-marched from the foe’s naval base at Tripolis in Syria, bringing between ten and fifteen thousand Greek marines and hired infantry from the fleet. The king has with him as well Memnon’s lads Agathon and Xenocrates, with eight thousand mercenaries of the Peloponnese, and the Greek captains Glaucus of Aetolia and Patron of Phocis, who are not only outstanding commanders of heavy infantry but have drawn to their colors, so all reports confirm, another ten thousand hired Greeks, crack troops, the kind who can stand up to our phalanx. So: thirty to thirty-five thousand heavy infantry against our twenty.

  “Among Darius’s courtiers are also numerous renegades of Greece and our own country, who work for the overthrow of Macedon and are intimately familiar with our arms and tactics. Darius too has agents, down to tent whores and laundry urchins, who track and infiltrate our camp; we may be sure that every word, even those uttered in sleep, finds its way to the ears of the foe.”

  When will Darius move? Where? With how many?

  I offer his weight in silver to the man who brings this intelligence. When report comes, at Ancyra on the edge of the Salt Desert, it arrives not from spies or deserters but from Darius himself, in the form of a command requisition, captured by our scouts from a courier on the Royal Road. The instrument is addressed to Barzanes, governor of Mesopotamian Syria; it commands him to have waiting for the Army of the Empire, when it arrives in six months (meaning this fall), two hundred thousand amphorae of wine, fifty thousand sheep, forty thousand bushels of barley, with matching quantities of wheat, sesame, and millet, and enough water and forage, dry and green, to supply the needs of sixty thousand horses, asses, and camels. The letter specifies that a sufficient number of muker ovens, the round-bellied clay type, be either on-site or ready for fabrication, as well as four hundred thousand feet of rope for tents and pickets, a hundred thousand palisade stakes, and six thousand hoes and mattocks for the ditching of the camp, the raising of ramparts, and the excavation of latrines. For the royal precinct, the letter commands a site on rising ground, shaded by trees and watered by a stream from whose upper course no cup has been dipped before the king’s; the area of the camp to be eight acres, raked and groomed, with an adjacent eleven for a baggage park and for picketing the animals. Darius also wishes from the governor eleven thousand pack animals, with their muleteers, dispatched at once to Babylon.

  What convinces me of the dispatch’s authenticity are the accommodations commanded for the royal party.

  When the Persian king travels to war, he is accompanied by a baggage train a mile and a half long. That’s not for the army; that’s for him. His own personal stuff. He brings his wives and mother. His hairdresser accompanies him, and his cosmetician. The king brings everything that is dear to him, including his pet panther and his talking macaw; he brings busts of his ancestors, favorite pillows and books; he has flautists and timbrel players, pipers and kitharists. His entire household accompanies him, including seers and magi, physicians and scribes, porters, bakers, cooks, cupbearers, bathroom attendants, butlers, waiters, masseurs, chamberlains. His concubines come, not all three hundred sixty-five as he keeps at home, but a field version of this harem, each mistress with her own handmaidens, attendants, and beauty doctors. The Great King has his own crown-plaiters, pot-boilers, cheese-makers, drink-mixers, wine-strainers, stewards and butlers and perfumers. He has a man to carry his looking glass and a man to tweeze his eyebrows. This does not count the host of scribes and eunuchs who are the royal administrators, paymasters, poets.

  This tent in which we now sit belonged to Darius; we captured it after Issus. Its original version is absolutely enormous. I have feasted six hundred in it; in Bactria we put the flaps up and exercised horses in it. When I acquired it, it came with forty skilled men, just to set it up and take it down. We divided it in quarters after Drangiana (making over the rest for a hospital and barrack tents) and now use a quarter of a quarter. Even that fraction suffices as billet for half my Pages, their refectory and infirmary, offices of the Royal Academy, my own quarters, with space left over for the duty watch of the Guard, two map rooms, a library, the staff briefing area, and this salon, which used to be the king’s seraglio, where we talk and drink.

  Packing this tent, Darius and his army marched from Babylon to Syria, seeking to bring me to battle. And I, overconfident and too eager to meet him, enacted the grossest blunder of my career.

  Fourteen

  THE PILLAR OF JONAH

  THE BAY OF ISSUS IS A NOTCH IN THE SEABOARD of Asia Minor, at the elbow in Cilicia, where the coastline turns from facing south to facing west. South over the mountains lie Syria and her capital, Damascus; then Phoenicia and Palestine, Arabia and Egypt. East by the Royal Road awaits the breadbasket of the empire—Mesopotamia, the “Land Between the Rivers,” the Tigris and Euphrates, and the imperial cities of Babylon and Susa.

  The seaboard plain of Cilicia is enclosed by two rugged mountain ranges, the Taurus to the north and east, the Amanus to the south and east. The passes across the Taurus out of the north are called the Cilician Gates. This is a wagon road, so steep in places that a mule’s asshole will open up and whistle, so mightily must the beast strain to haul its load, and so narrow in parts, the locals say, that four men abreast who start up as strangers will reach the other side as very good friends. The Persian governor Arsames has been commanded by Darius to hold the heights, but, striking swiftly with the Royal Guardsmen and the Agrianians, I get round and above and drive him out without a fight. We descend to the sprawling and prosperous city of Tarsus, set in the midst of a gorgeous plain bounded by mountains and sea and lush with every kind of fruit, vine, and grain. We capture the ports of Soli and Magarsus, to deny haven to the enemy fleet, and seize the cities of the plain, Adana and Mallus on the Pyramus. It is at the latter that the first reliable intelligence comes in, reporting the sighting of Darius’s army.

  The Persian multitude is five days east, at Sochi, on the
Syrian side of the Amanus mountains. Their camp is sited in the Amuq plain, a broad and flat expanse, ideal for the deployment of cavalry (in which Darius outnumbers us five to one), with abundant grain and forage and resupply from Antioch, Aleppo, and Damascus. The foe will not be prized from such a site with a lever. He won’t come to us. We have to go to him.

  Now you must understand something, Itanes. The narrative of a battle is invariably recounted with a clarity, particularly a geographic clarity, which is seldom present in the event. One advances, the sergeants say, by two guides: Guesswork and Rumor. We fast-march to Issus, at the pocket of the bay. The mountains loom to the east; Darius waits, just fifteen miles away, on the far side. But how to get there?

  When a great army passes through a region, it draws the locals from miles. An army has money. An army brings excitement. In every country Macedonians are called “Macks.” “Oyeh, Mack!” the natives bawl, grinning gap-toothed as they trot at the heels of the column. Every knave has something to peddle: live fowl, onions, firewood. “You need guide, Mack?” Every jack and jasper claims to know the shortcut to sweet water and forage. His brother-in-law serves with the Persians, he swears; he can tell us where Darius sleeps and what he had for breakfast. I do not scorn these fellows. From them we learn of the passes at Kara Kapu and Obanda, of the track via the Pillar of Jonah, and, last, the Syrian Gates below Myriandrus, which will deliver us over the Amanus onto Darius’s doorstep. Our forward elements seize these, all but the final. Seeking foot-by-foot intelligence of this last ladder into Syria, I interrogate in person over a hundred locals and go over with our own scouts every goat track and runnel by which the army can get to Darius or he can get to us.

  Yet not one tells me of the Lion’s Pass over the Amanus.

  Mark this, my young friend. Sear it into your soul with brands of iron: Never, never take anything for granted. Never believe you know, so that you cease to probe and query.