Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  Now let us consider the nature of these newly commissioned Persian spearmen, the King’s Own.

  These troops, we know from spies, are called Cardaces, a term in Persian which means “cadets” or “foot knights.” Clearly they are Darius’s generals’ attempt to remedy his gravest deficiency—lack of homegrown infantry who can stand up to our Macedonian phalanx. So far so good. I applaud the intention. But I reckon too the vanity, faction, and intrigue of courtiers surrounding the Great King. Will Darius’s grandees, configuring this new corps-at-arms, consult their hired Greek commanders, who possess true expertise? Never. To do so would constitute loss of face. The lordlings of the royal seat will evolve this novel arm entirely on their own.

  Close-order fighting is not a skill one masters in a day. Nor is it in the Persian national character. Asiatics are archers. The bow is their weapon, not the spear. Noble youths since before Cyrus the Great have been schooled “to draw the bow and speak the truth.” The fight at close quarters is not the Easterner’s style; he prefers to duel at range with missile weapons. Even the shields of the King’s Own, body-length wicker flats, are archers’ shields, meant to be set upright upon the earth, as mobile ramparts from behind which bowmen may launch their shafts. One cannot fight in close order with such a shield. And the foe’s disposition: Fifty deep is not a formation; it is a mob. A man in the rear is more afraid of being trampled by his own mates in flight than he is of the enemy. When the fore ranks buckle, the rear will sling their shields and run.

  I will charge Darius’s archers and his King’s Own at the head of my Companion Cavalry. This will be the dagger, thrusting to the heart of the bear. My phalanx in the center and Parmenio’s foot and horse on the left will hold off the paws.

  Rear of the Persian front is Darius’s camp. Another hundred thousand in sutlers, wives, whores, and the general crowd. When the foe bolts in terror, he will run onto his own men. The hills behind him are riven by ditches and ravines. Troops and horses will stampede; thousands will be trampled. Those who succeed in crossing the first range will find their flight impeded by their own baggage train. Unit cohesion will vanish. The military roads will become colossal jam-ups of men, horses, and vehicles. Our cavalry will pour onto the disordered foe. The enemy who stumbles will be lanced in the back; the man who turns will reap death from the front. Scores of thousands will end their lives here, yet only a tenth will be slain by us. The rest will kill themselves and one another. In the defiles, multitudes will expire of suffocation. Their mates will flee across a causeway of their broken bodies.

  All commanders have assembled on my colors now. I issue orders of battle; brigadiers spur back to their divisions. “Old friend,” I ask Parmenio, “can you hold the left?”

  “The sea shall bleed Persian purple.”

  I like this kind of talk. I gallop along the lines one last time, not to cry speeches (who can hear with the distance and the wind?), but to align the advance and to ride to individual commanders and heroes, acclaiming their exploits and calling them to glory. Citations roll down the line like waves. Cavalrymen call a horse “high” when its state of excitement reaches such a pitch as threatens to carry it away. I see this in mounts now and feel it beneath me in Bucephalus’s skimming, skittering stride. We can wait no longer. In moments I must give the order to step off.

  Suddenly from our rear breaks a solitary rider. The man appears from the shore road at the gallop, splits the seam between our leftmost infantry and cavalry, and drives out front for the center of our line.

  Every eye turns. The horseman is one of ours, alone, bearing a battle standard of the Companion Cavalry.

  Telamon: “What the hell is this?”

  The pennant is the crimson of Bottiaea.

  “It’s Payday!”

  We see now. The rider is Eugenides, who wept in my arms at Myriandrus, only hours past, mutilated by the Persians.

  The army goes rigid. Payday is three-quarters dead, barely able to hold his seat. “Get him back!” I command Philotas, who at once sends horsemen at the gallop.

  How can the mutilated man have come so far? He was already gravely wounded, at Issus, before the foe worked his horror on him two days past. Since then he has trekked on foot twenty miles to Myriandrus and now doubled the same track on horseback. As our Companions approach to retrieve him, his strength returns. He bolts into the clear. A cry ascends from the army.

  “Payday! Payday!”

  The man’s disfigured face has been concealed by his regimental scarf. Now, as our comrades close on him, he tears this garment free. The sight makes our fellows rein-in despite themselves. Payday shouts something to them. He raises his right arm, severed at the wrist, and elevates the battle standard in his left.

  I order all officers to their units at the gallop. I turn, myself, to spur to my post. I hear Telamon say, “There he goes.” I don’t need to look. The army again cries Payday’s name. Without waiting for my orders, the brigades begin to move.

  Sixteen

  THE BATTLE OF ISSUS

  THUS COMMENCES THE GREATEST SLAUGHTER in the history of warfare between East and West, and the most decisive victory, up to that point, of the army of Macedon over the myriads of Persia.

  Three battles are fought, each on separate sectors of the field, which on their own, would constitute struggles of epochal scale and complexity. Yet the seminal scheme is simplicity itself. Here. Let us sketch it on this table. What I want you to apprehend, Itanes, is the concept of effective strength. The enemy outnumbers us nearly five to one, yet where the action is decisive, we, not they, possess numerical superiority.

  On the wing against the sea, a desperate cavalry clash will rage for most of an hour. In the center, the brigades of our phalanx will endure terrible punishment, where the river bluffs rupture their order and Darius’s superb Greek heavy infantry falls upon them as they struggle to mount out of the stream. But on the right, where I attack with the Companion Cavalry, the foe breaks at first contact. His belly splits open, in great Aeschylus’s phrase, like

  the parting of the flesh beneath the whetted steel.

  The initial shock of my Companions is hurled at the seam between the Persian King’s Own and the light cavalry and skirmishers on their immediate left. Before these, on the near side of the Pinarus, the foe has arrayed Median archers—two thousand, as young Sathon has reported—in three divisions, one behind the other. The first gets off two shots, the second one, the third none at all, as their leading ranks, taking one glance at our squadrons thundering upon them boot-to-boot, turn in terror, dump their kit, and run. The mass plunges in wild disorder back through the river and crashes into the front ranks of the spearmen of the King’s Own. Before our first lance has drawn blood, the foe is in full flight.

  Our lead squadron is the Royal, in Dragon’s Teeth on the oblique, right leading. I take the first fifty; Cleitus the second; Philotas the fourth, meaning that wedge called “the anchor.” At my left shoulder rides Hephaestion; Telamon on the right; Love Locks right of him; with the agema of knights, my Bodyguard, forming the first three chevrons. Behind the Royal come the other seven squadrons of Companions.

  The enemy are fleeing as sheep do, in waves rolling outward from a longitudinal axis. We see nothing but backs, and shields and spears being flung. In the time it takes to count a hundred, the lead squadrons of Companion Cavalry have broken through the Persian front. We have eighteen hundred across the river now, with four squadrons of Royal Lancers—eight hundred more men—right behind, and a squadron of Paeonians in the train of that. The wedges come left behind the enemy’s front and spur toward Darius in the center.

  The distance to the king is seven hundred yards—a long way, nearly half a mile. I am certain that Darius does not know we have struck his line, let alone penetrated it; that he will not know until a dispatch rider reaches him, if indeed one ever does. The king’s attention is concentrated upon his right and his front, the sectors in which he hopes to produce victory. He is not yet aware
, I am convinced, that our blade has entered his belly.

  Now, my young friend, let us consider another element of dispositions in war: the line in defense.

  When divisions establish themselves in a defensive line, as those of the foe have here along the Pinarus, each must lay out not one but two positions: an initial defensive front, upon which it makes its stand, and a secondary post, to which it can withdraw in the event of being hard-pressed. The defenders cannot simply stack their reserves in infinite depth, lest panic in the front ranks be communicated immediately to the rear, with no interval of containing it. Thus the fallback position. This supplemental front must be close enough to the original—three or four hundred paces—that the division can retire to it swiftly and form up to resume the defense. At the same time, this reserve post must be far enough back that the retreating soldiers can put breathing space between themselves and their pursuers.

  This formation means two things for our squadrons of Companions as they break through the foe’s first defensive front and wheel left in column to dash across, behind it, toward the enemy’s center. First, it provides us an avenue—the space between the foe’s primary defensive front and his fallback position—down which we can charge. Second, it assures us that the ranks of the foe in deep reserve (respecting their forward fellows’ defensive order) will not flood into the gap to interdict us.

  Our squadrons are now, as I said, seven hundred yards from Darius. We will learn later from captured officers of the Babylonians and Medes, who manned the center of the foe’s secondary line, that they have indeed observed our breakthrough but have mistaken us for Darius’s own Royal Horse Guard, so unthinkable is it to them that enemy cavalry, meaning us, can have penetrated so many ranks so swiftly and in such numbers.

  Only one division of the foe comes forward to contest our transit, that of Mesopotamian Syria. It does so, we will discover later, not because its commanders have apprehended the danger and responded (they, like the Babylonians and Medes, cannot believe that we have broken through their densely stacked front), but because an unrelated order, misdirected and misdelivered, has commanded an unrelated division to come forward for an unrelated reason. In other words, a complete bung-up.

  Can you see the field, Itanes? Then let us add another concept to your education.

  Plates and seams.

  A plate is a front constituted of a unit under autonomous command. In other words, a section of the battle line—company, battalion, regiment—that is not divisible, that can move only as a unit. The larger the plate, the more unwieldy the formation.

  A seam is the boundary between plates.

  When our sarissa phalanx with the brigades of the Royal Guard advances on line, for example, its twelve thousand men appear to constitute a solid wall. In fact, the front is composed of nine autonomous brigades—six of the phalanx and three of the Guardsmen—each capable of independent action, and each subpartitioned into battalions, likewise competent. So that this single front contains thirty-six plates and thirty-five seams, each plate capable of acting on its own, if opportunity or peril so demands, without breaking the seam that unites it to the whole.

  This is our order. Now consider the foe’s.

  The Mesopotamians intercepting us are one plate with no seams. Their numbers are ten thousand (a lucky figure in Chaldean numerology) and they are under one commander, Darius’s brother-in-law Sisamenes, without captains beneath him authorized for independent action.

  Ten thousand in Mesopotamia is a hundred by a hundred. Can there be a more foot-bound formation? Further, the ground between them and us is split by rifts and ravines. The foe attempts to charge forward in his cumbersome mass. But the field confounds him. In addition, the Mesopotamians are archers—troops possessed of neither the arms nor the inclination to come to close quarters. I send three fifties at them as they struggle to mount out of a ravine, and these are enough to send the mob tumbling back down the face. The enemy has recognized us now. They launch at us from the floor of the rift and from the far side, but their shafts, flung uphill and into the wind, drop in our train as lightly as pine boughs in a breeze.

  Our squadrons are now three hundred yards from Darius. He is, at last, aware of our rush. So are his captains of the One Thousand and the Kinsman Cavalry, and so are the Greek officers commanding the mercenary infantry of his forward line.

  At this point, perhaps ten minutes into the fight, the six infantry brigades of the Macedonian phalanx have locked up with the enemy across the full fifteen hundred yards of the center. Amid the bluffs and brambles, Darius’s Greek infantry and those companies of the King’s Own who have not been stampeded by our Companions’ penetration (with those to the right of the Greeks) press down upon our foot regiments, producing grievous casualties among their ranks, whose order has been broken by the uneven ground, the river and palisades, and by the struggle to mount the steep, rocky bank. On the wing along the sea, twenty-five or thirty thousand superb Persian cavalry under Nabarzanes (with Arsames, Rheomithres, and Atizyes, who had fought so gallantly at the Granicus) are flinging themselves upon our allied and mercenary horse, reinforced by the eighteen hundred Thessalian heavy cavalry that I have dispatched at the last minute. Stiffening this front are our archers, Cretan and Macedonian, half the Agrianes, and all twenty thousand of our Thracian, allied Greek, and mercenary light infantry, fighting as hamippoi—that is, foot troops integrated with cavalry.

  I can see none of this from where I ride. It is clear, however, that this will be a brawl such as never has been seen, with horse and foot clashing along two thousand yards of strand, coastal wash, drift jams, and out into the sea itself. If Parmenio cannot hold our left, the foe will break through, wheel to the center in overwhelming numbers, and take our phalanx in flank and rear. The slaughter in the river will be catastrophic. And the Persians will break through. They are too many and too good.

  My thrust must break through first. The Companions must get to Darius in the center before Nabarzanes’ cavalry penetrates Parmenio on the wing.

  Hephaestion tells me later that I appear like a madman, pressing the attack on every quarter, and that my horse seems crazier than I. It does not feel that way. I feel lucid and contained. Each thrust I press has an object, and each is animated not by lust for glory, but by the knowledge that our countrymen of the left and center stand in terrible jeopardy, which can be relieved only by triumph here at the center, and by the certainty that victory—utter, spectacular victory—hangs only a lance thrust away.

  Darius’s post is on the rising ground behind the Pinarus, a hill shaped like an overturned shield. His royal chariot stands at its peak, its plumes and standard visible above the sea of horses’ headstalls and knights’ hoodlike cawls. The colors of every elite regiment cluster about him. Their numbers are a thousand five hundred. Ours are eighteen hundred.

  On this lone sector of the field, the forces of Macedon have, for the moment, achieved numerical superiority.

  It would make a better story to say that this stroke carries the day. In truth, the struggle around the king breaks down at once into a slugging match, within the press of which neither horsemanship nor unit tactics counts for an iron spit, but the brawl takes shape as an infantry battle on horseback, or, to draw an apter analogy, like certain naval engagements in confined straits or harbors, when the ships can gain no leeway to ram and so lock up hull-to-hull alongside the vessels of the foe, leaving it to the marines to fight it out on deck. The champions of Darius’s Royal Horse dare not charge upon us from their posts about the king for fear of leaving their lord vulnerable, and yet, holding stationary, as they clearly know, they might as well be sitting horses of wood. The knights of the East form up flank-to-flank, facing outboard like warships surrounded at sea. Our Companions plunge in, like triremes ramming an encircled fleet.

  Two champions of the foe stand out—Oxathres, Darius’s brother, and Tigranes, descendant of the famous Tigranes who followed Cyrus the Great. Neither is a specimen of heroic s
tature (both tall and slim, in the Persian ideal), nor do they fight as a tandem. Rather, each, as an individual, rallies fronts of the Kinsmen and the One Thousand into bulwarks, which not even our fiercest rush can penetrate. Now men and horses begin to fall in serious numbers. As at the Granicus, the superiority of the Macedonian long lance and the fore-and-aft bronze corselet proves decisive. Our men, wielding their weapons with both hands, work terrible execution upon the foe, who has been reduced to using javelins as lances, many of which had been shivered to stub ends, or else slashing with the saber (a hopelessly ineffective blow when not powered by the momentum of the gallop), protected only by their cloaks, which they have wadded up and wound about their left forearms to fend blows, and by their light linen jerkins, without helmets, only woolen head wraps, and small targeteer shields. The foe seeks to form ramparts of horses, massed flank-to-flank, while we assault singly and in wedges, thrusting our lances into the faces of the men and horses. Bucephalus is a monster, I have said, and here the push of his massive hindquarters breaks apart seam after seam of the foe. Many of the enemy fall to wounds of the throat and neck. I myself am stabbed through the thigh. I see one knight of the foe pitch from his mount, still slashing with his saber as blood shoots in surges from his severed carotid; others fall of lance thrusts driven through their windpipes or into the sockets of their eyes. Here, Black Cleitus and Philotas distinguish themselves. Philotas slays Megadates and Pharsines, half brothers of the king, while Cleitus hacks his way, it seems, through a fifth of Darius’s Royal Horse. Hephaestion, too, wins honors this day, and many are slain and disabled, horses and men, in that press where blows come at you from front, back, and both sides.