He is right, of course.
“Does it surprise you that they hate you, Alexander, whom you have deprived of liberty?”
I laugh. “I don’t know why I keep you around.”
“And if you freed these Greeks,” he asks, “would they love you then?”
I laugh again.
“Understand you are the earthquake, Alexander. You are fire on the mountain.”
“I am a man too.”
“No. You gave up that luxury when you stood before the nation in arms and accepted their call as sovereign.” It is a terrible thing to be a king, Telamon observes. “You think you will be different from those who went before you. But why? Necessity doesn’t change. You have enemies. You must act. You find yourself proceeding with the same brutality as kings have always, and for the same brutal reasons. One cannot be a philosopher and a warrior at the same time, as Parmenio has said. And one cannot be a man and a king.”
I ask Telamon what he would do with the perfidious ambassadors.
“Execute them. And not lose a minute’s sleep.”
“And the states of Greece?”
“Act toward them with consideration, as before. But send gold to Antipater for two more regiments.”
In the end I pardon the envoys. They are, after all, brave men and patriots. But I keep them with me, hostages for their countrymen’s good behavior.
What is more natural than to crave the good opinion of our fellows? We all wish to be loved. Perhaps the conqueror wants it more, even, than other men, for he seeks the adulation not only of his contemporaries but of posterity.
When I was eighteen, after the victory of Chaeronea, my father sent me with Antipater to Athens. We brought the ashes of those Athenians fallen in the battle and proffered the return without ransom of their prisoners—a noble gesture on Philip’s part, whose intent was to disarm both Athens’s terror and her antipathy. It worked. I became its beneficiary. I confess the celebrity went a little to my head. Then one night at a banquet, I overheard a remark accusing me of succeeding only by birth and luck. This sent my humor spiraling. Antipater saw and drew me aside.
“It seems to me, little old nephew”—he employed the Macedonian phrase of affection—“that you have elevated these Athenians as arbiters of your virtue. When in fact they are arbiters of nothing; they are just another petty state, consulting its own advantage. In the end, Alexander, your character and works will be judged not by Athenians, however illustrious their city may once have been, or by any of your contemporaries, but by history, which is to say by impartial, objective truth.”
Antipater was right.
From that day, I vowed never to squander a moment’s care over the good opinion of others. May they rot in hell. You have heard of my abstemiousness in matters of food and sex. Here is why: I punished myself. If I caught my thoughts straying to another’s opinion of me, I sent myself to bed without supper. As for women, I likewise permitted myself none. I missed no few meals, and no small pleasure, before I brought this vice under control—or believed I had.
Nineteen
MAXIMS OF WAR
YOU HAVE SPENT NINE MONTHS NOW, ITANES, as a Page in my service. Time to emerge from the womb, don’t you think?
Yes, you shall have your commission. You shall soon lead men in battle. Don’t grin so broadly! For my eye will be on you, as on every cadet who graduates from the academy of war that is my tent.
It has been your privilege, these months since your acceptance into the corps in Afghanistan, to attend upon commanders of such genius as warfare has seldom seen. The officers whose meat you carve and wine you pour—Hephaestion and Craterus, Perdiccas, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Coenus, Polyperchon, Lysimachus, not to say Parmenio, Philotas, and Nicanor, Antigonus One-Eye, and Antipater, whom you have not had the fortune of knowing—each stands in his own right with the great captains of history. Now I require of you the same fidelity I demand of them. You must incorporate the conventions and principles by which this army fights. Why? Because once battle is joined, I shall be where I can control nothing beyond the division immediately under my hand, and, in the inevitable chaos, will barely be able to direct even that. You must command on your own, my young lieutenant, but how you do so cannot be random or idiosyncratic; it must follow my thought and my will. That is why we talk here nightlong, my generals and I, and why you and the other Pages attend and listen. That is why we rehearse fundamentals over and over, until they become second nature to us all.
I have asked Eumenes, my Counsel of War, to make correspondence of mine available to you. Study these letters as if they were lessons in school, but hold this foremost in mind: The pupil may differ with his tutor, the cadet never. What I set in your hands this night is law. Follow it and no force can stand against you. Defy it and I will not need to settle with you, for the foe will already have done so.
On Philosophy of War
TO PTOLEMY, AT EPHESUS:
Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend makes them timorous. If I learn that an officer of mine has assumed a defensive posture in the field, that officer will never hold command under me again.
TO PTOLEMY, IN EGYPT:
When deliberating, think in campaigns and not battles; in wars and not campaigns; in ultimate conquest and not wars.
TO PERDICCAS, FROM TYRE:
Seek the decisive battle. What good does it do us to win ten scraps of no consequence if we lose the one that counts? I want to fight battles that decide the fate of empires.
TO SELEUCUS, IN EGYPT:
It is as important to win morally as to win militarily. By which I mean our victories must break the foe’s heart and tear from him all hope of contesting us again. I do not wish to fight war upon war, but by war to produce such a peace as will admit of no insurrection.
On Strategy and Campaign
TO COENUS, IN PALESTINE:
The object of campaign is to bring about a battle that will prove decisive. We feint; we maneuver; we provoke to one end: to compel the foe to face us in the field.
What I want is a battle, one great pitched clash in which Darius comes out to us in the flower of his might. Remember, our object is to break the will to resist, not only of the king’s soldiers, but of his peoples.
The subjects of the empire are the real audience of these events. They must be made to believe by the scale and decisiveness of our triumphs that no force on earth, however numerous or well generaled, can prevail against us.
TO PERDICCAS, AT GAZA:
The object of pursuit after victory is not only to prevent the enemy from re-forming in the instance (this goes without saying), but to burn such fear into his vitals that he will never think of re-forming again. Therefore, pursue by all means and don’t relent until hell or darkness compels you. The foe who has been a fugitive once will never be the same fighter again.
I would rather lose five hundred horses in a pursuit, if it prevents the enemy from re-forming, than to spare those horses, only to lose them—and five hundred more—in a second fight.
TO SELEUCUS, IN SYRIA:
As commanders, we must save our supreme ruthlessness for ourselves. Before we make any move in the face of the enemy, we must ask ourselves, free of vanity and self-deception, how the foe will counter. Unearth every stroke and have an answer for it. Even when you think you have thought of everything, there will be more work to do. Be merciless with yourself, for every careless act is paid for in our own blood and the blood of our countrymen.
On Generosity
TO PARMENIO, AFTER ISSUS:
Cyrus the Great sought to detach from his enemy disaffected elements of the latter’s forces, or others serving under compulsion. To this end he showed the Armenians and Hyrcanians honor and spared no measure to make their condition happier under his rule than under the Assyrian’s. In Cyrus’s view the purpose of victory was to prove more generous in gifts than the enemy. He felt
it the greatest shame to lack the means to requite the munificence of others; he always wished to give more than he received, and he amassed treasure with the understanding that he held it in trust, not for himself, but for his friends to call upon in need.
TO HEPHAESTION, ALSO AFTER ISSUS:
Make generosity our first option. If an enemy shows the least sign of accommodation, match him twice over.
Let us conduct ourselves in such a fashion that all nations wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.
On Tactics, Battles, and Soldiers
No advantage in war is greater than speed. To appear suddenly in strength where the enemy least expects you overawes him and throws him into consternation.
Great multitudes are not necessary. The optimal size of a fighting corps is that number that can march from one camp to another and arrive in one day. Any more are superfluous and only slow you down.
All tactics in conventional warfare seek to produce this single result: a breakthrough in the enemy line. This is as true of naval warfare as it is of war on land.
A static defensive line is always vulnerable. Once penetrated in force at any point, every other post on the line becomes moot. Its men cannot bring their arms to bear and, in fact, can do nothing except wait in impotence to be overrun by their own comrades fleeing in panic as our penetrating force rolls them up from the flank.
Be conservative until the crucial moment. Then strike with all the violence you possess.
Remember: We need win at only one point on the field, so long as that point is decisive.
Every battle is constituted of a number of sub-battles of differing degrees of consequence. I don’t care if we lose every sub-battle, so long as we win the one that counts.
We fight with a holding wing and an attacking wing. The purpose of the former is to paralyze in place, by its advance and its posture of threat, the enemy wing opposed to it. The purpose of the latter is to strike and penetrate.
We concentrate our force and hurl it with utmost violence upon one point in the enemy line.
I want to feel as if I hold a lightning bolt. By which I mean that blow, poised beneath my command, which when hurled against the enemy will break his line. As the boxer waits with patience for the moment to throw his knockout punch, the general holds his decisive strike poised, careful not to loose it too early or too late.
Don’t punch; counterpunch. The purpose of an initial evolution—a feint or draw—is to provoke the enemy into committing himself prematurely. Once he moves, we countermove.
We seek to create a breach in the enemy’s line, into which cavalry can charge.
The line soldier need remember only two things: Keep in ranks and never abandon his colors.
An officer must lead from the front. How can we ask our soldiers to risk death if we ourselves shrink from hazard?
War is academic only on the mapboard. In the field it is all emotion.
Leverage of position means the occupation of that site which compels the enemy to move. When we face an enemy marshaled in a defensive posture, our first thought must be: What post can we seize that will make him withdraw?
The officer’s charge is to control the emotion of the men under his command, neither letting them yield to fear, which will render them cowards, nor allowing them to give themselves over to rage, which will make them brutes.
Entering any territory, capture the wine stocks and breweries first. An army without spirits is prey to disgruntlement and insurrection.
Use forced marches to cross waterless territory. This minimizes suffering for the men and animals. For a march of two days, I have found it an excellent method to rest till nightfall before setting out, march all night, rest through the heat of the next day, then march again all night. By this scheme we compress two days’ marching into a day and a half, and, if we find ourselves still shy of our goal with the second day’s sun, it is easier for the men and horses to push on in daylight, knowing water and rest are near.
On Cavalry
The strength of cavalry is speed and shock. A static line of cavalry is no cavalry at all.
A horse must be a bit mad to be a good cavalry mount, and its rider must be completely so.
Cohesion of ranks, paramount with infantry, is even more crucial with cavalry. An enemy on foot may stand his ground against scattered horses of any number but never against mounted squadrons attacking boot-to-boot.
Cavalry need not work execution in the assault. Just break through. We can kill the enemy at leisure once we put him to flight.
It takes five years to train a trooper and ten to train his horse.
Green cavalry is worthless.
What I want in a cavalry mount is “push,” or, as the riding masters call it, “impulsion.”
The skills of mounted warfare require constant practice. Even a brief furlough can put a horse and rider “off their stuff,” until they regain their sharpness by a return to training.
A cavalryman’s horse should be smarter than he is. But the horse must never be allowed to know this.
Book Seven
AN INSTINCT FOR THE KILL
Twenty
COUNCILS OF WAR
IT TAKES DARIUS TWENTY-THREE MONTHS to raise another army after Issus. As with the first, he marshals and trains it at Babylon. This time I will go to him. This time we will duel beyond the Euphrates.
It is three years now since our army has crossed from Europe. The expeditionary force has appended to its conquests Phoenicia, both Hollow and Mesopotamian Syria, Tyre, Sidon, Gaza, Samaria, Palestine, and Egypt. I have become Defender of Yahweh, Sword of Baal, Pharaoh of the Nile. The sun priests have anointed me Child of Ra, Boatman of Osiris, son of Ammon. I embrace all honors, but especially the religious ones. They are worth armies. The Persians were blind, when they ruled Egypt, to insult the gods of the land. There is no surer way to make yourself hated; whereas to take up the native deities wins the people’s love, and at no cost. Heaven speaks with the same voice in Memphis and in Macedon; I despise the man, however learned, who does not grant this. God is God, in whatever form He chooses to appear. I worship Him as Zeus, Ammon, Jehovah, Apis, Baal; lion-limbed, jackal-headed, bearded, behorned; in the form of man, woman, sphinx, bull, and virgin. I believe in them all.
The king, my father taught me, is the people’s intercessor with heaven. He invokes the Creator’s blessing before the seed goes into the ground and proffers thanksgiving at harvest’s bounty. Before every army marches out, every vessel sails, every enterprise originates, he presides. At every crisis he entreats God’s counsel and interprets it. If the king is in favor with heaven, so is the kingdom. What miscreant is so perverse as to spurn the blessing of the Almighty?
Tyre and Gaza trusted in the strength of their fortifications and compelled me to besiege them. What a waste of blood and treasure! The lives of a hundred and ninety good men were squandered over six months in consequence of Tyrian stubbornness, and Gaza cost another thirty-six and a hundred and eleven days. The bastards nearly corked me twice, with a catapult bolt through my breast and a stone that nearly made powder of my skull. Had some malign god deprived them of their senses? Did they imagine that I would permit a state to command strategic ports in my rear, by which my enemies could assail me? Did they dream that I might pass benignly on, leaving their nation intact as an example to others that defiance of my will was the path to preservation? My envoys sought to make the leading men of Tyre and Gaza see reason; I dispatched letters beneath my own hand. I pledged to make their cities richer, freer, safer. Still they resisted. They compelled me to make examples of them.
What I abhor most about such obduracy is that it robs me of the occasion to be magnanimous. Do you understand? The enemy will not see chivalry. He obliges me to fight not as a knight but as a butcher—and for this he must pay with his own ruin.
The world we see is but a shadow, Itanes, an adumbration of the True World, the Invisible World, which resides beneath. What is this realm? No
t What Is, but What Will Be. The future. Necessity is the name we give to that mechanism by which the Infinite produces its works. The manifest arising out of the unmanifest. God reigns in both worlds. But He permits only His favorites to glimpse the world to come.
I felt at home in Egypt. I could happily have been a priest. In truth I am a warrior-priest, who marches where the Deity directs, in the service of Necessity and Fate. Nor is such a notion vain or self-infatuated. Consider: Persia’s time has passed. In the Invisible World, Darius’s empire has already fallen. Who am I, except the agent of that end, which already exists in the Other Realm and at whose birth I assist in this one?
At Antioch in Syria I held a great feast in honor of Zeus and the Muses. Ten thousand bullocks I sacrificed to the Olympians, to Heracles, Bellerophon, and all the gods and heroes of the East, beseeching their benediction for the enterprise to come.
The campaign of Gaugamela (or what would become the campaign of Gaugamela) would be by far the most complex of the war. When I called the Macedonians and allies together at the vizier’s palace in Antioch, I asked Parmenio to prepare a paper on the challenges the corps would face. I have it still. Here is the script he recited from:
“The advance into Mesopotamia will require a march of between six hundred and eight hundred miles, depending on the route, much of it across waterless desert. We will be separated from our bases on the coast and thus from resupply by sea. Everything we need, we must pack on our backs or wring from the country. Further, we advance now through ‘rough territories’ in which we have few agents or men in place.
Virtues of War Page 18