Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  “Numbers. We must see to the feeding and maintenance of forty-seven thousand combatants and all their gear, plus sixty-seven hundred primary mounts and eleven thousand remounts. Baggage animals will number above fifteen thousand. In addition, the army has acquired a multitude of dependents—wives and mistresses, children, in-laws; we pack even grandmothers these days. Drinking water will present a predicament even when we have reached the Euphrates, for I hate to trust our guts to piss driven over silt, which is what that river is. Heat and sun will be worse. In summer, all reports confirm, the plains north of Babylon are fit only for creatures born with fangs or scales. The country has swallowed armies. Yet we must fight in the heat, because of the harvest dates. Leaving the seacoast in spring, we take the early wheat and barley with us; arriving in Mesopotamia in late summer, we take the second crop, milk-ripe if we’re ahead of schedule, fully headed if we dawdle. That is, if Darius has not garnered or torched it, in which case we shall fight in hell on empty bellies.

  “Babylon lies above the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, both great rivers, unfordable at any point within a hundred miles of the city. One or both must be bridged. This will be no mean feat in the face of an army exceeding a million. The country along the Euphrates is dense with crops; canals and irrigation works will block us at every turn. The plain beyond is featureless waste. Wander a mile from camp and we’ll never see you again. Darius has summoned to Babylon every fighting nation of his empire. Infantry and cavalry of those eastern provinces absent at Issus—Scythians, Areians, Parthians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Indians—have joined Darius’s army now and are training at Babylon as we speak. This is the breadbasket of his empire; he will defend it with everything he’s got. The plains north on which he aims to fight us are broad and treeless, ideal for old-fashioned Asiatic warfare. The enemy will employ scythe-bearing chariots, mailed cataphracts, perhaps even war elephants. And he will be recruiting from horse tribesmen of the East—Daans and Massagetae, Sacae and Afghans and Arachosians—whose limitless grasslands produce war stock without number. The provinces of Media and Hyrcania alone can bring forty thousand horse, I am told, and the steppe satrapies beyond are even richer in this resource.”

  Parmenio concludes his presentation and sits. The hall, which is roofed in cedar and columned in alabaster, falls tomb-silent.

  “Craterus, cheer us up!”

  Craterus’s assignment is forward supply. He cites the cities, towns, and villages by which we must pass and what native agents have been contracted with for supplies and forage, guides, pack animals, water. Depots have been established at intervals between Damascus and Thapsacus, where we will cross the Euphrates. Beyond there, we must live off the land. Craterus brings forward exiles from Darius, traders, caravan runners, mountain tribesmen. They describe the country through which we must trek. Most of us have heard it already. But I want my officers to hear it again in one another’s company. I want them to take it in as a corps.

  “What about wine?” Ptolemy asks.

  This is the first laugh. Love Locks has that duty. His agents have identified breweries of rice and date palm beer; estate vineyards and “pockmarks,” local stills that produce a liquor made from pistachios and palm sap; vile but drinkable in a pinch. He will capture them all, Love Locks vows, and, by Zeus, suck them dry on his own, if we don’t catch him first. A chorus of good-natured derision assails him.

  How much cash do we have? From Damascus, twenty thousand talents of gold; from Tyre, Gaza, and Jerusalem, another fifteen thousand; Egypt, eight thousand. From the cities of the seaboard, six thousand more.

  This is fifty times the pot we had when we set out, but still not a tenth of what Darius holds and will use against us.

  “How hot is the Euphrates Valley?” “How swift is the Tigris?” “How many are the enemy?” Each general has his sphere of responsibility. Each has his aides and adjutants; often it is they who do the answering.

  I don’t believe these councils accomplish much in the instant; we’ve heard it all before and will hear it a hundred times more in a hundred other caucuses. But I want my officers to see one another and hear one another speak. Particularly the mercenaries and allies, who understandably feel less central to the expedition than the Macedonians.

  This army, as all armies, is riven by faction and jealousy—of infantry, the Old Guard, Philip’s contemporaries, who feel resentment toward the New Men, my age; the Companion Cavalry of Old Macedon, raised by Philip, mistrust those of New, favored, they fear, by me. Then the Greek infantry serving under compulsion, whom nobody trusts, and their cousins, the mercenary foot, who keep to themselves, so no one knows what they think. The allied and hired horse are suspect because, being mounted, they can bolt any time they want; next the Thracians and Odrysians who barely even speak Greek; the crack Thessalian Heavy Horse, haughty to all save the Companions, from whom they demand respect, which is not always given; the javelineers and peltasts of Thrace and Agriania; the Old Mercenaries, who came over with us from Europe, hard as horn; the young bucks, who burn for action, perhaps too brightly; the foreigners and late arrivals; Armenians and Cappadocians; Syrians and Egyptians; renegades of Cilicia and Phoenicia who have joined since Issus; the Greek mercenaries who served originally under Darius; not to mention the Paeonian and Illyrian horsemen and the new infantry of the Peloponnese. Let them hear one another. Let them look in one another’s eyes. I tilt the council’s tenor toward magnification of the foe; it knits our bickering camps.

  Parmenio is our father; there is comfort in his encyclopedic knowledge and exhaustive preparation. Ptolemy is razor-keen; he can sell you anything. Our best soldier is Craterus, and most profane; his speeches are spare as a Spartan’s. The men love him. Perdiccas’s ambition is as naked as his arrogance, but he knows his game; Seleucus excels all in physical courage; Coenus in cunning; while Hephaestion is a knight out of Homer. I speak little myself. I learned this from my father.

  I nod to Lysimachus, say, or Simmias, indicating that I wish him to speak to the subject at hand. I love to feature junior officers, particularly those with whom the company is unfamiliar. One Angelis, a route engineer, describes a type of pontoon bridge he and his men have been developing. It relies not on pilings or claw anchors (the first burdensome, the second unreliable) but employs wicker crates filled with stones. He has tested it at the Orontes and the Jordan, rivers with silt-bottomed channels like the Tigris and Euphrates; he believes he can span a thousand feet in a day and a night and put across not just men but horses. “Heavy pile drivers needn’t be borne across country by the baggage train; we can cut planks and cables on-site of local materials, which reports confirm to be abundant, and we don’t even need to carry the anchors, but they too can be cobbled together on the spot.”

  I call Menidas to speak, colonel of the mercenary cavalry, and Aretes of the Royal Lancers. Few know these men, though they come of noble Macedonian stock, as both are recent and untried replacements for well-loved commanders. Yet our fate will ride on their will and grit. When Menidas falters in his speech, unaccustomed to addressing so illustrious a body, I cross from my place and settle in the chair at his side. Together we field questions; I pour wine for his parched throat. He finds his voice. Craterus names him a “dark hand,” slang for a prodigy who lays low out of cunning. The tent responds with a roar. I clap Menidas’s shoulder. He will be fine.

  Midnight comes and goes. I call for a late supper. Confident as we are, the numbers are still staggering against us. We are fifty thousand; the foe may be a million. Of course such a figure is ludicrous, as it tallies in every trollop and laundry urchin; still, we will face conscript infantry five times our total and cavalry outnumbering us even more. As the conclave breaks, Craterus gives speech to the fear on every man’s mind. “Of devices that the enemy may employ, Alexander, which concerns you most?”

  I reply that I have only one dread: “That Darius will flee and not face us in battle.”

  The pavilion erupts.

&nb
sp; At Marathus in Hollow Syria, a letter has arrived from Darius. In it, he offers me his empire west of the river Halys (a second letter extends this to the Euphrates) with ten thousand talents of gold; he will give me the hand of his daughter, he says, and asks that I return to him his wife and son and mother, whom we have captured after Issus.

  I reply:

  Your ancestors invaded my country and worked grievous harm to Greeks and Macedonians, though we had previously done nothing to them. My father was assassinated by agents in your employ, as you yourself have boasted in correspondence published before all the world. You bribe my allies to make war on me, conspire with my friends for my murder. You started this war, not I.

  I have vanquished in the field first those you sent against me, then you yourself and all your army. Therefore, do not address me as invader, but as conqueror. If you want anything, come to me. Ask for your mother, your wife and children; you shall have them, and whatever else you can persuade me to give. But send to me not as an equal, but as your king, and the Lord of Asia. And if you contest this, then stand your ground and fight and do not run away, for I will follow you wherever you go.

  When I write that I will give Darius whatever he asks if he but come to me, I mean it. I feel no rancor toward the man. I respect him. I would make him my friend and ally. He can have anything but his empire. That is mine, and I will take it.

  Twenty- One

  THE ADVANCE INTO MESOPOTAMIA

  Anabasis IS A MILITARY WORD. It means a “march to the Interior.” In early summer, three years after the army’s crossing to Asia, our anabasis seeking Darius begins.

  The corps departs Tyre on the seacoast on a raw blustery dawn, making for Thapsacus, where we intend to cross the Euphrates. I have sent Hephaestion ahead with two squadrons of Companion Cavalry, fifteen hundred allied infantry, half the archers and Agrianians, and all seven hundred of Menidas’s mercenary horse. He is to seize the city and throw two spans across the river, whose breadth is eight hundred yards at that point.

  Tyre to Thapsacus is two hundred fifty miles. Hephaestion will arrive by midsummer and set to work; our main body should catch up at the season’s scorching peak. From Thapsacus to Babylon is another four hundred and fifty miles, by the Royal Road down the Euphrates. In the heat at that season, the corps cannot be expected to average more than fifteen miles a day. Certainly I intend to push it no harder. So: middle to late fall. We will face Darius then.

  I have selected Hephaestion for the work at Thapsacus, and not Craterus or another, on the chance of intrigue. Darius and his staff will reckon that site as my likely first objective; the king is certain to send a strong detachment north from Babylon to keep an eye on me or even to contest my crossing. There may be a chance, if we are clever, to bring the commander of this division over to our side, if not now, then later. Hephaestion will throw his bridges nine-tenths of the way across the river and hold up till our main army arrives. The Persians will shout insults from the farther bank, in Greek if their numbers include hired infantry, which they will. Who better than Hephaestion to turn this occasion to our advantage? I have authorized him to make any deal he can with the Persian commander. If none can be struck in the moment, Hephaestion is to communicate to the officer that Alexander watches him, and he is a man (meaning me) who knows how to reward an act of friendship.

  Our main body’s route of march, departing from the coast ten days after Hephaestion, is inland via Damascus. I have commanded the provincial governor to produce on-site every armorer and swordsmith of Hollow and Rough Syria with all their tools and wares. The army lays over five days, giving the soldiers time to refit their kit for the coming fight. Damascus’s market is called the Terik, “pigeon.” These birds are considered gods by the Syrians; they flock in numbers uncountable and are as self-satisfied as cats.

  A prodigy occurs in the marketplace. One of our sergeants, seeking his dinner, snatches a roosting terik and, ignorant of local reverence, wrings its neck. The quarter erupts; in moments, hundreds mob the square, shrieking in outrage. The mart, as I said, is an arsenal of armorers’ and swordsmiths’ shops; our fellow and his mates find themselves hemmed by armed Damascenes, howling for their blood. A general riot looms, ready to wreck the entire expedition. Suddenly the pigeon stirs in our man’s hand. It is alive! The sergeant opens his fingers; the bird wings safely away. A thousand Syrians drop onto their faces, worshiping heaven.

  Damascus to Homs is a six-day trek of ninety miles. A column on the march is always prey to portent and rumor. The men are bored; they gossip like housedames. What of the incident in the marketplace? Is the pigeon Darius? Will he flutter free of Alexander’s grasp? Or is the sergeant our army, preserved from slaughter by a miracle?

  A two-day march of thirty miles brings us to Hamah; then five days, seventy miles, to Aleppo. On route a message arrives from Hephaestion ahead at Thapsacus: Arimmas, my appointee as governor of Mesopotamian Syria, has failed to provide the forward magazines of grain and feed the corps will need for the advance beyond the Euphrates. My first impulse is to make an example of him, but Hephaestion, anticipating this in his dispatch, requests clemency for the fellow. The scale of the enterprise has overwhelmed Arimmas; his failing is incapacity, not treachery, for which I must share the blame, elevating him to an office beyond his gifts. I remove him and send him home. Pasturage, fortunately, is abundant where we camp now, in the Orontes valley; a call to Antioch for muleteers brings in seventeen hundred. I put the whole army to work. We load up and move out.

  We are advancing east now, into the empire. An alteration takes place in the men’s demeanor. I am riding beside Telamon, on the wing of the column, when I sense the revolution.

  “Can you feel it?”

  He acknowledges. “Fear.”

  Each mile now carries the army farther from territory we have conquered, farther from our bases on the sea. We enter the foe’s domain, his stronghold. The men glance over their shoulders despite themselves, toward the road receding behind them, thinking how far it stretches from supply and safety.

  Fifteen thousand reinforcements were supposed to arrive at Tripolis on the coast. Are they vital to our success? No. But their nonappearance, first at Damascus, then at Homs, now at Aleppo, sends a shudder of evil luck through the column. How can the commander counter? Here is something the instructors of war do not teach: the art of confronting the irrational, of disarming the groundless and the unknown.

  We as officers debate our routes and strategies. What we forget is that the men do the same. They are not stupid. They see the country change; they know what they’re marching into. In their tents and around their cook fires, they chew over every fresh piece of intelligence. We in the command post have our sources; the corporals and private soldiers have theirs too. Daylong they interrogate the natives tracking the column, the rabble of the towns we pass through, the whores and sutlers of the general crowd, and, of course, one another. A racehorse cannot gallop the column’s length faster than the newest rumor or the freshest fear.

  Two stages on, at Dura Na, the column comes upon a site where Darius’s army encamped eighteen months ago, in its advance toward what became the battle of Issus. Army junk spreads everywhere; you can see the lanes and latrines and the great square entrenchment whose breastworks, studded with palisade stakes and wicker hurdles, are still being stripped by the locals for firewood. On such military highways, one comes often upon the camps of vanished armies. I make it a point never to overnight on them. It’s bad luck. And, in this case, I don’t want the men to be unnerved by how small our force is alongside Darius’s (we will fill only a fifth of the space the foe’s host encamped on).

  But our fellows see it. How can they not? I feel their stride change. They mutter now. How many thousands did the Persians have in this camp? How many more when we face them next? I trot alongside the column.

  “Brothers, will you give me five more miles before we camp?”

  Let us stretch past the foe’s fort. Let the me
n see how strong our pace is, so they boast that our army makes two camps where the glue-footed Persian makes three.

  But fear dogs the column. In camp that night an incident occurs involving a fearsome weapon our soldiers have never seen.

  In any army there are resourceful fellows who can scrounge up treasure from a hill of dung. Two of ours are sergeants of the phalanx, called by the men “Patch” and “Repatch,” for their habit of forbidding their mates to throw anything away. Their prize this time: a Persian scythed chariot.

  Apparently a local bandit made off with the machine during Darius’s advance a year and a half ago; Patch and Repatch, nosing about, have got wind of its existence and, publishing a reward among the natives, have enticed the outlaw to bring it in.

  The chariot sets off a sensation. Our fellows throng about it.

  “By Zeus, how’d you like to stand up to that iron . . .”

  “I’d sooner shave with it.”

  “Take a look, mates. You’ll be hiking on your knees after that runs over you.”

  Wicked-looking blades extend from both axles of the chariot; others are mounted on the frame and the front of the yoke pole. The bandit claims that Darius had a hundred of these “cutters” when he marched against us eighteen months ago, but he left them here, on this side of the mountains, believing the terrain in Cilicia too rough to permit their use. That’s why we didn’t see them at Issus. Our fellows collect about the chariot now, conjuring the havoc five score of these machines would wreak, driven at the gallop into a massed formation. Our sergeant Patch voices the prevailing sentiment: “Let’s have a few hundred of these bastards on our side!”

  Another curiosity brought in by the locals are the “crow’s feet,” with which Darius had intended to sow the floor of that earlier battlefield against our cavalry—and which he no doubt will use on this coming one. These devices are made of four iron spikes yoked at a single axis. Any way you strew them, one spike always points straight up.