Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  From Dura Na a three-day march of forty-five miles brings the army to Thapsacus on the Euphrates. The date is 2 Hecatombeion, high summer. A pall of smoke hangs above the plain beyond the river, where forward parties of Persian cavalry are scorching the earth. Darius, we learn, continues augmenting his forces at Babylon, between four and five hundred miles south. His army now totals one million two hundred thousand.

  A multitude of such scale, however preposterous in fact or unworkable in action, cannot fail to strike terror into the breasts of those who believe they must face it. Crossing camp on foot, I come upon our friend Gunnysack, hunkered in the dust with a score of comrades, drawing schemes with a stick.

  “Are you an artist too, Sergeant?”

  He is sketching a line of over a million men. How wide a front? How deep? Can such a host be possible?

  “Sire, are we really going up against so many?”

  “Maybe more, if you count whores and scullery lads.”

  “And are you not afraid, sire?”

  “I would be—if I were Darius and had to face us.”

  The Persian has sent two mounted brigades north ahead of his army, one of three thousand under his cousin Satropates, another of six thousand under Mazaeus, governor of Babylonia. Their assignment is to devastate the country into which we advance and to contest all river crossings. We learn this from Hephaestion, who has, as I had hoped, parleyed with Mazaeus personally.

  Mazaeus is an interesting fellow. He is something of a gangster. A Persian and adherent of the royal house, he has governed provinces for thirty years—first in Cilicia alone, then as supreme satrap of Phoenicia, Cilicia, and both Syrias. He received his warrant of appointment to Babylonia not from Darius but from his predecessor, Artaxerxes Ochus. Darius wished to remove him upon his accession, so the popular account declares, but Mazaeus had in the course of his tenure insinuated himself so powerfully into that peculiar Babylonian underworld called ashtara, “the Code,” that he could not be ousted without bringing down the entire regional economy.

  Mazaeus is the richest private individual in the empire; his breeding stable contains eight hundred stallions and sixteen thousand mares. He is said to have fathered a thousand sons. But what marks him out is his openhandedness to the people. The grandest secular feast of the Babylonian year is the Mazaeid, at which its host provides meat for tens of thousands and distributes grain in such quantities that families live on the issue all year long. Mazaeus is fat. His mounts are draft horses, not cavalry ponies. And he is not above poking fun at himself. At his festival each year, it is said, he takes the choral stage dressed as a woman and warbles in such a convincing key that none can pick him out from the real thing.

  Withdrawing before our force, Mazaeus has let us take several prisoners. These confirm Darius’s army at one million two hundred thousand. Hephaestion throws a pontoon bridge across the last uncompleted span; we cross in five days. I rest the army four days in the plain while we bring up the siege train and the heavy baggage.

  A decision must be made on which route to take to Babylon. Shall we march south, directly down the Euphrates, or cross east to the Tigris and turn south from there? I call a council.

  The foe’s vast numbers dominate all talk. The army prattles of nothing else, and even my generals are spooked and anxious. Old feuds surface. Tempers grow short; mates snap testily at one another.

  How is one to command? By consensus of his subordinates? Listen indeed. Weigh and evaluate. Then decide yourself. Are you stumped at the crossroads? Pick one way and don’t look back. Nothing is worse than indecision. Be wrong, but be wrong decisively. Can you please your constituents? Never let me hear that word! The men are never happy with anything. The march is always too long, the way always too rough. What works with them? Hardship. Give your men something that can’t be done, not something that can. Then place yourself at first hazard. The Spartan commander Lysander made the distinction between boldness and courage. We must have both. The audacity to conceive the strike and the belly to carry it out.

  All that being said, how does one make decisions? By rationality? My tutor Aristotle could classify the world, but couldn’t find his way to the village square. One must dive deeper than reason. The Thracians of Bithynia trust no decision unless they make it drunk. They know something we don’t. A lion never makes a bad decision. Is he guided by reason? Is an eagle “rational”?

  Rationality is superstition by another name.

  Go deep, my friend. Touch the daimon. Do I believe in signs and omens? I believe in the Unseen. I believe in the Unmanifest, the Yet To Be. Great commanders do not temper their measures to What Is; they bring forth What May Be.

  Twenty- Two

  SWIFT AS AN ARROW

  WE MARCH EAST TOWARD THE TIGRIS.

  Sound military considerations dictate this, but in truth I have made the decision based on a dream. The god Fear appears to me in the guise of a panther. The beast is so black, he seems made of night. I track him in the dark. In the dream it seems imperative that I overhaul the panther and learn what he has to tell me. I have no torch and no weapon; I advance, gripped with dread that I will stumble into him in the dark and be torn apart. I awake trembling.

  We have two Egyptian seers with the army, as well as our own diviner Aristander. I sound them separately. The Egyptians both say the panther is Darius. Both dismiss my unease as based on our present deficiency of reconnaissance; our scouts have lost contact with the Persian army. The dream indicates no more than this understandable care.

  Aristander makes no interpretation of the panther. Without hesitation he asks, “In which direction did the beast’s tracks lead?”

  We march east.

  The beast is not Darius. The beast is Fear.

  It is two hundred ninety-six miles from Thapsacus to the Tigris. Why this route? My commanders have expected the other, south down the Euphrates valley. That way is clearly the easier, straight on the Royal Road, a month or month and a half to Babylon—the same route Cyrus the Younger took when he fought his brother, Artaxerxes II, at Cunaxa. The Euphrates flows at our shoulder; forage is abundant from irrigated fields; supplies can be barged downstream from country we’ve already overrun.

  But Darius wants me to approach this way. Otherwise why has he sent Mazaeus with so weak a force to contest me? Why have him and Satropates withdraw after such feeble passes at torching the earth?

  The foe means me to take the Euphrates route. He baits me to do so. No doubt his engineers have prepared battle sites along the course, on the several plains that are ideal for his grand army. His supply base is there, at Babylon; he has prime roads and the river and canals to bring up men and gear.

  I can’t take that way. Down the Royal Road we pass through the hottest part of the country—an irrigated corridor between scorching deserts. The network of canals makes natural strongpoints. The enemy can flood fields to check our advance or lay ambushes to assault us from the flanks. The grain is already in; only stubble remains. To get at the harvest we’ll have to besiege walled cities. Liquor? The only spirits we’ll have will be those we pack. And the heat. We’ll lose one man in five trekking down that griddle, not to mention the horses, and those not felled by the sun will succumb to the stinking river water. I have fifteen thousand reinforcements on the march from home; if I bolt south down the Euphrates, they won’t get here till it’s too late. Take another, slower route, and there’s a chance they’ll catch up.

  But what decides all is strategic. To take the Euphrates road gives the foe no incentive to move. Darius will simply wait at Babylon, on fields he has groomed for our slaughter, strewing his crow’s feet and smoothing the fairways down which his scythed chariots will thunder.

  I go east instead of south. Away from Babylon, into the foothills of the Armenian Taurus. Hephaestion’s cavalry chase Mazaeus’s scouts off our tail. Let Darius lose sight of me. Let him wonder, Where is Alexander?

  Our column follows the High Line, the old military highway. It
’s cooler at altitude; grass is still green, not burnt to straw as in the plains. Harvested grain is held in unwalled villages; we take it with ease. And we drink sweet water from the mountains. Can Darius cut off our rear? That’s a risk. But to do so, he must detach from his main body a force powerful enough to withstand our whole army (for it may be my design to lure just such a corps north to its slaughter) and he can’t take that chance, not out of contact with his base across hundreds of miles.

  Let the foe fidget at Babylon, wondering where I have gone. Let him stew over which way I approach. Let his ambitious generals plague him. Let him chair councils of war, where overkeen officers urge audacious moves and aggressive pushes. Nothing is harder in war than to stand fast. Darius will not have the patience for it, not after losing and running at Issus. Nor will his restless levy of horse warriors permit him such luxury. He will leave Babylon. He will come north, seeking me. This is what I want. For every mile he puts between himself and his depot is another mile for things to go wrong and events to run queer.

  Meanwhile I will take my time. Subdue my flanks and rear. Give my reinforcements the chance to catch up. I will graze my cavalry mounts on green grass and water my pack animals from mountain streams. My foragers will shear the country and my troops will drill. If it takes till winter to fight, so be it. I have to feed only fifty thousand; Darius is plagued by a million and more.

  That is the plan anyway, until scouts gallop in on the twenty-first day with reports that Darius has departed Babylon. He has crossed the Tigris, our riders declare, and is pushing north, hard, with all his force, to put the river—tigris in Persian means “arrow,” for the swiftness of its current—between him and us as a line of defense. We are over a hundred twenty miles from the nearest crossing when this intelligence arrives. I strip the march force of everything but its arms. See the daybooks for our pace. Twenty-seven miles, thirty-one, thirty, thirty-four; we strike the ford in four days and cross while Darius is still a hundred miles south. No army in history has covered so much ground so fast.

  But the pace has taken the sap out of us. Fording the Tigris proves a near fiasco, as the water crests breast-high on the men, moving fast as a galloping horse. We string four lines of cavalry across the ford, two above, two below, and rope them in place, while the infantry crosses in the middle. The upper cordons break the river’s rush, a little, while the lower form a living wall to catch men and weapons swept away. It takes forty-eight harrowing hours for the corps to cross. The men are beyond exhaustion and are prey, now more than ever, to rumor and fear.

  Enemy cavalry is burning the country ahead of us. The earth is ash for miles; dense clouds block the sun. At night flares stud the horizon. It is the landscape of my dream.

  Omens and portents abound. Every raven in the sky, every serpent in the dust is fodder for the men’s superstitious conjecture. Let a fellow cry out in his sleep; half the camp is thrown into hysteria. A she-goat births a kid with three horns; this presages death, say the cook-fire prophets. Scouts seeking water find a pool, which, struck by the sun, ignites to flame. Has no one heard of naphtha? It becomes a full-time chore for our seers: concocting affirmative interpretations of crackpot prodigies.

  Dread has infected us. Irrational, inexplicable, inexpungible. I double the number of forward scouts and triple their bounties. The siege train catches up, with the gear we set down to make speed. Our young engineer Angelis gets a pontoon span across the Tigris, barely, and we hurry the heavy baggage across.

  Where is the enemy?

  Deserters from his camp begin appearing. Scouts bring them in, bound and blindfolded—disgruntled mercenaries on stolen horses, sutlers cheated of their wares, women who have suffered outrage. Procedure mandates segregation of fugitives, lest wild rumor sweep the camp. It never works. Every fool’s tale spreads like fire. The enemy is one million no longer. He is two million. Three. One runaway says he crossed the plain at Opis after Darius’s cavalry had passed over; the earth steamed with horse dung for forty miles. A Baghdader claims his district was commanded to produce a thousand bullocks; Darius’s troopers wolfed them at one sitting—and that was only the officers.

  On the march our fellows tramp in “litters,” squads of eight, so they can break down their sarissas and lash them in one bundle, which two men then carry, by turns, over their shoulders. Litters are always laughing or cursing. Now I hear silence. The men trek without larking or grumbling, each packing his own eighteen-footer, often in one piece, their eyes on the dirt. At such times, the pace of events threatens to run out of hand. The temptation is to stop thinking and yield to momentum. This must be resisted at all costs.

  I hate inspections. But one must be held now, to steady the men and to make sure no item is wanting—whetstones, spare spear shafts, straps. I ream a buck sergeant who carries his helmet in his hand. “Lash it to your rucksack, damn you!” Vinegar to purify water. Tallow for the men’s feet. By Heracles, if I hear of a man down with blisters, I will make him trek on his hands.

  I hold councils with my generals three times a day now. I sleep two hours at noon and one at night. Bucephalus is picketed outside my tent, and my groom Evagoras keeps my war kit honed and ready. It is my public role now to infuse the men with certitude. Their eyes track me instant by instant. As I banish fear, so do they. Until two nights after the inspection, when the moon goes dark and vanishes from the heavens.

  An eclipse.

  “Just what we needed!” Craterus rages, watching veterans of twenty campaigns huddle in groups, gaping at the sky and muttering superstitiously. Shall we expound like schoolmasters on the astronomical correlatives of the sun and moon? “Stand forth those salt-sucking Egyptians!” Craterus bawls, meaning the seers. “By Hades’ mane, they’d better cook up some tasty tale.”

  They do. I’ve forgotten what. Something about the Persians being the moon and us the sun. It quells the men’s dread. For now.

  “Better get them moving,” says Telamon.

  I do.

  Sweat, speed, action—these are the antidotes to fear.

  But they don’t work. Not this time. Scouts have located the Persian base camp, sixty miles south at a commercial crossroads called Arbela. Darius’s army has advanced twenty miles beyond that, other riders confirm, crossing a stream called the Lycus. Wolf River. A great plain is there, named Gaugamela. The Persians are preparing the ground. They have two hundred scythed chariots and fifteen Indian war elephants.

  I set under house arrest the riders who have brought this report. I won’t let them outdoors even to piss, to keep the rumor from flaring. It does anyway. The eclipse has spooked us. And this stinking desert. We cross a skillet, scorched to ash. Nothing is living. Are we in hell?

  Gaugamela—or its local hill, Tell Gomel—means “Camel’s Hump.” Our troops pore over this for significance. Is the name lucky? Does it foretell doom?

  I ask Telamon what he thinks the men are afraid of.

  “You know,” he says.

  But I don’t.

  “Success.”

  How can that be?

  “As well they should,” my mentor continues. “For with this triumph, our force will stand where no army has in all of history. The men dread this, the unknown. And you, Alexander, you shall be acclaimed as . . .”

  Black Cleitus reins-in alongside, grinning at Telamon’s sober demeanor. “What wild fancy,” he inquires, “is this philosopher retailing today?”

  I laugh. “He foretells victory.”

  “An imbecile could do that!” And he hoots and spurs away.

  The column treks on. Ahead and behind, the sky is black from fires set by the foe. Soot and cinders descend. The mountains east have vanished in the murk. Sound carries in this soup. We hear ghostly galloping, otherworldly voices. Even the earth gives you the jumps. A man’s tread punches through the crust, throwing up a plume of alkali. The stuff gets in your nose and hair; chalk coats your face; your lips crack. The horses’ hooves kick up the heavy greyish dust, which rises on
ly as high as a man’s waist. The column wades through it. Then, postnoon of the second day, the sound all commanders dread.

  Panic.

  Something sets the corps off. No one knows what. End to end, terror reigns. Ones and twos break from their comrades, unsheathing weapons. In moments, men will be dicing one another in terror.

  “Column, halt!”

  An eternity passes before the corps is brought to a stop. I command, “Ground arms.” Another eon as the order is passed down the miles-long line. At last each man sets his weapon at his feet on the earth.

  The army recovers.

  We camp that night on a featureless plain. With dusk, fog descends from the mountains. One’s sight plays tricks. Soot and ash cut off the sky. Then, in the second watch:

  Another panic.

  Lights in the sky have been mistaken for the enemy’s fires. They look real—thousands and thousands of them. Even I am fooled. It takes hours to calm the camp.

  Heaven sends a wind. The skies clear for twenty minutes. Then: a dust storm. The camp becomes chaos. We tramp all next day into the gale, muffled to our eyeballs, while grit like pumice abrades every surface and lodges in every cavity. For the first time I hear from my men the litany that plagues me to this day: We have come too far, won too much; heaven has turned on us; we’re frightened, we want to go home.

  Another night. The dust storm abates as abruptly as it has struck. Scouts report the real Persian fires. We’re a day away. I bring the corps out of column into modified line of assault. Our front is half a mile wide now. I have cavalry out on every quarter.

  Noon of the fourth day. The plain of Gaugamela lies a few miles ahead, beyond a range of low hills. Will this be the place? Is this the site that will give its name to our destiny?

  I ride forward, taking Black Cleitus and the Royal Squadron, Glaucias’s Apollonians (he has replaced Socrates Redbeard, who is recovering from sepsis in Damascus), and Ariston’s squadron of Paeonian Scouts. Persian reconnaissance riders retreat before us. The Tigris is on the right, wider here and within sight across a dusty pan. A line of gazelle bound away into a wash. We ascend the range of hills. At the crest three of our troopers sign “Enemy” and point with their lances to the southeast.