Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War

by Steven Pressfield

  In the melee a man seized the rim of the enemy's shield and pulled it down with all his weight. You clawed at a man's eyes, spit in his face if you could summon spit, and bit at him with your teeth.

  We could feel the foe falling back. Our reinforcements poured from behind, driving by their weight the mass of contention forward. The moon rose behind. The enemy broke and ran.

  For what happened then, blame must be laid upon our officers, myself included. We could not restrain the men; they bolted in a mass, ravening upon the foe like beasts. The spring of their fury lay no doubt in two years' woe and frustration under Nicias. I believe the men feared as well that their endurance was at its end; they had been fighting five hours without food or water; they must finish the enemy now, before strength failed.

  You have witnessed the rout, Jason. Performed properly, the cavalry run down the fleeing foe, disabling him with the saber or slaying him outright with the lance. Allied with the horse troopers, the swiftest of the infantry overhaul the enemy in his flight, bringing him down from behind with the thrust of the nine-foot spear. The wounded he spikes where they lie. Here on the Heights, however, we had no cavalry and by this stage no nine-footers; all had long since been slung or shivered. Instead our troops fell in disorder upon the stampeding foe, hacking at him with the sword.

  This is no way to kill a man. The edge-on wound is not reliably fatal or even disabling, and, more ruinous, it rouses its object to such desperation as to goad even the coward to turn and fight, when, taken down as he ought, with a penetration wound or missile weapon, this same fellow would continue to present his back and be slain with ease. The second axiom of the broken field, drummed into the rookie's skull, is never to take the foe one-an-one, but always by pairs, and from opposing quarters.

  Both precepts went by the board in the fatigue-spawned extremity. Out front our infantry could be seen slashing at the foes' hamstrings and necks, then, as these rearmost fell, rampaging onto the next lot, leaving the outstripped foe wounded but still able to fight or, if he was clever, faking it entire, and now, as the next rank overran him, alive and unharmed among our own troops. The line broke down across the entire field. Topography enlarged the dislocation. Chalk Hill, to which the enemy now fled, was a good half mile away, over ragged and broken ground. Our men, spent, broke apart while the foe in flight was able to use the fells and declines to make his escape.

  Nonetheless the Athenian advance encountered scant opposition; cries of triumph rose as our troops, disordered as they were, rolled on toward the redoubts that ringed the chalky rise commanding the counterwall. The moon was over our shoulders as we advanced; ahead you could see the enemy debouching in masses from half a dozen portals, shields, and helmets gleaming in the light. They were smart. Gylippus was smart. He had chosen not to hold his men behind the battlements, upon which our disarrayed troops would press, regaining order simply by their own compaction. Instead the Spartan elected to meet us in the open, throwing his massed, rested troops against our disordered, exhausted ones.

  The world knows how spectacularly this succeeded. Lion and I had caught up with Chowder and Splinter and the orphans of other units who had attached themselves to us. Our side continued to overrun the foe; the Argive Thousand on our left was mowing down the Syracusan division arrayed against them. We could see the Chalk Fort, a hundred yards ahead. “It is fallen!” I heard an Argive officer cry.

  At that instant the man on my right toppled into me. I caught him and held him up, for a man in armor on the ground is as good as dead. I turned right and there was the enemy, rolling us up from the flank.

  We learned later that this was the Cadmus division, Boeotian volunteers, and the Thermopylae regiment of Thespiae, two thousand in all, whom Hegesander had stationed before that redoubt called the Ravelin. Where all others broke, these held.

  Like a great rock upon which the ocean wave crashes and bursts, these stood and turned all.

  I was on the earth, toppled before their rush. It was impossible to rise in fifty pounds of armor. A man, one of ours, was trying to burrow under me, so my flesh and not his would take an enemy spear. The Boeotians passed over, plunging the butt spikes of their nine-footers. I heard the burrower take it; the sound of his skull pierced, cranial foreships staving and the soup gushing from within. I took one blade outside my hip and another two whiskers from my globes. The foe passed over. I rolled free. Lion hauled me clear.

  In routs escape is rarely demanding if one keeps his head. You simply dump what weight you must, bucking your nerve with the certainty that you're willing to run harder and longer to preserve your life than the foe is to take it. Here on the Heights all such usage was overturned. It was dark. There were no roads.

  Moonshadow cast all into chaos. You couldn't hold where you were; you had been overrun. To advance was suicide, while to flee only hurled you among the very troops by whom you had just been routed.

  We had to get round. But now a fresh hazard confounded us: the enemy our troops had outstripped in the advance. These were on their feet now, rallying into bands of butchers. They ranged the killing ground, slitting the throat of every downed Athenian. I was with Lion, Chowder, Splinter, and about a dozen others. We had migrated somehow to the extreme right of the field. The bluffs dropped sheer, two hundred feet. Chowder peered down with Lion.

  “Shall we try it?”

  “After you.”

  We tracked the brink, seeking a descent. From a rise Lion and I squinted. In the distance: a battle.

  Stripping helmets, we could hear the paean-their Dorians or ours, who could tell? — and that anthem all soldiers know, the toll and rumble of the othismos as the massed formations compact and clash. “I'd as soon give this the skip,” observed Splinter.

  Lion asked what had become of his taste for glory.

  “I lost it hours ago, with the contents of my bowels.”

  We skidded down the slope toward the battle. At the bottom men transited like phantoms. We heard Attic accents.

  “Athenians?”

  “Move up!” an officer shouted. “We're forming beyond that rise!”

  We tagged the troops, but lost them in a defile. There was fog in the low places, the light had gone strange. The moon in your eyes, you were blind; behind you, you trod in ink. Emerging from a fell, we saw a mass of several hundred infantry, their officers dressing their line. We dashed in, seeking one to report to. A trooper waved us down the line. A man spoke, addressing a comrade. Syracusan dialect.

  These weren't our troops.

  We were among the enemy.

  A Syracusan tugged at my shoulder; handsome chap, a six-footer. He was asking me something. Lion's blade sliced his throat. He dropped like a pig, gushing fluid.

  We ran for our lives. I called to Lion to take over. I was unstrung; my thoughts would not obey me. “How did those sheepfuckers get there?!”

  We drew up in a ravine, out of our wits with terror and clutching each other like children. “Are we turned round? How did they get on that side of us?” We tried to orient ourselves by the moon, but in the defile you couldn't tell which direction its light came from. Sounds! Men advancing in a body, from where we had just come. “It's them!” Three rangers scrambled over the crest. We unloaded everything at them.

  “Athenians!” they shouted in fright.

  We demanded the watchword.

  They had forgot. So had we.

  “By Zeus, are you Athenians?!”

  “Yes, yes! Stop shooting!”

  They were our countrymen. In a minute their main body scrambled over the rise, about a platoon; we located their lieutenant. Lion told of the enemy we had blundered into, immediately north.

  “That's west.”

  “It can't be. Look at the moon.”

  “It's west, I tell you!”

  “Then where's the fight?”

  “It's over. We've lost.”

  “Never!”

  We bolted, seeking the battle. More men ahead. We formed fast, fear
ing the enemy. “Athena Protectress,” their point pair called.

  The password! We countersigned. They hurried toward us. “By the gods,” our youngest advanced with relief, “what the hell's going on?” Their point plunged a nine-footer into his guts. More fell on us from the flank. We bowled through in terror.

  We could not tell if they were the enemy, discovering our watchword, or our own mistaking us for the foe. One imperative drove us: to reach our own lines. It didn't matter if we were eviscerated one moment later, we must reunite with our countrymen. We were out of our minds with this necessity.

  Forms ghosted past in the darkness, fleeing and advancing in all directions. They kept silent as we, each in dread of the other. A new fear had seized me. I was terrified that I would encounter my cousin and each, taking the other for the enemy, would slay the other.

  When men passed I called out, “Simon!”

  “Shut up!” Lion barked.

  I couldn't.

  “Simon! Is that you?”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  At last we got out onto the flat. A breast-bursting hump of a mile carried us to the Labdalum fort, the first one that the rangers and shock troops had taken, what seemed like a lifetime past, this night. There were mobs everywhere: dead and wounded being borne rearward; masons and carpenters just now mounting the switchbacks of Euryalus; and scores of remnants like us, bunching up in terror and disorder. Troops streamed by, fleeing. Battling each other to get down the cliff face.

  “What has happened?”

  “Lost! All lost!”

  “Hold up!” Lion advanced into the stream. “Rally, brothers!

  Summon your courage!”

  The sight of our countrymen in flight filled me with such shame that fortitude, or some simulacrum, reanimated. I took my place beside Lion.

  “Have you found your head, Pommo?”

  “Yes.”

  “You scared the wits out of me.”

  Men fled past us. We caught a few, shamed as we, and formed them into a front. I recognized one, Rabbit, who had fought as a shield with Telamon. When I clutched his arm, I saw he was in tears.

  “I killed a man,” he cried.

  “What?”

  “Our own. One of ours.”

  He was unhinged and begged me to cut his throat. “God help me, I couldn't see… I thought he was theirs.”

  “Forget it, it's the dark. Make your stand.”

  He bared his steel and set its point beneath his jaw.

  “Form up!” I shouted at him. “Rabbit! Take your place!”

  He grasped the hilt with both fists and jammed the blade up into his brain.

  “Rabbit!”

  He dropped like a cut puppet. Men gaped in horror. We could hear the enemy's paean.

  “Hold!” Lion bawled to our comrades. “Hold where you stand.”

  “Why?” cried one.

  They ran.

  We ran too.

  XXII

  THE AVERTED FACE OF HEAVEN

  You have heard recounted numberless times, Jason, the chronicle of the lunar eclipse which occurred a month succeeding the calamity on Epipolae, and the terror into which it plunged the fleet and army, coming as it did in the instant their vessels made ready to embark for safety. Men have censured Nicias as commander and indicted the troops themselves for yielding to such dread, superstition-spawned, at the hour of their deliverance, when they had at last set their purpose to abandon Syracuse and sail for home.

  Of those who condemn us I say only: they weren't there. They weren't there to feel the dread that breathed in that hour, when the moon hid her face and its benediction from men's sight. I consider myself a man of practical usage, yet I, too, stood stricken at my post, staring skyward in consternation. I, too, turned about, unnerved and unmanned by this prodigy of heaven.

  Nine thousand had been lost since Epipolae. In the panic at the cliffs, men had leapt and fallen by hundreds. I went out that first dawn with Lion, seeking our cousin. Thousands were still missing.

  Many who had made it down off the Heights had lost their way seeking camp. Now with first light the Syracusan horse were making mince of them. At the base of the cliffs, dead and dying lay strewn for acres. They were all ours. Some had tumbled in the panic as thousands bunched up at the brink and each, in terror to reach safety, had dislodged another, spilling him in turn onto those picking their way down the switchbacks below. Many in despair had leapt of their own will, stripping armor and casting themselves to fate.

  At the top of the cliffs prize parties of the foe now collected.

  They called down, taunting. “You are so clever, Athenians, did you think you could fly?” Take a good look, the enemy vaunted, slinging severed limbs and even heads down onto the mounds of our slain. “This is the only way you will leave Sicily!”

  Again in camp Telamon awaited us. He had found Simon, alive and unwounded, tending the sick. I dropped where I stood and slept the day round. Only four remained of our sixteen marines; it took five platoons to make one new one. I passed the day beside Pandora, writing widow letters. Her foreships had rotted through; she lay careened on the site the soldiers called Dog Beach, awaiting timbers.

  The camp had become one sprawling mud hole, stinking to heaven. Our tents were pitched in the swamp where Gylippus' troops had driven us, fifty thousand kenneled in a bog narrower than the agora in Athens. Every step sank into sucking ooze. My bed was a door atop a flat of muck, which I shared with Lion and Splinter, taking turns as one does shipboard. The men called these bunks “rafts.” You had to watch your raft or someone would steal it.

  Foreign sailors began slipping the cable. It was impossible to hold them; they simply waited for dark, then swam for it. Some even took their oars. Victualry ceased, and refuse removal; there were no armorers, cooks, or nurses. Line troops must be assigned details customarily performed by drudges; twice in ten days altercations flared into near mutinies. The one thing the troops had was money. But what could you buy? Not a dry patch to lay your head or a clean divot to empty your bowels upon. You could not buy water; the foe had dammed the streams that fed the camp and poisoned the solitary spring. Hundreds sickened, swelling wards already packed with the thousands of casualties of Epipolae, who worsened daily in this hellish miasma.

  A phrase swept the camp: “hoisting the akation.” You know this, Jason: the foresail of a trireme, the only one borne into battle, run up at life-and-death, to flee. Not a man did not burn to hoist the akation. Epipolae had turned Demosthenes against the whole expedition. In his eyes Sicily was a quagmire; we must get our boys out now, or failing that, withdraw to a part of the island where the country could be overrun, supplies obtained, and the wounded and sick given proper care.

  Now of all people Nicias acquired resolution. He refused to retreat without orders from the Assembly at Athens. One night I took supper with my cousin and the physician Pallas. This doctor's family was the Euctemonidae of Cephisia; he was related to Nicias and had tended him here for kidney disease, which ravaged him yet.

  The medic had had a snootful and spilled his tale straight.

  “If Nicias takes us home wanting victory, how will the demos express its gratitude? He knows, believe me. Those same officers who squall loudest now for withdrawal will, safe in Athens, turn upon him to hide their shame. Our commander will be impeached for cowardice or treason or taking bribes of the enemy; his accusers' mouthpieces will inflame the multitude, who will howl for his head, as for Alcibiades'. Say what you will, Nicias is a man of honor. He would sooner meet death here as a soldier than be butchered at home like a dog.”

  Days passed and the army did not move.

  Gylippus returned from the Sicilian cities, having recruited a second army more numerous than the first. A camp of ten thousand arose on the Olympieum and another twice the size on Ortygia. The foe had lost all fear. He manned his benches in broad daylight and trolled past our palisade, daring us to launch and face him.

  At last Nicias
saw the wisdom of withdrawal. Word was passed; the army would be taken aboard this night. Across the camp, the mood was elation. Far from feeling shame at packing up, the men felt chastened and restored to grace. Humility and piety, however tardily rediscovered, had delivered them from the ruin heaven had prepared, witness all the turns of evil that had plagued the expedition, from the banishment of Alcibiades on. What derangement, men asked now, had made us tear him from us?

  Could any believe that, Alcibiades in command, our force would stand in such straits? Syracuse would have fallen two years ago.

  The army would be halfway up Italy's boot; the fleet would have reduced Carthage and be rounding on Iberia. But the gods had not ordained this, such was apparent. Perhaps heaven scourged us for our pride in mounting an enterprise of such moment, or for bearing strife to a country which had borne none to us. Perhaps the immortals bore malice toward Nicias for his luck, or Alcibiades for his ambition. It was all moot now. All that mattered was we were going home.

  All that mattered until the moon disappeared.

  No night is so dark as that, orb-illumined, plunged into the ink of lightlessness. No place may be so black as the starless sea, nor men more prone to dread than those in peril of their lives. So evil were the omens, when at last the diviners had taken them, that the first victim and the second and third were cast aside; the seers slaughtered beast after beast seeking any that would bleed propitiously.

  Thrice nine days the fleet must abide, so the portents read.

  For thrice nine days no ship may sail.

  XXIII

  UPON THE WALL OF SHIPS