Steven Pressfield

by The Afghan Campaign

  “Do you know,” Lucas confesses, “I’m still writing to my fiancée back home? I am a loathsome cur.”

  His betrothed is my cousin Teli, a darling girl who worships him.

  “Forgive me, Matthias. I keep waiting to get killed. Then I can avoid giving her the bad news.”

  He is a dog for this dereliction. Still we laugh. We’re all waiting to get killed.

  Lucas acknowledges his happiness with Ghilla. The fact astonishes him. “Who could have foreseen it? But look at her. She’s beautiful, she cares for me tenderly. I can talk to her, she understands. I don’t have to pretend the world is different than it is or that I’m a better man than I am. Yet she stays. Why? Would any of our girls back home do the same?”

  I think: Would they poison us? But I bite my tongue.

  “This woman,” says Lucas with truth, “makes no demands for herself, yet she is willing to die at my side. Just being with me puts her at risk of her life, from her family and tribe and even from strangers. Still she remains.” He shakes his head. To me he promises to write to Teli, come clean.

  Dice asks, “Will you ever go home, Lucas?”

  Our festive hall is the ruins of a farmhouse.

  “I am home,” he says.

  35.

  Maracanda is the principal city of Sogdiana. This is the same place Alexander has chased the Wolf from twice. The same place that he, Spitamenes, has captured as many times. The same place our column of mercs was relieving when the Wolf and his Scyths and Sogdians made hash of us.

  It’s a pretty spot just the same. A spur of the Ocher Range juts from the west, not lofty enough to catch clouds and bring rain, but possessed of a rugged, almost sculptural quality that sets the city off like a jewel. Approaching from the south you feel like you’re entering, if not an enchanted realm, then at least a civilized and agreeable oasis. The city incorporates two satellite districts, Ban Agar and Balimiotores, which flank the river half a mile below the upper town. Ban Agar is the horse market. Balimiotores, which the troops call Little Maracanda, is the shantytown.

  The upper city is sited on the summit of a jagged scarp, whose approaches have been built up and fortified over centuries. It would be no small chore to storm the place. The district contains a governor’s palace with royal residences, erected by the Persians, within a parklike enclave that remains surprisingly cool even beneath the blistering Afghan sun. Alexander and his entourage occupy this. The army itself spreads out across the plain and along both banks of the meandering, sludge-colored river, whose breadth in summer varies from a hundred yards to a quarter mile. A small dog could cross at the trot and not wet its haunches. It goes without saying, you can’t drink it.

  Why are we here, other than to rally midsummer as operational orders prescribe? The place cannot support us. It can’t support a force one-quarter our size. But the corps must get in out of the wind. The men need twenty days to wash the desert off and to get blind, and the mounts must get into their bellies more than bush grass and camel thorn. The heavy baggage can come up now from the Oxus. And our wages.

  Mule trains carrying gold make their way up the secure zone that the five columns have cleared by their sweep north. This at least has been accomplished. The frustration is that no element of Alexander’s forces, or all collectively, has been able to force the foe to a main-force showdown. All we’ve done is drive the tribes north.

  This is progress as far as it goes. But since Spitamenes has shown that he can slip major formations past us to raid unchecked in our rear the feeling throughout the Maracanda camp is vexation, exasperation, even alarm that the vaunted Big Push has accomplished nothing at all.

  Boozing, never moderate among Macks in the field, has escalated here to heroic proportions. The king convenes his council atop the citadel. Every drunken outburst finds its way down to the troops. Alexander rips his officers. Forward Operations is singled out for censure. Where is Spitamenes? How did he get past us? The object of this push north, the king declares, is to deprive the foe of the initiative. Instead, the Wolf has seized it and hurls it back in our face.

  It is not our king’s style to blame others. Always he takes the weight himself. The men love him for this. But frustration, now, gnaws at his guts. “This place,” says Flag, “is getting to him too.”

  Another stone digs beneath Alexander’s heel. This is the person of Black Cleitus, former commander of the Royal Squadron of Companion cavalry, now sharing with Hephaestion charge of all of Alexander’s elite mounted brigades. Cleitus is fifty-three and Old Corps to the bone. He has come late to the Afghan theater (summoned by Alexander, who will appoint him governor of Bactria), having been hospitalized for a year, eleven hundred miles east at Ecbatana. There, the war still “feels Persian”—meaning conventional, the kind a soldier of the Old Guard can understand. There the army is all Greek and Macedonian. Cleitus is unprepared for the miscegenated cavalcade that comprises the divisions at Kandahar and Bactra City, and now at Maracanda.

  He sees Persians and Medes in stations of power. Cavalry formations, once all-Mack scarlet, now glitter with the leopard-skin mantles of Hyrcania and the serpent pennants of Syria and Cappadocia. Alexander has begun to integrate Bactrian and Sogdian cohorts—the very Afghans we’re fighting—and worse, to Cleitus’s eyes, savage Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae, also our enemies, and at rates of pay beyond what our own countrymen earn in garrison in Greece.

  In his youth Cleitus served as a page under King Philip. It was his honor to bear the infant Alexander to his naming bath. Cleitus’s right arm saved Alexander’s life at the battle of the Granicus River.

  Cleitus will not hold his tongue. He hates what he sees and he lets the army hear it. He lets Alexander hear.

  You who are familiar with the history know of the midnight drinking bout in which Cleitus insulted our lord; how the offender’s comrades dragged him, drunken, from the banquet tent; how he returned a second time to slander his sovereign even more viciously, calling him a petty prince and a knave, who would have achieved nothing without commanders like himself and others—Parmenio, Philotas, Antipater, Antigonus One-Eye—whom he, Alexander, has now put out of the way for no cause other than to gratify his vanity.

  You have heard how Alexander, driven past endurance by this abuse, seized a pike from one of the attendants and drove it into his antagonist’s belly, then, recoiling in horror at this homicide committed by his own hand, flung himself upon Cleitus’s corpse, first beseeching heaven for its reanimation, then seeking with the same blood-defamed lance to end his own life. You know how Hephaestion, Ptolemy, and the king’s other mates overpowered him and bore him, only with extreme exertions, to his quarters, within which he retired, refusing all food and drink for three days, until his friends and attendants, desperate at the army’s state while deprived of his presence and leadership, succeeded at last in drawing him forth from his retreat.

  It is my object here neither to reprieve Alexander’s actions (who can exonerate murder?), nor to extenuate Cleitus’s part in his own drunken demise. I address only the effect on the army.

  Let me speak plain. Not a man in the corps gave a damn about Cleitus. He deserved his end. He got what was coming to him.

  When Alexander at last emerges from his quarters, he looks like a ghost of himself. He neither addresses the men nor permits a surrogate to do so in his name. He sacrifices. He inters Cleitus’s corpse with honor. He takes exercise.

  This is enough. Sergeants, even colonels weep. Men kneel on the earth in thanksgiving.

  The king lives!

  We are preserved!

  At once Maracanda, our garden and oasis, has become hateful to us. We can’t get out soon enough. Where has the Wolf flown? Find him. Kill him. The army must get back to what it was.

  But can it?

  “This country,” says Flag. “This god-abandoned country.”

  BOOK SEVEN

  Wolf Country

  36.

  South of the Jaxartes, where the peaks of
the Scythian Caucasus mount back from the plain of the river, stand three impregnable natural fastnesses called Tora Giraya, the Black Beards. Each is a mountain unto itself. All have summits broad as prairies, year-round springs, and unscaleable flanks. Among these strongholds Spitamenes, our spies report, has taken refuge. He has with him seven thousand Bactrian and Sogdian cavalry and all their goods and women.

  Alexander names the operation Summer Thunder. He leads in person, calling in from their own deployments the brigades of Ptolemy, Polyperchon, and Coenus, and half the siege train under Craterus’s deputy Bias Arimmas. This combined force numbers over twenty-four thousand. Everything, we are instructed, depends on speed. We must get to the Black Beards before the Wolf has time to flee or prepare a trap.

  Among the units hastening north from Bactra City are the Silver Shields, the elite heavy infantry of Alexander’s Royal Guard. With them, accompanying their cavalry escort, rides my brother Philip.

  He finds me in camp along the Little Polytimetus, an alkaline trickle amid creosote and tamarisk, midway between Maracanda and the Black Beards.

  I have not seen Philip since I was fifteen. “I must tell you,” he says after our initial emotional embrace, “I am very angry with you.”

  Philip is fourteen years my senior. His cloak of Companion cavalry bears the silver eagle of a lieutenant colonel. He is taller, even, than I remember. I am daunted by him. I find myself calling him “sir,” nor is he prompt to tell me to stop.

  Philip is upset at my evading his call to escort Elias’s ashes home. His anger has nothing to do with Elias. Its object is to protect me, to get me out of Afghanistan. When I repeat what I said in my letter, that I can’t leave my mates, Philip groans in frustration.

  I see that he loves me. My eyes sting.

  “Forgive me, Philip. But Elias himself would have dodged that duty.”

  For the first time, my brother smiles. His beard, I see, has gone gray. His hair, once raven, is the color of iron. I note from his gait that both knees have gone stony (from wounds perhaps, or falls, as is not uncommon among horsemen). I have brought wine for him as a present, and a duck in a sack. For me, Philip carries Elias’s regimental sash, of wool dyed black and tan.

  He tells me how Elias died and what happened to Daria.

  “In custody, the woman tried to make away with herself, chuffing down some poison she had smuggled past the guards. The surgeons flushed her gut, so she could be properly executed. She was the first Afghan woman to be charged before a military tribunal. She offered no defense and refused to make a statement of any kind. They crucified her.”

  My brother has seen Shinar too. “She sought me out at my quarters at Bactra City. I thought she was some shepherdess. When she opened her mouth and good Greek came out, I nearly keeled over. Then she showed me her oikos papers with your name on them.” He laughs. “I said to myself, ‘My baby brother is all grown up.’”

  It is through Philip’s intercession that Shinar (and Ghilla and Lucas’s baby) have been documented through to Maracanda. They will arrive with the heavy baggage, probably in ten days. Too late for me; I’ll be a hundred miles east, up in the Black Beards, by then.

  “How much time,” my brother asks, “do you have left on your enlistment?”

  I tell him. “Why?”

  “We’ll tear it up. I want you out of harm’s way.” He’s serious. Strings can be pulled. “What makes you stay in this pit of hell?” Philip demands. “Duty? Love of country? Please spare me any oraculations on the subject of Macedonian honor. Money? Let me guess: You owe the army more now than you’ve earned in your entire enlistment.” He faces me in vexation. “I don’t understand you, Matthias. Is your aim to cast your life away?”

  I ask why this is so important to him.

  “I will not,” he says, “lose another brother.”

  We have to get out of the public way. We’re making a scene. Along the riverbank stands a slope where the muleteers unkink their new ropes; for hundreds of yards there’s nothing but wet lines stretching in the sun. “Philip,” I say when we have walked down, “you know I can’t leave my mates. Not when there’s still fighting to do.”

  My brother regards me with infinite weariness. “Let me tell you something you may not know. This war will soon be over. For all our frustrations, Alexander’s scheme is bearing fruit. The new forts have cut Spitamenes off from the north; our devastation of villages has stripped him of supplies; our hiring of native troops has drained his source of recruits. Oxyartes and the other warlords—everyone except the Wolf himself—see the end approaching. They’ve all sent undertakings in secret to Alexander. Deals are being worked out right now. We could have peace as soon as fall. And let me disabuse you of another fancy that may be fueling your hopes of a future in the army: the riches of India. I’ve been there. There’s nothing in India but monsoon rains, poisonous snakes, and half-naked fakirs.”

  Go home, Philip tells me. If you serve out your enlistment, you’ll wind up crippled or dead. “I’ve heard what happened with your sweetheart Danae. You’re free. What’s stopping you? Take your Afghan girl. Farm Father’s land.”

  “That’s your land, Philip.”

  He faces me in exasperation. Two teamsters pass, checking their ropes; we wait till they’ve moved on out of earshot. My brother draws up.

  “Forgive me, Matthias. When I hear your voice, which sounds so much like…”

  He cannot say Elias’s name.

  “…then to see you as a soldier.” Philip’s long hair has fallen across his face; he sweeps it back with dark, sunburnt fingers. “You were just a child.”

  And he weeps.

  We walk by the river. The sun plunges; the sky turns the color of pearl.

  “You know,” Philip says, “Elias and I used to talk about you. More than you may realize.” He smiles at some remembrance. “Our own lives meant little to us. But yours always seemed impossibly precious. Perhaps because you were the baby.”

  My brother bends and scoops a fistful of flat stones, the kind you skim across a surface of water.

  “They say a man becomes old,” he says, “when more of his friends reside beneath the earth than above it.”

  “Is that how you feel, Philip?”

  He doesn’t answer. Only hands me half the stones. We send trails skipping.

  “Don’t end up like Elias and me.”

  My brother turns away, eyes across the dark water.

  “To be a soldier,” he says, “is no lofty calling. Who acts as a brute is a brute.”

  37.

  The column moves out the next day, pushing hard to gain the Black Beards. Philip rides ahead with the Silver Shields.

  Let me here address the army’s state of mind in the aftermath of the Cleitus debacle and make plain, if I can, by the following minor but extremely significant incident, the undiminished love the corps bore for its king.

  Dispatching Ptolemy’s and Polyperchon’s brigades round the western shoulder of the Scythian range, Alexander struck straight across with his own divisions, Coenus’s, and that portion of the siege train that had come up from Maracanda. This force made good speed for two days. But mounting a pass called An Ghojar, “the Barber,” on the third morning, the column was brought up in its tracks. A torrent in spate with late-summer snowmelt had washed out half the valley. I chanced to ride up, delivering dispatches, just as all progress ground to a halt.

  The gorge down which the cataract thundered stretched, bank to bank, broader than a bowshot. Where the downshoot plunged against boulders in midchannel, each the size of a two-story house, the impact sent geysers of mud-colored spume fifty feet into the air. The din was so deafening that troopers, even hundreds of feet up the slope, could make themselves heard only by shouting directly into their fellows’ ears. How to get across? The alternative, backtracking the way we came, would have cost days and wiped out every advantage of speed and surprise Alexander had worked so hard to attain. Any lesser commander would have elected this o
ption. And even our lord, drawn up before the torrent, seemed to consider it. His presence on-site alone, however, drove the divisions into action.

  Without waiting for orders, combat engineers began surveying the ascending slope, seeking spots where rockfalls could be started. Rigging teams of mules and setting great timbers as levers, the sappers and bucket-men succeeded in dislodging several critical boulders. Half the mountainside came down, straight into the river. The fall didn’t span the flood, but at least it brought the banks closer together. From a perch atop one newly formed promontory, archers launched scores of light lines across, of which the looped ends of two, after infinite pains, were at last coaxed into holds around outcrops on the far bank. Upon these filaments, which looked in the scale of the scene no stouter than threads, two young and athletic volunteers, stripped naked to make themselves as light as possible, worked their way across hand-over-hand. By now the column had massed like spectators at the games at Olympia. The youths swung perilously above the torrent (and even slipped once or twice into it), while their onlooking countrymen’s emotions alternated between ecstatic citation and excruciating suspense. Alexander had pledged a talent of gold to the man whose sole first touched the far shore and a talent of silver to the second. When the champion at last found footing and turned back, raising his arms in triumph, the roar could be heard even above the cataract. Heavier lines were warped across. By midafternoon a rope bridge had been rigged. By the following dawn a span of timbers stood in place, stout enough that laden mules—hoodwinked and shielded by side-screens from sight of the plunge below—could be coaxed across.

  This was what Alexander’s presence alone meant.

  The result was that two of our four columns appeared in the enemy’s rear days before even the Wolf could have anticipated. Coenus’s division assaulted the least-well-defended of the Black Beards, driving its occupants into refuge on the other two. Beard number two was separated by a cavernous rift from the only spot upon which sufficient siege elements could be assembled. Under Alexander’s direction, however, the soldiers working in shifts succeeded in dumping into the chasm such tonnage of boulders and cartloads of soil and brush that by the fourth dawn the interval had been built up enough for a crude mole to be laid across its spine. By this time the engineers, assisted by hundreds of carpenters and mechanics drafted from the ranks to assist, had put together a rolling siege tower, seventy feet high, shielded by hide-faced mantlets, and had rigged a system of tackle and cables by which it could be warped across the gap and thrown against the face of the cliff.