The Afgan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  As the evening’s revels unspool, I get a chance to study him. His hair falls in curls to his shoulders, copper shot through with gray, concealing a scar that can only be from the blow of a saber, descending from beneath his left ear, half of which has been sheared off, traversing his jaw all the way to his chin. Two fingers are missing on his left hand. His right arm is frozen at a permanent angle; when he reaches to the bowl, he has to use his shoulder or he can’t make the stretch. Twice he excuses himself to relieve his bladder. Both times he can rise only with the aid of his mistress, not from intoxication, I reckon, but because the sinews of his back refuse to unseize. He notes me watching and laughs. “You disapprove my bibulations, little brother! But tomorrow at dawn, while you groan in bed with your eyes nailed shut, I’ll be in the saddle, ready for anything.”

  I believe him. His kit is threadbare, his skin burnt to leather by the sun. He is a warrior. His mates too. None wear beards. Like Alexander, the Companions of Forward Operations all favor the clean-shaven look.

  Elias’s mistress occupies the square of carpet next to mine, but, as with his guide, my brother demurs at introducing her. She is lovely, a Pactyan from the country around Ghazni, though I will not learn this till later. That she and the other wives and ladies are included in the all-male sanctuary of the drinking party is a breach of decorum unthinkable in Macedon and worthy of murder here in the East. No one notices or cares. In lulls in the revels, Elias’s bride teaches me phrases in Dari. Her Greek is studded with soldiers’ profanities, which she offers with a charming ingenuousness. I am falling a little in love with her myself. I cannot get her to tell me how she met my brother or under what circumstances they came to be joined. She volunteers news of our elder brother Philip, though. He has returned safely from India. He rides now with an elite detachment of mountain rangers; they are already over the Hindu Kush and into northern Afghanistan, behind enemy lines, seeking tribal alliances for Alexander. Their packhorses’ bundles are freighted with gold.

  Past midnight Costas the chronicler gets into a shoutdown with two of Elias’s comrades. They clash over the recent plot against the king. At Phrada, Alexander has brought his commander of Companion cavalry-Philotas, son of Parmenio-before the army on charges of treason. The corps has convicted the man and put him to death. Philotas’s father Parmenio, seventy years old and the army’s senior general since Philip’s day, has been executed as well, at Alexander’s orders, though no evidence links him to his son’s crime. Many in the army have voiced outrage at this. Alexander, further, has taken action against some twenty other officers who had bonds to the family of Parmenio, executing some, dismissing or imprisoning others. My brother’s mates defend these acts. Such is the law of kings since before Agamemnon, declares a captain named Demetrius. “If a man plots against the throne, not only must he pay with his own life but with those of every male of his family, including infants. Otherwise, those spared will seek revenge, if not immediately, then later. Never is such action more imperative than now, with the army at war, in an enemy land.”

  With a smile, Costas applauds the captain’s sentiments. “My friend, you cite the war between ourselves and the Afghans. That’s not the campaign Alexander is waging. His war is within the army, between the Old Corps and the New.”

  The Companions will not hear Alexander’s name impeached, even in jest. “Do you dare,” says the captain, “call the king conspirator?”

  “I remark only,” replies the correspondent, “on the convenience of these convictions.”

  Have you not noticed, says Costas, that half the army is now foreign? The corps, which at campaign’s start had been virtually all-Macedonian, has become more alien than native, more mercenary than free, more Persian and Median, Syrian, Armenian, Lydian, Cappadocian than European. “Look around you, brothers. Two-thirds of our cavalry were fighting against us a year ago. To whom are these foreigners loyal? That man, only, to whose clemency they owe their lives, and upon whose favor their hopes and fortunes depend.”

  “What is your point, friend?”

  “My point, brave captain, is that this war, which all of us believed had finished half a year ago, is about to become a second war, whose end no man can see. Do you imagine that your regiments will mop up Afghanistan and be home before Frost Festival? Never! Our king fashions for himself a new army, with which he will fight here and eastward forever. Overthrowing the Persian Empire is the least of his conquests. He has vanquished you, and you don’t even know it!”

  “Do not condescend to us, thou obituarist.”

  It is my brother who speaks. The room turns toward him. “You have told us to look around. We say the same to you.” Elias’s gesture takes in the soused and sprawling company. “Here are men, damn your bones, at whose shoulders stands Death, yet who will ride out with tomorrow’s dawn to face Him. What do we care where our king leads us, or against whom? He is our lord!”

  At this the chamber explodes.

  “His right arm has vanquished our enemies! His might has lifted us from obscurity to renown! By his will, the wide world is given into our hands! What are we without him? Where would we be, serving another?”

  The hall booms with citation after citation.

  “Do you know Xenophon’s Cyropaedia?” my brother demands of the correspondent.

  With you, we are not afraid, even in the enemy’s land.

  Without you, we are afraid, even to go home.

  We part, Elias and I, beneath the stars. Tomorrow will take him away into the mountains. He clasps me in a farewell embrace. “Don’t you want to know,” I ask, “about Mother and Eleni?” Our younger sister.

  Yes, yes, of course.

  But as I tell him, I see his attention wander. The shikari boosts my brother’s consort into the saddle. She waits. I break off.

  Elias meets my eyes with an expression at once caring and stern. “Don’t waste your time thinking of home, Matthias. It can’t help and can only hurt.”

  13

  The army sets off into the Hindu Kush on a brilliant autumn morning. Ash, the Afghan muleteer, has indeed supplied the women we need to make up for the beasts we couldn’t hire. Good bearers, he swears. Strong. No trouble.

  I have been in Afghanistan too long.

  The plan sounds good.

  I like it.

  Kandahar City, from which the army departs, has risen entirely new. We have built the place ourselves over twenty days, at Alexander’s orders, erecting walls and palisades, laying out streets, and excavating defensive ditches. It’s a tent city now, but soon settlers and immigrants will make it a real one. A garrison has been put in place, constituted of Greek mercs, disabled vets, and Macks who either wish to stay for their own reasons or whose health renders them no longer fit for service. The new city will command the river and road junctions of the lower Arghandab Valley and hold them open for trade, communication, and supply for the corps.

  The city’s official name is Alexandria-in-Arachosia. The natives already call it Iskandahar, “Alexander’s City,” after Iskander, the Persian version of our king’s name.

  Iskandahar is full of women, mostly young and all starving. They are peshnarwan, outcasts, dispossessed by war.

  The greenbelt of southern Afghanistan is a torment of fleas and horseflies, hornets, blow-bugs, and lice. The track into the mountains winds along irrigation canals, from whose sloughs insects ascend in hissing, steaming clouds. They swarm into your mouth and eyes. They colonize your ass. Horses and mules suffer horribly. You march in full kit, legs plastered with mud (which the bugs bore through anyway) and a mesh cowl over your skull. The trail works along the Arghandab for about fifty miles, climbing steadily, before it commences the all-out ascent into the peaks. At a village called Omir Zadt, “Schoolmaster’s Nose,” the straight path turns to switchbacks. The column strings out over miles. Camps at night hang off the mountainside. Rain descends one minute, hail and snow the next, then all three mixed. Mules bawl all night. They smell winter coming; they
want to turn back for the barn, not climb into thinner and more frigid air.

  Our section, as I said, has hired female porters-eleven in all, to go with our eight mules-and two more that Ash miraculously discovers when he learns I have half a daric left. Nor is our outfit the only one to make use of this expedient. Every brigade has at least two hundred, all dressed in trousers with vest and pettu, and the rag footgear the Afghans call pashin.

  The reason contractors take women instead of mules into the mountains is if a woman breaks down or dies, the loss is less. A mule is a serious investment. Still, one would be a liar to say his glance does not roam over these lean, dark-eyed maids. One of them, whose real name is Shinar, has been nicknamed “Biscuits” by the Macks because she makes no shame to lift her pettu and squat by the roadside. She is between the age of my sister and my sweetheart, about seventeen, and the only one, except a long-limbed lass named Ghilla, with the light of intelligence in her eyes. She is slender but strong. I watch her carry a sack of sesame that weighs half as much as she does. She never speaks. The fourth night I approach Ash; I want him to ask her how she has come to this life as a porter. Ash reproves me. “Such questions must never be put.”

  I am made to understand that the young woman’s case is unexceptional. All these girls’ villages have been burned, Ash declares; all their fathers and brothers driven off or slain.

  “By Macks?”

  “Narik ta?” What difference does it make?

  The old man’s attitude toward his charges is that they are lucky to be alive. In his eyes, he is their savior. He fills their bellies, gives them work. Who else would do this? Their own gods and ancestors have abandoned them, for crimes committed in this life or another. I ask Ash how he knows this. He elevates his palms to heaven. “If God had not wished it this way, He would not have made it so.”

  Ash treats the women like mules. He directs their exertions not by verbal commands, but by “gee” and “haw,” driving them with the lash and halting them by blows and cuffs.

  You have never seen a mule laden until you’ve seen an Afghan do it. The poor beasts are so overloaded they can barely totter. For women it’s worse. The females are provided neither pack frames nor straps but simply handed a sack or crate and pointed up the trail. If they falter, they are beaten; if they fall out, their loads are divided among the others and they themselves left for dead.

  The girl called Biscuits is the first to talk back. I chance to witness this, at a site where the trail crosses a torrent. She draws up and addresses Ash. The old villain could not have reacted with greater surprise if a mule itself had broken into speech. He seizes his chatta, a double rope with knots twisted into its ends. I have never witnessed such a beating. I stride to stop it. Our sergeant Thatch catches me.

  “The girl’s his property; you insult his honor if you break in.”

  “To hell with his honor!”

  The old man continues to savage the girl. Thatch clamps me hard. By the gods, I cannot endure this. Ash marks my state and lays on a few extra stripes, just to show who rules this caravan. Then he stops. The maid lies motionless. Not one of her sisters makes a move to help her, nor am I permitted to bring her aid.

  When the column packs out half an hour later, the girl lies in the same place. Clearly she is dead. But a few miles up the trail, I see her again. Her sisters have divvied her load and hauled it for her. She struggles along, mute as a beast.

  The column has entered the mountains now. At night the women sleep in a huddle, wrapped in nothing but their threadbare pettus. One midnight Thatch makes an incursion into their camp, declaring his globes so swollen he will mount a woman or an ass, whichever he can get behind first. “Ough, the smell!” And he scurries back to finish his business on his own.

  Up we trek. In other armies, soldiers have servants. In Alexander’s a man shoulders his own kit; pack animals are used only to bear ropes and tents, road-building tools, spare weapons and armor, and their own fodder. One mule in three hauls nothing but hay and grain, with nosebags tied on top and snapping like pennants in the gale. How the night howls at this elevation! The broader the valley, the more bearable the wind; in the gorges it really whistles. At times the trail is overarched, literally carved from the mountainside. Crouch or you’ll crack your skull. The gale blasts uphill in the morning and downhill at night, except in storms, when it comes from everywhere.

  I’ll give Ash this: He is right about the women. They are tough. Tougher than we are. Soles bound only in rags, they tread surefootedly across scree falls and ice dumps, uncomplaining as mules. Lucas ogles several as we trek. “I’ve been on this trail too long, Matthias. Some of these girls are starting to look good to me.”

  The industry of Afghanistan is banditry. Every vale is home to a different clan, and each extracts a toll from the traveler. It is Alexander’s policy to subdue all wild tribes along any route he traverses. This means sending troops up to high-line the ridges, that is, seizing the high ground to protect a route of march. Lucas and I volunteer. Anything to break the monotony.

  We take to the high country like cats to a creamery. There are skirmishes every day. The foe are ragged tribesmen mostly, armed not with bows (the wind blows the hell out of arrows at this altitude) but with slings, with which they can launch a stone the size of a child’s fist a quarter mile downhill. If one of these drills you above the eyeline, you won’t have to worry about next payday. We chase these bandits. They retreat from fort to rockpile fort, launching curses and skull-busters, then show their heels when we close within range. Their sons, nimble as goats, serve as lookouts.

  We camp above the clouds now. Terrain is all snowfields. In the bare patches, alpine meadows show carpets of broom and heather. Days blaze with sun-dazzle; nights are ungodly cold. It takes forever to heat a bowl of broth. Boiling an egg is impossible. Breath comes hard. A dash of two hundred feet leaves us heaving. Astonishingly, the bugs are still with us.

  On the fifth dawn we run into Flag, Tollo, and Stephanos. Every high-line party is supposed to return to the column for rest after five days. Bung that! We’re not about to get unyoked from our mentors again. We like it up here. No one gives us orders and, if we can keep from getting brained by the enemy’s hand-catapults, the chances of getting minced are remote.

  Among the peaks even Ash becomes a good fellow. We come upon abandoned camps of the foe. Nothing could be more primitive. Ash points out signs of different clans, boundaries over which the khels would never trespass in normal times. Now, invaded by great Alexander, the tribes are one.

  I ask about Spitamenes. Ash knows him, or knew his father. The old man was a hero who fell in glory fighting Alexander’s squadrons, defending the Persian Gates. The son Spitamenes was not raised to be a soldier, says Ash. He was sickly as a youth, and bookish. His schooling was as an astronomer and Zoroastrian scholar.

  “Well, he’s made up ground fast,” says Flag. He tells Ash of the atrocities performed upon our men under orders from the Desert Wolf. Ash shrugs. Flag regards him. “You’d drink our blood too, wouldn’t you, you treacherous old sheep-stealer?”

  “With relish,” says Ash, laughing.

  He predicts that Spitamenes will be the stubbornest foe Alexander has faced. “For this young man is bolder even than your king, and his gift for war is from God. See how already he has dragged your army across half this country, yet you stand no closer to him than you did when you began.”

  Spitamenes has escaped across the mountains, Ash declares; we won’t catch up with him till spring. He will fight us like a wolf in the darkness. “Where you turn, he will be elsewhere. When you tire, he will strike.”

  Spitamenes will wear us down, Ash predicts, and use our own aggressiveness and impatience against us. “In the end, your own men will beg to get out of this country. And your king will take any peace he can find.”

  Glare is ferocious at this altitude. Instructed by our shikaris, we fashion “pinpointers” of leather and wood and bind them across our eyes
. Otherwise we’ll go peak-blind. The light burns through anyway. It blazes through the walls of the goatskin tent or a doubled woolen blanket; we swipe horsehair from the torsion catapults to make blinders that we wrap atop our pinpointers. If you squint you can see. The vistas are spectacular. “How high do you reckon we are?” I ask Flag atop one ridgeline. He indicates a peak two hundred feet below. “Back home that would be Olympus.”

  I believe him.

  An odd pair have become cronies up here: Ash and Stephanos. Muleteer and poet can be glimpsed, nattering away at all hours. We break camp one dawn; Stephanos splashes our backsides with water-“Godspeed” in Pactyan.

  The old man tutors the poet in Afghan proverbs.

  God is timid, like a mouse in a hollow wall.

  Meaning, says Ash, that one must approach the divinity in silence and with humility. Stephanos admires this. I am repelled.

  “What does God say,” I ask the miscreant, “about beating the hell out of a woman?”

  “Why don’t you ask Him?” replies Ash.

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Perhaps, Matthias,” Stephanos says, “you and I might profit, in an alien land, by suspension of judgment.”

  Though blind, God sees; though deaf, He hears.

  What the hell does that mean?

  Pray to God on an empty stomach.

  I’m disgusted. What religion do these blackguards follow anyway, that lets them mutilate our men while they’re still alive? What lice-ridden deity do they pray to, who immures them in ignorance and squalor?

  “Each precept of wisdom you gain,” says Ash, “bears you farther from God.”

  Ash tells us his religion has no name, though Stephanos has pieced together, from this villain and other sources, that the Afghans are descended from the sons of Afghana, son of Saul, son of Jeremiah, who was Solomon of Israel’s commander and who built the temple at Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar bore the multitude off into captivity at Babylon, where they flourished and intermarried with their Assyrian masters, and later with Persians and Medes. The tribes finally settled in the desert of Ghor, around Artacoana, calling themselves the Bani-Afghan or Bani-Israel. They believed in one God, creator of the universe. This fit well with the Persian faith of Zoroaster (himself born in Bactra, northern Afghanistan), whose God of Light, Ahura Mazda, was not far off from the Jehovah of the Jews.