“The trail!”
Joy flashes the length of the column. Our guides cry from ahead. Shelter! Shelter by nightfall! In jubilation we pound each other’s bundled shoulders and backs. Head count! The column forms up to start again.
“Where’s Tollo?”
It’s Flag, checking the roster.
“I saw him,” Little Red points back, “just before we crossed.”
“Where is he now?”
No one knows.
Flag works back along the column. Pulling off mufflers and pinpointers. Examining every face.
“Was he roped? Who saw him rope up?”
The column has gotten off the pitch now. Out of the gale. A face of the mountain protects us. We feel almost warm.
Behind us the Clothesline howls in the open.
Flag comes back. He hasn’t found Tollo. “Go on!” he commands, driving us forward in the direction of the village.
“What about you, Flag?”
“Get moving!”
Lucas and I hold up. We can see Flag and Red go at each other. We can’t hear much. Red points down the ice face.
“…if Tollo’s down there, he’s bought his ticket!”
Flag turns away. We can see him hauling rope and a hatchet from the pack of a mule. Red rejoins the column, moving on. The mass shuffles forward, toward the village. Lucas and I look at each other.
“I’ll stay,” he says.
I look in his eyes. He’s worse off than me. He’ll freeze in an hour.
“No.” I’m an idiot. “You go on.”
A push gets Lucas started.
“Save me something warm.”
17
Flag and I find Tollo five hundred feet down, alive and delirious.
He doesn’t know who we are. His pinpointers are gone. He’s blind. He orders us back up the face.
I want to go. I would. But it’s not so simple. Five hundred feet have taken Flag and me two hours. The face is steep as a ladder and slick as frozen snot. My boots are rags, frostbound as boards; their soles glisten with ice.
Darkness has fallen. Cold-sickness has taken Flag. Frozen vomit plasters his breast; his speech is slurred; he can no longer close either hand.
We cling to a shelf no wider than the sole of a shoe. Tollo sprawls thirty feet below. Upside down, hung up on an outcrop by a rope caught round his ankle. His other leg, from the knee down, is turned around backward.
“Who is it? Is that you, Matthias?”
I’m going to have to go down to him. The distance seems like nothing in the recounting. In summer a child could scamper it with ease. But now, in the dark and the plunging cold, with our own exhaustion and our icebound boots, the pitch seems distant as the moon. I would leave Tollo. I’m ready to start back up the face. Then I see Flag, with his frost-benumbed mitts, readying to start down. I curse him in language that would get me strung up under tamer circumstances.
I can’t let him go down.
It has to be me.
I make it somehow, belayed by the line Flag lowers from the ledge.
Tollo doesn’t know me. Even when I shout in his ear. His leg is turned around completely. When I touch it, it’s hard as a block of stone.
“My cap,” he says. “Can you see my cap?”
He has lost his boar’s-tusk skullcap. It must have fallen off, he says. There it is. He points it out to me. About ten feet down, across the ice. “Can you get it for me?” he asks in a voice so faint I have to put my ear right next to the ice-hole which is his beard, and even then I can barely hear him. He is like a child. My heart is wrung. At the same time I hate him. I hate him for falling. The selfish bastard will kill me. My life will end on this face and all he wants is his salt-sucking cap.
“Let it go, Tollo.”
“My cap.” He says he has to have it.
“What for?”
He coughs something I can’t understand.
What? I shout at him.
“In hell,” he says. It will be disrespectful to appear without a cap.
Sure, why not? Why shouldn’t I die for his bung-fucked cap?
I get it. I plant it on his skull, beneath his fleece hood. I press my mouth to his ear: “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
We rope Tollo under the arms, Flag and I. The back of his cloak is solid ice; it makes a sledge. If we climb, pitch to pitch, we can haul Tollo up behind us. One stage at a time. We start up. One traverse. Two. Except now Flag is failing too. He can’t talk. I fear for his extremities. I can still feel my own. I’m all right. Youth. Youth is everything.
“…the crest…” Flag manages to croak. He means we must regain the trail.
“Why? So we can die there instead of here?”
I have entered a state of rage so towering, words cannot give it expression. “Tollo!” I shout down. “How about pulling your weight? Use your arms, damn you!”
“Shut up,” barks Flag.
“Why didn’t he rope himself? We’re gonna top off because of this ass-wit.”
“Shut up.”
I keep babbling. I know I’m cracking but I can’t stop. A part of me has entered delirium and I know it, but another part remains surprisingly lucid. I figure I have half an hour before I lose all sensation in my hands and feet. Beyond that, what? An hour till I’m frozen head to foot. What is particularly galling about going into the books this way is that within twenty days there’ll be flowers on this slope. It will be spring. In a month, Panjshiris will be grazing sheep here. They’ll strip our corpses and jig over our bones-ours and however many other hundreds of our compatriots will have gone briskets-down before the column gets over these mountains.
“Wake up!”
I gape at Flag like a man surfacing from a nightmare. He bawls into my ear: “Got to make the trail!”
I can’t tell whether he’s lost his mind or I have. What’s waiting for us at the trail? Nothing. The column has moved on. We’ll never be able to track them in the dark, and certainly not sledging Tollo. Our only hope is if the section following us has come up. But they’d be crazy to do that. Cross the Clothesline in this cold and dark? Never. They’ve scratched out a camp somewhere below.
“Right,” I shout back. Make the trail. Good plan.
The way we climb is with the butts of our half-pikes. Plunge the spike into the ice, pull your weight up by the shaft. Knee first, then foot; when you know it’s solid, seat the rope over your shoulder, the one that’s hauling Tollo; then push up with that leg.
At places the slope isn’t bad. We can chop steps into the ice. Have we climbed a hundred feet or a thousand? I know I’m hallucinating. It seems like I can hear Biscuits’ voice. In Greek. Pretty good Greek too. She has waited for us. The column is gone but she’s still there, at the trail. That’s a good hallucination. I appreciate it. It’s like one of those dreams you have, where you say, By heaven, that is imaginative! I glance over to Flag, wondering if he’s seeing the same mirage I am. Apparently not. He just keeps climbing. By Zeus’s iron balls, he’s got guts. What a soldier! I’m proud to step off for hell beside him.
“Hey! Flag!” I’m going to tell him I love him; I don’t care how unmilitary it is.
“Shut up!”
I want to tell him about Biscuits. Where did she learn Greek so well? Must have been from Macks who had her before we came on the scene. She’s above us, shouting down. Something about a rope. “Grab it! Pull yourselves up!” I am really impressed with her Greek.
Flag struggles to catch the rope. This is strange. How can he be after the rope that’s in my mirage?
Now I’ve got the rope. Somehow we’ve reached the trail. Crawling. Facedown. Rolling over the lip, propelled by our knees. Stand? I can’t. Biscuits and Flag haul up the rope that I seem to remember is attached to Tollo. It occurs to me that this might not be delirium.
“Hey!”
Biscuits kneels over me. I’m on my face on the ice; she rolls me over.
Hey!
What?
Sh
e grabs me by the hair and shakes me so hard the roots almost come out.
“Hey!” she shouts into my ear. “Are you stupid?”
18
What saves our lives are Tollo’s fleece and military cloak. With these we roof the shallow kennel that Biscuits has chopped out of the ice. I am struggling, she tells me later, to drag Tollo in with us. It takes Flag pummeling me with both elbows (he can no longer feel his hands) before I understand our Color Sergeant is dead.
“He was croaked at the bottom,” Flag declares.
I’m furious. Why didn’t Flag tell me? He has made us break our backs. But I am in awe of him too. My God, what a soldier! What a friend.
“Strip the corpse!” Biscuits shouts over the wind. Without Tollo’s kit, the three of us cannot survive the night.
Never! I cry. And leave him naked?
The absurdity hits me. Flag too. We start laughing. We can’t stop.
It takes ten minutes to beat Tollo’s garments apart from his frozen flesh. Flag and I remain convulsed. Flag takes the boar’s-tusk cap. This prompts another round of hilarity. Tears freeze round our eyes; ice mats our beards.
Poor Tollo lies naked. Blue with frost. Slippery. We have to moor him like a dinghy, to a half-pike planted in the ice, to keep him from plunging again over the side. We are ashamed of our hysteria but we can’t stop.
We endure the endless night in our ice-hole, Biscuits and I, with Flag between us. His feet ride against my belly; she clamps his hands under her arms. In the morning, we are rescued by advance elements of the column coming up from behind. They prize us from our tomb, rigid as the dead. Incredibly, the day turns warm. By noon, when we reunite with Knuckles and Little Red, sent back in search of us by Stephanos, the sun blazes so fiercely that we have to strip our cloaks. We tie them atop the oxhide sledge on which we haul Tollo’s corpse.
The descent to the plains takes nine more days. It is on this stretch, the northern (sunless) flanks of the Hindu Kush, that the army’s suffering approaches its apogee. We transit the Khawak Pass for six days. It seems we will never get out. Twenty-two miles to the summit, twenty-four more to the Foothill Trail. Flag has vowed to pack Tollo all the way down to the plains; he will not see his mate interred in some icebound den, to be dishonored in spring by wolves or Afghans. But we have no strength to haul his weight. Scores of others labor like we do, sledging the corpses of comrades lost to the cold. In the end we plant Tollo beneath a rock cairn with thirty others. Big rocks, that predators and barbarians can’t shoulder aside.
Each day starts in deep shadow. The sun is up but the peaks block it. Bellies are empty; legs feel like lead. The column packs out. By noon, heaven’s heat is assaulting the peaks above. Now come the avalanches. It is spring. The high melt loosens the snow-mass clinging to the face. Again and again slides bury the trail. It takes forever to dig through. The first day in the pass we make three miles. The third, less than one. The native tiris, underground bunkers where the locals hide their winter stores, cannot be located, even by our guides paid fortunes. The worst is that so much of what we have jettisoned in our extremity is food. Nothing left. We gnaw wax and wood; we eat our spare shoes. The army has trained, in Kabul, to too much leanness; there’s no grease on our bones. And so many are ill equipped in clothing and footgear. Beside the trail, men lie down and do not get up, close their eyes and never open them again.
With hunger, column discipline breaks down. The infuriating hurry-up-and-stop rhythm, common to any line of men strung out one behind the other, becomes lethal as snowslides break the column into sections cut off from one another. Whoever has even a patch of food finds himself under siege from mates starving. A jar of honey goes for six months’ wages. Sesame oil to rub ourselves down against the cold (olive oil is all gone) fetches an empress’s ransom. This was Biscuits’ cargo, but she has dumped it on the Clothesline to help haul Tollo. The order comes to slaughter the pack animals, one per company. No wood to make a fire; we gag the meat down raw.
On the sixth day Alexander appears. Incredibly, our king has trekked back, miles from the column’s head, accompanied by Hephaestion and some pages of his suite. Yes, the troops have cursed his name. Watching comrades perish, no few have condemned our lord for his recklessness to dare this wilderness so early in the season. Now at sight of him, they are struck through with shame. Here before us, in his plain cavalryman’s cloak, stands our sovereign, who could be dining in the warmth of the lowlands by now but has chosen instead to come back to us and bear our sufferings at our side. He does not ride. He walks. He has no food. None for us, none for himself. When the column halts for camp, our lord digs roots of silphium from beneath the snow with the blade of his own pike and on this fodder for goats makes his supper. Seeing a man down, Alexander lifts him with his own hands. Troops at the column’s head, he tells us, will in three days’ time be plucking pears from orchards on Bactria’s sun-warmed plains. Take heart, mates! Bear up! The sufferings we endure now, bitter as they may be, will be made good in the currency of comrades’ lives spared when we descend in the enemy’s rear, where he does not expect us and has prepared no defenses.
The foe will fly, Alexander pledges, struck through with terror by our appearance in strength from these cruel passes, which feat was believed impossible at this season until we did it.
BOOK THREE
The Bactrian Plain
19
The Bactrian plain, to which the army descends now with joy, is an oasis of green and plenty. The men’s spirits revive at the sight of orchards of pear and plum, and terraced fields of rice and barley. The Bactrians are civilized; they have towns, not villages. In other words, something to lose. Forty places surrender in eleven days. The corps strides in warm sun, on good roads, into Afghanistan’s breadbasket.
Alexander’s gamble has paid off. Bessus and Spitamenes flee north, to put the Oxus River between themselves and their Macedonian pursuers. Signs of the enemy’s hasty decampment are everywhere. The foe has attempted to scorch the country, but the local planters (whose property Bessus and Spitamenes would send up in smoke) have by mighty exertions rescued their goods. They double- and triple-charge us, but we don’t care; we’re so happy to be warm and alive.
At Drapsaca, army engineers erect a vast tent hospital to treat the thousands of cases of frostbite and exposure. The army’s kit is rags; half the corps treks barefoot. Our animals are skin and bones. Still Alexander and the elite brigades make ready to push on. Stephanos calls our mob together. We are free, he says, to enter the hospital. “But if you do, you can kiss your career good-bye. Alexander pursues the enemy now, and he’ll remember the name of every man who marches with him.”
Flag has two black fingers and one gone toe. He chops them off himself with a maul and a sawyer’s wedge. Hundreds do likewise throughout the corps, or have mates do it for them. Men would sooner die than enter the medics’ tent.
The army crosses the Stone Desert in an ordeal of heat and thirst. Three hundred more perish, and seven hundred horses. Alexander reaches the Oxus two days behind the foe. The river is twelve hundred yards wide. Bessus and Spitamenes have crossed, burning their boats behind them. The Mack army pitches camp and starts building bridges and rafts.
Our women are still with us. The ordeals of mountain and desert have transformed them. They have earned our respect and their own. They fear now only the halt, when the corps may decide it no longer needs them. Biscuits paints my sore-pocked soles with vinegar and binds them with moleskin. Ghilla sets bones. Another girl, Jenin, sets up as the outfit’s source for nazz and pank. The women have become indispensable. Even Flag defends them.
Our sergeant has changed, too, since the mountains. Tollo’s death has hit him hard. Grief makes Flag more human. I hear him use the word “son,” addressing Lucas. At Drapsaca, he is awarded a Silver Lion, his fourth. The citation comes with half a talent of silver. Flag pays for the burial of the four women lost in the mountains and arranges a clean abortion, in-hospital by an army
doctor, for a fifth. He refits all our kit. What’s left he sends home to Tollo’s kin.
I have come to know this man whom, before, I regarded more with awe and fear than respect. I see the whole of him now. He is a soldier in the noblest sense of the word. Tough, selfless, long-suffering. “Here, this is for you.” He tugs me aside at the town of Taloqan, setting Tollo’s boar’s-tusk cap in my fist.
I can’t wear it.
I don’t deserve it.
But at Flag’s insistence I tuck it inside my pack. “Ghosts are good luck,” he says. He calls our half section together. The second litter will have a new Number One: me.
Can he be joking?
“You’re promoted to Corporal, Matthias. Congratulations.”
From that day, I attend all command briefings. It feels ridiculous. I can’t make myself give orders to Rags or Knuckles or Lucas. “Learn how,” Flag commands. He includes me now in his private thoughts and deliberations. Every noise he gets from up the chain, he shares with me. I can walk up to Stephanos now and address him as if he were a friend. Indeed, he becomes short with me if I don’t.
Flag passes Tollo’s boots and cloak to Biscuits, with ten drachmas (a year’s wages for a porter) from our fallen comrade’s purse. She has earned it. “What gift,” he inquires of her in the squad’s name, “would you like from us?” Name it, our fellows agree, and we will grant it if we can.
“I would like you all,” she declares, “to stop calling me Biscuits.”
20
The European cannot appreciate the wretchedness of station of a lone female in the East. Such a creature is lower than a dog, for the animal at least has a worthy use to guard the camp. An unprotected woman isn’t fit, in the eyes of her Afghan countrymen, even to be raped and murdered. They would sooner stone her. She is an outcast, abandoned by God and her ancestors. Evil fortune attaches to her, and the clansman fears nothing so much as bad luck.
The Afgan Campaign Page 10