The Afgan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  Still no one has seen Lucas.

  42

  I have never seen men so eager for battle. Twenty-seven months of frustration have driven our Macks more than a little mad. They want to crack skulls. They burn to make widows.

  Our companies form up under Bullock in a vale alongside a line of catapults being fixed to their limbers. Unit strength is supposed to be 256. Count tops out at 91. Nobody cares. Wherever a man finds himself, let him pick a crew and slot in.

  Stephanos canters the line, forming us into wedges. We’ll be backing up the merc cav. “I don’t suppose,” Flag says, “anyone has anything like actual orders.”

  Stephanos indicates the mercs. “Just do what they do.”

  The hired cav are Phrygians and Cappadocians. You can tell by their pointy caps. We don’t even speak the same language. Dice reins alongside Boxer and Little Red. “Welcome to gang-fuck!” He’s laughing.

  The mercs pull out in column of wedges. They seem to know what they’re doing. They’re all lancers, with earflap cawls and pennants snapping on the ends of their twelve-footers. We’re trotting down a swale between tall barrows. It’s like passing between burial mounds. The battlefield, or what will become the battlefield, is just over the left-hand rise. We turn a corner and there it is.

  Snow is dumping in sheaves now. Clear of the vale, the cold hits like a wall of ice. Where is the foe? The weather is deteriorating so fast we can’t see more than one wedge in front of us. With the wind and snow, we can’t hear a thing.

  Where is Alexander?

  Where’s Spitamenes?

  In every other scrape I’ve been in, the dominant element has been confusion, succeeded by doubt and terror. Here it’s only confusion. I feel no fear at all. I keep scanning round for Lucas. Let him be all right and I’ll croak without a second thought.

  Our wedges follow the mercs. The column swings right. The barrows are at our right shoulder now; we’re at the canter, paralleling them. To our left and down a long gale-scoured slope stretches a vast bowl filling up with snow. We pass company after company of light infantry advancing into this. They make no haste. They’re jabbering to each other, careless as fishwives in the market. Curtains of snow descend; you can see the troops but can’t hear them. The footing beneath my pony’s hooves is hard as stone and slick as marble.

  Historians will demonstrate later that Spitamenes had no choice but to come, on this site at this hour, into the open. Alexander’s forts have compassed the Wolf, leaving him no safe patch to set down upon. The foe’s supplies have been cut off. Doubtless his hot-blood tribesmen provoke him in council. The Massagetae won’t stay the winter without some adventure after plunder. He’ll lose them and the Daans and Sacae if he doesn’t act with audacity. They’ll scatter and never rally round him as a leader again.

  The Wolf has no choice but to attack. He knows Alexander wants him to. He knows our king has contrived events to give him no other option. And he knows that as soon as he does attack, Alexander will race north from his ready camp at Nautaca with every man and horse he’s got.

  So be it.

  A straight-up brawl at last.

  Our merc cav come left in column. We follow. The mercenaries transit directly behind the light infantry, forming a second front rearward of the foot troops; then their leaders come about in that evolution called the Laconian countermarch, like racehorses round a turning pole or a team of oxen plowing a field. Dice hails me as we skipper through the blowing snow. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Just follow these bastards!” I’m as lost as he is.

  Our mounted force draws up on the rim of the snow bowl, behind the broad front of infantry. We’re in the middle now, in column with our long axis flank-on to the fight; the merc cav rein on our right wing in the same formation. We can hear but not yet see the clash taking place half a mile downslope.

  Alexander has sent forward in a hollow square eight hundred Lydian and Median cavalry with twelve hundred merc infantry (the same troops, we’ll learn later, that Lucas and I marched out from home with). These are the bait. Against them, Spitamenes has flung a crescent of Massagetae and Daan horsemen. The horns of the enemy’s charge have enveloped our fellows. The foe assaults the square of infantry by swarms, barbarian-style, ringing it with a great whooping mass of horsemen, who circle at the canter, keeping just out of spear and javelin range, while making rushes in groups upon our men, pulsing in and out, slinging volley after volley of arrows and darts.

  Right and left, we can hear Mack trumpets. The infantry downslope of us step out now. They drop down the flank of the snow bowl at the double, their boots lifting great eddies of white. The foot troops’ front extends right and left out of sight. They make straight for the swarming circle of enemy horsemen. Stephanos wheels his gelding Parataxis, “Pitched Battle,” out front. He holds us back till the infantry has advanced about a hundred yards down the hill. Now we go. Behind the dirt-eaters, at the walk. On our right, the merc cav advance in the same manner. I still have no idea what the hell we’re supposed to do. Neither does Dice; neither does Boxer. We all strain toward Stephanos. He doesn’t know either.

  This is my first real stand-up battle. Like everyone, I’ve heard a thousand accounts of such clashes, of trumpets and pennants and great thundering charges of massed troops and horses. But nothing prepares me for the scale or the sound or the mad irresistible sweep of the thing. The emotion of the animals is overwhelming. Like us, horses evacuate their innards when seized by fear and excitement. Everywhere you look, mounts are shitting and pissing; the stink cuts our nostrils; the frozen air steams with it. The ponies stamp and whinny; you can feel them slipping from their riders’ control. They are reverting to the law of the herd. So are we. Hooves fling divots of frozen sod. The earth bucks and shudders beneath us. The field puts up an inhuman, throbbing thrum.

  I am a corporal; I command a litter of eight. Every sense screams to me, Grasp your orders! Take charge! This is impossible. We are caught, all of us, in the tide and current of the hour. When our horses go, we’ll go with them. Orders? Zeus himself could not make himself heard above this din, and even if he could, the momentum of the instant would overwhelm his mightiest cries. I understand more with my seat than with my senses. The infantry’s job, I see, is to screen the merc cav, to prevent the foe from discovering our advance. Out front the enemy pours squadron after squadron of tribal horsemen into his great galloping ring. He thinks to finish off our initial divisions, then turn on the advancing foot troops and pull the same stunt on them.

  We’re halfway down the slope now. Battle sounds ascend from the bowl in a deafening cacophony. I see Stephanos gallop before our front; an officer of the merc cav rides beside him. This fellow trails a pennant rider, a youth no older than fourteen, at his shoulder. The boy bears aloft a great snaky “serpent” of crimson. Without a word every man understands.

  Follow him.

  Follow his flag.

  The merc cav on our right are turning rightward now, by the flank. Into column again. The way we entered. They go from the walk to the trot. Our horses understand before we do. They want to canter. At once I get it. We all do.

  “Understand, Dice?” I bawl into the sheeting snow.

  He laughs, pointing his lance toward the merc cav. “Do what they do!”

  Here we go. The last glimpse I get before our column spurs rightward is of the corps of pages galloping onto the slope above us, bearing the banner of the agema of the Companions, the former Royal Squadron, and the Lion Standard of Macedon. Alexander and the Companions. A thrill shoots from my pony’s hooves through the crown of my skull and right out the top.

  This is the day.

  The only way to counter Scythian tactics, the great wheeling circle of horse archers, is to block it from the side. Make it break down. Drive it against a river or a mountain or a precipice. Then infantry and cavalry can bring their weapons to bear. But here on the steppes of the Wild Lands, there are no rivers or mountains or precipices
. That’s why Scythian tactics work so well.

  What you must do-and what Alexander does now-is to use men and horses to make a river, a mountain, a precipice. That is our role now. Ours and the merc cav. At the gallop, the elite hired troopers of Phrygia and Cappadocia emerge from behind the horns of the screen of advancing infantry. One wing goes right, one goes left. In a great sweep they swing out and back. They hit the wheeling enemy on both extremities of his ring.

  Now the foe is pinned between infantry front and back and cavalry right and left. His circle shatters like a wheel against four stones. Our litter trails the columns of merc cav as they thunder onto the foe.

  It would give me supreme pleasure to relate how the shock of our company’s rush broke the enemy and drove him before us in flight, not to mention how my lance personally dispatched this hero and that champion. In fact, the merc cav does everything before we even get there. Ours is probably the twentieth column to strike the foe. He is already reeling. We are just a wall. A hedge of pikes and horseflesh to pin Spitamenes’ hordes and crack his wheel into spokes and splinters.

  Now Alexander and his Companions charge.

  Our king leads eighteen hundred heavy cavalry in squadron column of wedges, two hundred men each. At the gallop, this force can cross a hundred yards in seven seconds. When it rips into the belly of the last of the circling foe, it shatters his momentum and turns his multitude into a milling, disordered mass.

  The fight is over so fast it’s almost disappointing. By now the tribesmen’s bolts have been shot. His mounts are blown, the fever of his assault is exhausted. Now the sarissas of our light and heavy infantry and the lances of the merc cav turn upon him. In moments, twelve hundred of the foe are slain. Thousands fling down their arms. Spitamenes himself bolts the field.

  Our company ranges about the belly of the bowl, snatching every loose horse we can lay hands on. The field is soup. The frozen turf has been punched through in every quarter. It’s all muck now. Everywhere the foe holds up empty hands. Their spent animals floundering in the slop, Bactrians and Sogdians drop their arms by the hundreds. Their erstwhile allies, the Sacae and Massagetae, seize the chance to raid their own mates’ baggage, lingering long enough to grab all the ponies and women they can before using the snow to screen their getaway into the Wild Lands.

  With victory, the field has become a churning mill of horseflesh. War mounts in hundreds stamp the mud to lather. Our lads whoop and whistle, on fire to snatch a prize mount, or at least a plug yaboo they can turn over for a quick purse of silver. Where is Lucas? I spur through the roundup. Suddenly a flash of white strikes my eye.

  Snow!

  My pretty little mare that I lost on the Many Blessings!

  Only a rider will believe it, that out of such a seething stampede of livestock, one’s glance can pick out an individual beast. But there she is. I whistle. Her ears turn. In an instant I have dismounted and crossed to her; I fling my arms round her neck. When she smells me, she knows me.

  Emotion overwhelms me. I stroke my darling’s muzzle. I understand, even as my heart overflows with it, that my elation at her recovery is a surrogate for other losses, far keener and not yet made good. Beloved comrades for whom my heart cannot yet mourn; missing brothers for whom even now I seek. They all become one for me in the form of this dear animal, whom I believed I would never see again and who now, one horse out of five thousand, has miraculously been delivered into my arms.

  I can hear men talking roundabout. Spitamenes, they’re saying, has gotten away. Our fastest riders pursue him. Where is Alexander? Seeing to the surrender of the Bactrians and Sogdians.

  A Mack sergeant says he saw Spitamenes’ son. I come alert in the instant. “Where? When?”

  “What, mate?”

  “You said you saw him. Where?”

  The sergeant is busy with his own captured horses. He and his mates turn away. I chase them, demanding to know if they saw or didn’t. The sergeant faces back, hot and chapped. “Take it easy, brother. I’m just telling what I heard…”

  “Then you didn’t see him?”

  “No, but many did.”

  I’m furious. I demand to know how he dares pass such tales without substantiation. He repeats: Spitamenes and his son have fled. “They fucked off, the pair of them! Is that enough for you, mate?”

  The sergeant’s comrades shove me back. Boxer and Little Red collar me. I feel like the top of my skull is coming off. If Spitamenes’ son is alive, then…

  “Matthias!”

  Dice’s voice booms above the din.

  “Matthias, here!”

  I turn to see him and two other mates rein in, coming from the battlefield. Despite the cold, they’re sweating. They’ve been looking all over for me, Dice declares. Their expressions are grave. Then I see the Headquarters lieutenant with them. I salute.

  “You’re Matthias, son of Matthias, of Apollonia?”

  I tell him I am.

  His face looks grimmer, even, than the others’.

  “You will come with me now,” he says.

  43

  In the staff tent stand an iron brazier, three trunks serving as chairs, and a campaign table. The lieutenant sets Lucas’s notebook on top. “Do you recognize this?”

  It’s a worn leather roll with two rawhide ties. Into the grain of the flap is carved the device of an elk being slain by a griffin.

  “Did you hear me, Corporal? Do you recognize it?”

  Soldiers know how to make their hearts go dead. You drop out of yourself. Light changes; sound goes queer. It’s like you’re looking down a tunnel. You see nothing but what’s right in front of you and even that appears as if it’s being observed not by you but by some surrogate, some counterform of yourself that has been denatured and hollowed out, leaving only a shell numb as stone.

  I am aware of the lieutenant placing onto the table Lucas’s helmet and dagger. He even produces the overcloak I gave Lucas as he rode off with Agathocles-and the sack of kishar and lentils.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. And turning to his aide: “Get him something to drink.”

  When the lieutenant leaves, Dice spits out the story.

  The party of Agathocles, Lucas, and Costas, escorting Spitamenes’ son, was fallen upon by Bactrian tribesmen only two days after striking out from the capture site. The foe had carried the Macks, bound and blindfolded, to a camp called Chalk Bluffs, where a multitude of their kinsmen had assembled. The clansmen nailed our countrymen to boards, painted them with pitch, and set them alight. Further outrages were performed upon them while they still lived. Then they were beheaded. Their remains were dragged behind the foe’s ponies until they broke apart and fell away.

  I ask Dice how he knows this.

  “The villains made boast of it. In a post to Alexander.”

  Our troops, Dice says, found the skulls in the enemy camp immediately after the battle, in captured wagons of the Bactrians, along with our fellows’ weapons and kit, which the foe had taken as trophies.

  Night falls. Mack patrols fan across the steppe, seeking Spitamenes, who has become now, in the snow, one set of tracks among thousands. Alexander prepares the brigades to give chase as soon as the Wolf is discovered. Our section under Stephanos has been pulled out of the line. No one tells us why. I do not sleep. I will not eat. Only one object animates my purpose: to return to action as soon as possible and pay these fiends out for the abominations they have visited upon my friend.

  44

  But Headquarters has quarantined us. Our section has been segregated to a compound on the margins of the camp. Intelligence has set up two tents. That night they bring in our officers and chief sergeants-Stephanos, Flag, the two young lieutenants who were present when Spitamenes’ son was captured. What they’re asking, no one knows. When they’re finished, they direct our commanders to the opposite wing of the compound, so they can’t talk to us who haven’t been called yet.

  My turn comes around midnight. A hailstorm has got up; pellets of ice
rip through the camp, tearing up tents and windbreaks. The cold and din are indescribable.

  The Headquarters lieutenant interviews me. This is in the same tent where he showed me Lucas’s notebook. He congratulates me and our company on our part in this glorious victory. I am to be decorated and promoted sergeant. Bonuses for all. Then he sets a document on the table before me. I am to read and sign it.

  “You do read, Corporal?”

  I regard him. “Barely.”

  The scroll is a report of the action against Spitamenes. It is accurate within reason. Except at the finish, where it recounts the deaths of Lucas, Agathocles, and the journalist Costas. All are given heroic demises, in combat on the field.

  “That isn’t how it happened,” I say.

  The ice storm booms against the sailcloth of the tent. Coals in the brazier flare with the gale.

  The lieutenant dismisses my statement. “All your mates have signed it.”

  He shows me Flag’s mark, and Stephanos’s and the two lieutenants, and our officers all the way up to Bullock.

  “Lucas and the others were killed,” I say, “days earlier, on the prairie. Run down by Afghan cavalry and butchered.”

  “Please,” says the lieutenant. “Make your mark.”

  Why, I ask, is it even necessary for me to sign? I’m only a corporal. Who cares what I say?

  “Headquarters wants marks from all.”

  If it hadn’t been so bitter cold, if I hadn’t been so exhausted, I might have scrawled my sign. Narik ta? What difference does it make? But the lieutenant’s manner puts my back up. With emotion I recount the capture of Spitamenes’ son on the steppe. I describe Agathocles’ insistence on delivering the prisoner to the column at once, and how Costas the correspondent and my friend Lucas volunteered to join the party that set off alone into the void. “The enemy caught them and massacred them. That’s what happened.”