The Afghan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  “Mules can be expensive,” Ash observes.

  We tell him we are learning this.

  “Women are cheaper.”

  We don’t understand.

  Our host mimes the hefting of a cargo pack. “Three women can carry as much as one mule and eat only half. And at night in camp,” he grins, “you can get a leg over.”

  We find our way to my brother’s quarters two hours before midnight. Elias and two other Companions have rented a house in Gram Tal, the town that will become the city of Kandahar.

  The place is packed when we enter and booming with timbrel and kithara. Tapers light the hall. We can’t find Elias. On campaign there is no such thing as an andron, a room for men only. Here wives and lovers dine at their men’s shoulders. We run into Costas, the young correspondent we met on the track from Phrada. He becomes our guide. Four separate banquets pack the apartments; our countrymen are so blind and so affable, it takes us a quarter of an hour to work through to the rear chamber, where my brother and his mates host their salon.

  The room is low and broad and laid out Afghan-style, no couches or chairs, everyone on carpets on the floor. Macks in various stages of inebriation litter the chamber, some passed out in corners, others sprawled against walls. The main body surrounds a low table, animated with conversation. Elias hails us. We are crunched in beside him and his lady. Costas carries a bumper of wine, which he contributes to the krater, to round applause. The troopers are all from F.O., Forward Operations; every man swanks the black-and-tan scarf that marks him as Reconnaissance.

  My brother bawls introductions. At his back stands an Afghan shikari. The word means “mountain wolf.” These are guides, ferocious-looking specimens who accompany all forward cavalry. I have never seen one up close. The man is between fifty and sixty, lean as a reed, with great black mustaches that he keeps rigid with paraffin. His trousers are baggy khurgans bloused into lambskin boots, with vest, jacket, and pettu, the long woolen wrap that serves as greatcoat, wind shelter, and sleeping roll. He carries the standard three Afghan knives, tucked into a crimson sash round his waist, and packs as well two javelins of cornel wood with blades of iron. Elias makes no introductions; to do so apparently would violate proper form. I know from his letters that Elias’s familiarity with the northern tribes is extensive. He has fought Bactrian and Sogdian cavalry in the Babylonian and Persian campaigns, and, serving after victory as a courier to them and later an envoy, has brought in numbers for hire in special units under Alexander. Elias owns acquaintance with the two great barons, Spitamenes and Oxyartes, who ride with the pretender Bessus now on the Bactrian side of the mountains. He says nothing of this throughout the evening, nor do I observe him exchange a single word with his guide, though the man remains at his shoulder—standing, never taking a seat—all night.

  I beg Elias to pull strings and get me and Lucas included in his company; we will serve even as grooms. With a laugh my brother dismisses this, citing several transparent pretexts. Clearly he is protecting me. Forward Operations is dangerous. “Drink up,” he shouts. “We’ll talk later.”

  I am astonished at the quantities of spirits my brother pours down. In Macedon, Elias was always the most moderate of topers. Now he is tight as a clam. They all are. Liquor is hard, distilled from rye and barley, fiery enough to gag a horse. I try to keep up but the room starts spinning. My brother sees and grins with delight. Sozzled as he is, he has lost no sense. When he rises to pour a libation, not a drop spills.

  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 a
cross 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.