The Afghan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  “And what is right, Matthias? Or do you take the enemy’s side too?”

  “When we were boys,” I say, “we rode from dark to dark, training for the charge and the chase. We dreamed of standing before our king as knights and heroes. I still do.” I turn to Lucas and the others. “There must be some way to be a good soldier in a rotten war.”

  Boxer laughs. “When you find it, Matthias, be sure and let us know.”

  23.

  The brigades at Cyropolis are granted three days’ rest. The men need it badly, but the break is even more critical for the horses and mules, who must get green forage or they’ll break down. The siege train has caught up with the army now. With it comes mail. I get twelve letters from Danae, all in one packet. The most recent is seven months old. Flag gives me half an hour to savor this correspondence. “Then get back to camp and be ready to move.”

  I find a patch of shade beneath a mud-brick wall. In the square before me, our section and another are roping up women and children prisoners. As I said, Alexander has in this campaign for the first time permitted troopers to take captives and sell them for their own profit. Clearly our king’s object is less to put money in the men’s purses than to fire our zeal in rounding up every last dame and urchin, so that not so much as a runty whelp gets away to bear hope to his compatriots. We have thrown in together, our section and another, agreeing to divvy the proceeds of the day’s take.

  I flop in the dust with Danae’s letters. Like every scuff, I arrange them first in order—most recent on top. That way I’ll know early if my darling has sent me a “Sorry, Sweetheart.”

  Sure enough, she has.

  Another man. Danae fears her youth passing. She loves me but…

  Like all soldiers, I have dreaded this hour. I have rehearsed it and braced for it, expecting it to devastate me. Now in the event, I feel no distress. I feel nothing.

  Across the square, the slavers are branding their catch. They’re all Arabs, these villains; they know a poor crop when they see one, and these Afghan brats and bitches are certainly that. Insolent, illiterate, in love with freedom, they can be domesticated no more than a pack of jackals. On the trail they will bolt or die.

  Danae’s message is seven months old. It occurs to me that she has probably wed by now. Likely she is with child.

  Some perverse impulse makes me open and read the other letters, the earlier ones when my betrothed is still mine. It is these that break my heart. The reality is apparent in lines unwritten that Danae has met and is growing attached to that man who now replaces me in her affections. Can I blame her?

  I am with Shinar.

  I have been for months.

  I’m the one who has played false, not Danae.

  The slavers appraise their inventory as they would horses or mules. They check teeth and feet. They take care when thrashing their stock (which they do with a cruelty exceeding even that of the Afghans themselves) not to inflict injury that will damage the goods.

  I return to camp to find a blow-off going. Soldiers are not grim after massacres. They booze and crack wise. Have they taken prizes? Will there be a bonus or a step? If they have lost a friend, it enlarges their hatred of the foe. They feel no remorse. They have done a good day’s work.

  I grab chow with Knuckles and Lucas. I say nothing about Danae’s letter. My mates are toting up the women and children in the day’s bag. Boxer is off making a deal with the Arabs. Knuckles reminds Lucas and me of our first fighting debacle, long months ago, in the village with the sheep pens.

  “You’ve come a long way.”

  “Rot in hell,” Lucas tells him.

  Flag appears with orders. We are to be ready to move two hours before dawn. We’ll be part of the column heading south to pursue Spitamenes. Alexander will press north by forced marches to deal with the tribes beyond the Jaxartes. Knuckles stands and scratches. “How much did Boxer get?” He means for the slaves.

  Flag makes no answer.

  “What about those boys?” Knuckles cites three healthy youths we took captive in a quarry. Twelve or thirteen years old. Worth real money.

  Flag squints away toward the mountains. “In the citadel,” he says, “some of our fellows stumbled onto the site where the Afghans butchered our garrison.”

  He means all captives, in reprisal, will be put to the sword. There goes our slave money.

  “What a war,” says Knuckles.

  24.

  The Many Blessings is the river of Maracanda. Our relief column tracks along it, hurrying to catch Spitamenes, who’s besieging the city. Where the river emerges from the heights northeast of the walls, it does so as a torrent, thundering down a gap called the Gorge of the Sisters (memorializing two Afghan virgins who, lore declares, leapt to their deaths in a gesture of defiance against some ancient invader); then it levels out and drops underground. When you ride over it, you can hear the waters rushing beneath the earth. Near the village of Zardossa the flow re-emerges, funneling down another defile, this time a sunken one, at a ford called Council Bluffs. By there, the river has spread to half a mile wide and become so shallow it can be waded by a child. Numerous bars and islands, called by the natives “travelers,” stud the channel. From one bank you can barely see the other. The shore and islands stand thick with willow, broom, and cottonwood, the kind of stuff that flourishes near underground water. This day, in fall, the cottony seeds sail on the wind. The air is snowy with them.

  Our column is twenty-three hundred, three-quarters infantry, all mercs, under Andromachus, called Whiskers for his great bushy red beard, and Menedemus, a dashing and brilliant cavalry commander, only twenty-seven years old, who at nineteen had taken the crown at Olympia in the pentathlon. Our half squadron under Flag and Stephanos is assigned flank security; we ride on the forward right wing, looking out for ambushes. It’s a four-day chop, moving fast, through semidesert populated by scrub brush, camel thorn, and tamarisk. I trot, all the second day, with the poet.

  Stephanos is one of the few Macks who does not carry, as the phrase goes, a camp woman. He has a wife and children back home, though no one has heard him speak of them; we know only that he pouches a letter to them every day. This reveals little, however, since the poet maintains simultaneous correspondence with scores of other colleagues, actors, philosophers, musicians, and heaven knows who else. When the army puts over at a foreign city, it is Stephanos’s habit to take apartments in town, on his own, even if the corps has assigned him to camp or cantonments. He does this to write. It’s easy to forget how famous he is. He is invited constantly to banquets and functions (which the army suffers in the interest of local relations), at which he appears in formal military dress, usually squiring one of the city’s ladies of fashion, often poets themselves, or else patronesses of the arts. My fascination with the fellow has enlarged, if anything, as our acquaintance has grown. No one really knows him. Even drunk, he will not spill his guts. I find myself watching him when he doesn’t know I’m looking. I study how he drinks and dines; the most minor detail of his conversation captivates me. Does he speak with approval of some author? I scour the camp for that fellow’s book. Has he voiced distrust of a certain officer? I won’t go near the man.

  Since the mountains, the poet has become a champion for our Afghan women. On the march he will make occasion to fall in at their sides, conversing in Farsi or Dari or, with Shinar, in Greek. He takes their cause with the army. I have seen him teaching Shinar to read. He thinks I don’t appreciate her, and he lets me know.

  “What you must keep in mind, Matthias, is that this young woman who shares the hazards of your life—and all her sisters who do likewise with our fellows—has traversed seas of the soul such as you and I cannot begin to fathom. In her village, even to be glimpsed by a foreigner would cost her a beating. To speak to one would mean her life. Now here they are, with us. Do you think these women have put such disrepute behind them? It burns in their vitals every hour. Each scrap of pleasure they share with us, they pay for in the cu
rrency of secret shame. Yet they love us. This girl loves you. Have you heard her, ever, speak the name of God? She cannot, for in her eyes she and her sisters are heaven’s outcasts, banished to an exile from which they can never return. ‘May you see God’s back’ is the cruelest Afghan curse. Such is your girl’s bitter bread, which she must choke down anew at every sunrise.”

  I ask, has he written verses of these girls? He will not answer.

  “Soldiers and their women,” declares the poet, “are not as crude as their betters imagine. To watch your brother Elias and his mistress, one could believe he was looking on a lord and lady, so solicitous is each of the other’s weal. Even Flag, who prefers wantons, will not mistreat them. And what, while we’re at it, of this corps of bawds and strumpets that tracks the army beneath all weathers? They have become sisters to us. No dame back home laughs as gaily as they, or so gives herself over to such simple pleasures as a bath in a river, a tussle in the snow. The army packs infants in thousands. Who cares for them? These wenches scorned by all. As whores they may have started; they have become mothers and sisters and wives. How excruciating must the torment be to them, who know that the man they call husband in this country will cast them aside when his discharge comes and return home to his real wife and children, never to speak again of this matron and her brats with whom he has shared the keenest joys and sorrows of his life. Do you remember on the Oxus when the told-off Thessalians were selling their horses? How poignant those partings! Yet next day those same men turned out mothers and children too. How did those abandoned feel? Have they endured less than we? Every league we tramp, they trek with us. They suffer casualties as we do. They perish of fatigue and want, of thirst and disease. They are kicked by mules; they spill down mountainsides; frost takes their limbs. Nor are they immune to enemy action, for the foe knows well how to raid our camps and in fact seeks them out, particularly these marauders of the Wild Lands—Daans and Sacae and Massagetae—for whom pillage and the taking of plunder is second nature. These maids know how to fight too. Every one packs a spike in her hair and reckons all the soft spots to sink it. These jades and doxies are the unhonored champions of our cause. Without them, we couldn’t last a month.”

  The column relieves Maracanda without incident. Spitamenes, who has held the city briefly, takes to his heels at our approach. The natives claim that his flight is at their urging; they fear Alexander’s vengeance if the king believes the city has harbored his foe. Or perhaps this is just their story. In any event, as soon as Andromachus and Menedemus learn this (before our fellows have even dismounted), the column puts about in pursuit. As always, no one tells us anything. Our half squadron, which had constituted one wing of the vanguard, receives no orders until a courier sent by Andromachus rides up, noontime of this breezy, cotton-aired day, and instructs us to hold in place while the column countermarches past, back the way it came, then reconfigure ourselves as the rear guard. In other words, no mooch for us or our horses.

  “What genius came up with this stroke?”

  I am with Rags, Boxer, and Knuckles where the highway turns beneath the city walls. When our mob hears we are not going in, a groan rises from all. The city means grain and sweet water for our animals, bunks for us, or at least a squat behind walls and the chance of half a night’s sleep. Now instead we must make off, unfed, unrested, with night falling in a few hours, into country cut by hundreds of lateral defiles, any one of which could conceal a regiment, along a river which, with its dense brush and cottony air, will set us up blind as a fogbank, so that the foe may appear either from the brush of the desert, driving us into the soup, or from the shallow channel itself.

  “Children,” says Stephanos, “I don’t like the look of this.”

  Back we trot, along the same route we came. There is a peril to serving under a commander as audacious as Alexander and the peril is this: When the king is not present in person but others command in his stead, those officers feel ashamed to act with less dash or boldness than they imagine he would. This can get you into trouble. Soldiers sense it. They can smell a shitstorm coming.

  “Covers off!” bawls Flag, cantering along our front. He means strip the oxhide sleeves off our lanceheads. “Dust ’em up!” He bends for a handful of sand to abrade the shaft for a grip. I feel a brick descend in my bowels. I’d give ten days’ wages to stop for a crap. Enemy hoofprints carve a highway east. The track is so fresh that horse turds are practically steaming. He is a liar, on a trail so hot, who claims his chestnuts have not retracted into his loins.

  Our post is both wings, rear guard. We have passed Zardossa village; the river flows on our right, wide and shallow, choked with broom and willow. Left is all creosote and tamarisk. Bush country; you can’t see a hundred feet into it. Each two hundred yards another ravine notches through, like a side road entering a thoroughfare. Dark lacks two hours. The horses snaffle at each tributary; they’re thirsty, they want to get their noses down. Orders are to make speed. We quirt them across.

  March discipline dictates that a column in country that so favors an ambusher should proceed with extreme circumspection. Wing cavalry should sweep the brush in fifty-yard relays. Each dry ravine should be secured before the column passes. But daylight works against us. And the brush is so dense, it would take forever to comb even a quarter-mile swath. Wing security should be out on the river side too. We should be two squadrons, not two halves, and they should search all islands, as far as the opposite bank (which we cannot see because of the intervening “travelers,” the dense brush, and the snowing cotton).

  An hour till nightfall.

  Too far from Maracanda to summon help.

  Suddenly riders appear behind us. Their numbers match our half squadron of the rear guard; like us, they advance at the trot, about a furlong back. They show themselves so boldly that at first, we think they must be ours.

  Knuckles looses a piercing whistle, alerting Flag, who rides ahead on the wing. Beside him, on the bank road, march two companies of mercenary foot. Flag sends a rider to their captains. Already we can see the infantry deploy. Flag spurs back, signaling to us to form into wedges.

  Our numbers are eighty. We break into twenties. My charge is the leftmost ten. I put Knuckles at the point (meaning the rear) and ride, myself, to the wing. Left, the nearest island is about a hundred yards. I’ve got a bad feeling about it.

  Lucas spurs past, taking his slot in the wedge. “Are they ours?” he calls, meaning the riders behind us.

  Flag laughs. “Ride back and find out!”

  Already we can feel the column compressing. Men’s voices are shouting ahead. Something is going on up front. Through the cottony air, we glimpse companies forming fronts left, facing the bush, and right, toward the shallows.

  We enter a section of bluffs. High cut-banks ascend on the left. Horsemen appear atop them. Archers. Not ours. We have no archers. The riders behind have widened their front now. The tamarisk flat between river and bluffs is about an eighth mile. They fill it. Behind them more mounted men appear. Riding double—horseman and foot soldier. We have heard of this practice but never seen it. In action, the enemy drops off his second man at the gallop; this fellow joins the attack on foot.

  Stephanos reins from his post at the tail. “Sons of whores!” he calls, indicating the foe. “They’ve set this up from the start.”

  He means Spitamenes’ flight from Maracanda was fake all along. This ambush has been in place for days. The foe has had time to rehearse. Doubtless he has groomed the ground, carving deadfalls and leg-breakers, blocking escape routes with brush and felled timbers.

  I call to Flag to let me check the island. Too late. Without a sound the treeline comes alive. Horse archers emerge in a front. They do not loose their missiles, nor do they charge; they simply advance to the water’s edge and hold their position. That’s enough. Our whole company is now fixed in place. We can’t attack the riders to our rear or we imperil the foot troops we’re posted to protect, and we can’t charge the islan
d or we leave our own rear exposed. Lucas is cursing our forward wings for not clearing this obvious blind. Perhaps they did, and found it vacant. The foe, concealed behind more distant islands, could easily have spurred forward unseen once our scouts had passed.

  What other surprises has the Wolf laid for us? The island holds about two hundred men. When our infantry rushes, how many more will materialize?

  Soldiers are drilled to respond without orders to certain situations. Facing an advancing front of horsemen, cavalry attacks in wedges. Ambushed from the flank, infantry assaults straight-on. Ours are crack troops; they can perform such evolutions in their sleep. But no amount of skill or valor can help us now. We are in the trap and the jaws are closing.

  All glory to Spitamenes. The Desert Wolf has suckered us like bumpkins. He has used the terrain and the time of day, the length of the march and the dearth of water and fodder; he has used our arrogance and our ignorance. He has made us fight on his ground, by his rules.

  Our force is equal in number to the enemy. We are better trained and disciplined, with superior armor and weaponry. But we are strung out like ducks on the water. The Wolf will “swarm” us. He will hurl his wings onto our column’s head and tail, trapping and immobilizing our mates in the center. Then he’ll cut the column into sections. His horse archers will ring each isolated element, galloping round and round, loosing their bolts point-blank upon us, then scampering out of range when we try to get to close quarters. We have no missile troops. If our infantry leave the shelter of the square, armed only with spear and sword, the mounted foe will cut them off and slaughter them in detail. If we on horseback try the same stunt, Spitamenes’ men will back off till we don’t dare pursue farther. Either way, we are finished.

  It is clear what our rear guard must do, so obvious that our commanders don’t rein in even to pass the word. They simply advance to their posts, knowing each man will move on the signal. It comes. Flag leads our two wedges straight at the horsemen closing from the rear. Simultaneously our adjacent merc infantry forms up, a hundred across and four deep, and advances into the river, seeking to come to grips with the horse archers of the island. Stephanos holds back our remaining troopers, about 40, while our foot commanders retain their own reserve, 150 or so. We all know that the foe will withdraw before our charge, then hit us from the flank with concealed elements when we’ve run out too far from our base. There is nothing we can do about it. We have to strike first or the Wolf will drive us even deeper into the snare.