The Afghan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  Even at earth’s extremity,

  Almighty Zeus reigns.

  Men fly in vain from his justice,

  from which no crag stands too distant

  and no fastness too remote.

  This is the sum of Alexander’s oration. He turns and retires.

  That night passes like no other. There is no drinking and no gambling. Men wait only for orders. They apprehend what their king means by “justice.” Here at earth’s end, they will exact it. Each time a messenger appears, the soldiers rise, eager to receive their assignments.

  Lucas and I are still too infirm to participate. Still we must, or never face our comrades again. Orders are passed next morning. With them comes mail from home. This from my sister Eleni’s husband Agathon, a decorated captain of infantry, who lost his right hand at Issus in Alexander’s earlier, more honorable wars.

  Matthias from Agathon, greetings,

  I feel I can talk to you, now that you’ve been out there a while and know what it’s like. I sit now, watching my infant son, who is your sister’s child and your nephew, playing in the sunlight of the yard. Do you know, dear brother, that my own disfigurement had impressed itself so powerfully upon my imagination that when this child was born I expected that he, like me, would possess a stump instead of a limb. When I saw him whole and perfect, I wept. Through this babe I feel the whole world has been made new.

  Come home, brother! Well I know the seduction of war and of anger and fear! When your term expires, let no folly hold you. Come home to us before it is too late!

  Tears drizzle into the brush of my beard as I read these lines. Come home? How can I?

  Am I blind to the madness of vengeance? Can I not imagine armies and armies, stretching back across centuries, each crying the same meritless anthem of payback and revenge?

  I roll Agathon’s letter into my pack. There it remains, wedged beneath my sack of lentils and parched barley, when the corps moves downvalley, village to village, exacting God’s justice, until nothing remains living in all the region except old women and crows.

  BOOK FIVE

  Winter Quarters

  29.

  The army winters at Bactra City.

  Alexander has retaken Maracanda; the Desert Wolf has fled north to the Wild Lands. Spitamenes’ purpose is still not served by facing Macedonians straight-up. The foe disperses, waiting for spring.

  Afghanistan—once the passes close—becomes six different nations, each isolated from the others. Susia and Artacoana in the west are cut off from Bamian in the center, itself separated by impassable peaks from Phrada (now called Prophthasia, “Anticipation”) and Kandahar in the south, and from Kabul in the central Paropamisus. From the Areian Plateau, a hardy force can take the caravan road south via the Desert of Death and work back up the Helmand and Arghandab Valleys to Ghazni and Kapisa and Bagram, but from there there’s no mounting out via the Panjshir, Khawak, or any other pass north into Bactria. In Bactra City you’re cut off from the south by the Hindu Kush and from the northeast by the Scythian Caucasus. South of the Oxus, the tribal Sogdians scatter to their strongholds. As for the steppe beyond the Jaxartes, the place in winter becomes so inhospitable that the Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae themselves retire to balmier quarters.

  Lucas and I are confined to hospital at Bactra City. We hate it. No one who has not been a soldier can understand the imperative to get back to one’s unit. When Flag or Boxer and Little Red visit, our torment redoubles. Our mates joke with us about “tickets home.” Hell itself cannot make us take one. “Are you crazy?” our mate Pollard tells Lucas. “You lost an eye!”

  “An eye isn’t enough.”

  The hospital is not a tent affair, but the converted estate of some Bactrian grandee. We have rope beds and fountains and black plums in the court. Mail comes, and chow shows up hot and on-time.

  We are far from recovered, Lucas and I. “You don’t feel it so much while it’s happening,” my friend observes. “It catches up later.” Lucas watches me sometimes. I watch him too. We laugh when we catch each other. “You all right?” he asks. We laugh again, but it’s not funny. The equation has altered between us. Before, Lucas and I shared all secrets; no one came between us. Now he puts Ghilla before me. He tells her things he won’t tell me. This is as it should be; I am happy for him. God knows I can’t do the same with Shinar. But it’s an estrangement. I am closer to Flag now. I worry about Lucas. He was never a brooder; he has always spoken up. He still does, but it’s different. You can’t put a name to it. He’s just…not who he was. Of one thing I’m certain: I will die before I’ll let harm come to him. The shaft that impales him must pass first through my flesh. I feel the same toward the others in my litter, including the new ones fresh from home, whom I haven’t even seen yet. I sound Flag out about this.

  “You’re becoming a soldier,” he says.

  Lucas and I can’t talk about the Many Blessings. It’s too painful. I speak to Flag instead. I lost my squad there, and my horse and my weapons. Only luck and Lucas’s heroism kept me from losing my life.

  I can’t put Macks serving under me in such a position again. I won’t. I will not let officers, however well intentioned, lead me and my men into danger without speaking my mind. I will balk if I have to. I have buried Rags and Flea and Knuckles, and the brothers Torch and Turtle. They were boys, all of them, but they were men too. Good men. Now at a table beneath plum trees, I write letters to their fathers and mothers. It is the hardest thing I have ever done.

  “Things change you in war,” Flag says. “Not always the things you expect.”

  For Lucas, I can tell, it’s not the loss of an eye or the ordeal of captivity. He takes both remarkably in stride. It’s the buildup, he says. The accumulation. We’ve been gone from Macedon now twenty-five months. It feels like twenty-five years.

  “A soldier keeps hold of himself by dreaming of going home,” says Flag. “That’s how Lucas has done it, counting the days. Now he realizes the days go on without end.”

  In hospital I appreciate Flag more than ever. Every time I think I’ve caught up with him a little, I realize he’s still leagues beyond me. I tell him what it felt like, being at the mercy of the Massagetae. “I always imagined that hard experience would make you stronger and less afraid. But it’s the opposite. It undermines you because you know how vulnerable you are and how bad things can get.” When I remember being a prisoner now, I wake with my bones rattling. Ten times a day my knees go queer. I have never put much freight in the gods. Now I’m starting to think about it.

  A soldier should never think. Flag doesn’t have to say it; I hear his voice in my head. “That’s why God made pank and nazz.”

  We drink. I understand thirst now. We get varnished. Numbness is good. It helps you heal.

  My right shoulder still will not unseize. I hoist the bumper with my left. The surgeons say my skull has been fractured; I should have joined the majority three months ago. How long till it heals? They don’t know. I know I can feel every tread on the plank floor of our sick ward. When I hang my cloak on a peg, I aim to one side, then slide it over. Otherwise I’ll miss completely. My skull feels like an onion someone dropped on the floor.

  Lucas has been awarded a Bronze Lion for his wounds. I get my second. Lucas is decorated with a King’s Garland for gallantry. He is promoted to corporal. Our bonuses are a year’s pay and forgiveness of all debts to the army. This is less of a windfall than it sounds, as we’ll both have to buy new horses and replace our kit from scratch.

  Our women have caught up with us. They have trekked from Bactra City to Maracanda and back again. Ghilla is pregnant by Lucas, from before, early summer. You can see it even under her clothes. She tells everyone she and Lucas will marry. Should any of her male kin learn her state, no force beneath heaven will stop them from splitting her belly. She doesn’t care. She has put her tribe and its cruel codes behind her. This is at once a brilliant and a terrifying thing to witness.

  The other girls have
abandoned Ghilla. Her revolt appalls them. Only Shinar remains her friend. Shinar has found employment in the infirmary. The job suits her. Her Greek has become fluent, and she is squeamish of nothing. “Your girl,” the chief surgeon tells me, “has capacity.” He promotes her from the laundry to the ward, putting her on at an obol a day, one-fourth of an infantryman’s pay—a fortune alongside anything she has known. He outfits her in proper hospital kit and will permit no man, officer or enlisted, to address her except with respect.

  Shinar thrives. She is changing too.

  Throughout autumn and early winter Alexander dispatches divisions to distant quadrants of the country. He will not give Spitamenes the season to rest. More to the point, Bactra City cannot support the numbers of troops flooding in. Seventeen thousand reinforcements have arrived from Macedon and Greece. Dependents of the army, sutlers, contractors, and the general crowd, make above sixty thousand. The camp has become the fourth-largest city in the world, behind only Babylon, Susia, and Athens.

  On the day the army disperses to its winter positions, Alexander calls the force together and addresses it in what may be the most extraordinary oration ever offered by a king of Macedon. He takes the unprecedented step of transcribing the speech and having it distributed to every unit in every post across the country.

  Citing the massacre on the Many Blessings, he places responsibility not with his troops or subordinate commanders but himself.

  “All fault resides with me, my friends. I have committed the cardinal sin of the commander: underestimation of the foe. The Desert Wolf has not beaten you who rode in that column; he has beaten me. By Zeus, I believed we would thrash these devils in a matter of months. I deemed them ignorant savages, unlettered in modern warfare, and no match for our force, which has vanquished the mightiest empire on earth. I was wrong. Clearly the enemy understands us, while we do not understand him. He has made us dance to his tune. He possesses answers for every tactic we throw at him. He is shrewder than we are. He has outfought us and he has out-generaled me.”

  All winter, Alexander declares, the corps will train in new tactics. The Afghan campaign now enters its second phase. Detailed orders will follow, but for now it is enough that all troops understand that operations-as-usual are over.

  As part of this new program, officers of Alexander’s intelligence interview all survivors of the Many Blessings. They quiz Lucas and me in the hospital. Everything we can remember of the massacre and afterward is recorded for examination by our king. We write down names and descriptions of our captors, sketch approximations of their routes, attempt to site their springs and supply dumps.

  On Solstice Day, my brother Elias arrives at Bactra City. His woman Daria travels with him; they take up cantonments by the river in Anahita town, with two other officers of Forward Operations. I spend evenings with them when Shinar is on duty in the infirmary.

  “Have you apprised Mother of this development?” Elias teases me. “She will not stand losing another son to the wiles of foreign wenches!”

  And he squeezes his mistress.

  Elias, through his role in Forward Operations, participates in briefings at the highest level. He knows everything. His interest regarding me is to keep me out of danger. His influence continues to scuttle all my applications to Reconnaissance. He worries, too, about Lucas. “What’s the matter with your friend?” he asks. And he doesn’t approve of my drinking. “You’ll wind up like me if you’re not careful.” He means this to scare me. I take it as a compliment.

  Every evening they’ll let me, I linger with Elias and his comrades. They are the finest fellows I have ever known, equals to Flag and Stephanos in courage, prowess, and soldierly sense, and beyond them in dash and color. It sobers me to see how seriously they take the enemy.

  “This place is worse than Persia,” declares Elias’s mate, Demetrius.

  “It will test every man,” agrees Arimmas, a captain, “but our king most of all.”

  The Companions fear that Alexander still does not appreciate what he’s up against. In their view, we should clear out the entire region. Deport the population, man and boy, like Cyrus did in Ionia and Nebuchadnezzar in Palestine. “Nothing less,” says Demetrius, “will subdue this country.”

  The bane of the Afghan war is getting the foe to stand and fight. Only one measure will compel him to do so, believes Alexander, and that is to chase him with one force and block him with another. Thus our king’s second step: reconfiguring the corps into autonomous divisions. To each of his brigade commanders Alexander now cedes an army in miniature, possessed of all combat and support elements—light and heavy cavalry and infantry, artillery and siege train, reconnaissance, intelligence, medical, supply, and logistical organizations. Achieving contact with the foe, Ptolemy or Perdiccas or Coenus will no longer pursue him on his own, hoping to grab all the glory. From now on, one division will drive the enemy toward another. Then both will finish him off.

  These steps are solid innovations. Far more controversial is the third: the integration into the corps of massive numbers of Afghan troops. This, the Companions believe, is rank folly. “We’ve been riding with Afghan shikaris for two years,” declares Arimmas. “There’s not one who wouldn’t eat us raw if he thought he could get away with it.”

  But Alexander’s mind is made up. In camp we’re already seeing hillmen of the Panjshir, infantry of Ghazni and Bagram, Sogdian and Bactrian tribal horse as well as newly hired contingents of Daan, Sacae, and Massagetae raiders. Can we trust them? Our king doesn’t care. By hiring these bandits for pay, Alexander reasons, at least he has kept them from going over to Spitamenes.

  Our lord intends to make the country over by all means, civil as well as military. His boldest innovation is the oikos (“household”) system. By decree he establishes “site incentives.” What this means is that soldiers of the army, who in the past have received wages only as individuals, will from now on get their pay and allowances as households. In other words, your girlfriend is included. A man makes extra for the woman he is packing.

  Further, Alexander directs, the sons of lawful unions between Macks and foreign wives are now considered Macedonian citizens. They may collect their fathers’ pensions and be educated at state expense. This is unprecedented. It is revolutionary. At one stroke it overturns a thousand years of custom and nomos.

  The decree outrages the troopers of the Old Corps. One cannot overstate the depth of conservatism among soldiers. Change is abhorrent to them. They revere the old and despise the new. And they refuse to see shades of gray. The issue to them is of right and wrong. What Alexander proposes by the introduction of pay-by-household is a slap in the face to all decent matrons of Macedon, our wives and mothers who have held the nation together by their devotion and fidelity. (Of course, these same Macks have themselves taken every foreign strumpet they can lay two fists on.)

  But the soldiers feel threatened for a far more personal reason. They perceive the oikos system as a device to sever them from home emotionally. Clearly it is. Payment by household spurs new men like Lucas and me to take a bride “out here.” And worse, from the Old Corps’ point of view, to conceive of our future out here.

  What the old soldiers dread most is this: that Alexander will never go home. Never lead them home. Clearly our lord hates this Afghan war. But not the way the troops do. They want to wrap it up and turn for Macedon; he wants to finish and keep going east.

  In the end the veterans cannot stay angry with Alexander. He is sun and moon to them. They are pained by this revolution of their commander, but being the simple fellows they are, they know only to strive harder, fight more bravely, show that they remain indispensable. They crave above all to win back his love. Alexander, of course, is exquisitely attuned to this and knows how to exploit it for all it is worth. Now he adds a further element to set the country on its ear.

  Money.

  The wealth that has poured into Afghanistan with the army of Macedon has deformed the economy of the entire region
. In the city market, a pear costs five times what it used to. The locals can’t pay. Meanwhile, a second economy has sprung up—the camp economy, the economy inside the Macedonian gates, where the pear may still cost five times its original price, but at least a man can afford it. The natives face the choice of starvation or submission to this new economy, either as suppliers or servants, both of which occupations are abhorrent to Afghan pride. Worse still, the oikos system lures their young women. Soldiers reckon every currency of seduction that can nail them dish, fig, cooch. Now they have a new plum to dangle: marriage. The native patriarchs seek to lock up their daughters. But the draw of the Mack camp is irresistible, for money, adventure, novelty, romance, and now even the prospect of acquiring a husband. For by no means are these invaders unappealing. Mack regiments parade, awash with youthful captains and Flag Sergeants, horseback and afoot, made swashbucking by the brass of their tunics and the dazzle of their glittering arms. Maids slip from midnight windows to consummate trysts in the arms of their ardent, hazel-eyed lovers. When delegations of city fathers appeal to Alexander for assistance in curbing this traffic, he makes all the right noises but takes care to do nothing. He wants the girls infiltrating. His object is to weaken, even sever, the bonds of family, clan, and tribe. He prosecutes this deliberately. It is his policy.

  As for Lucas and me, even our own women begin acting strange. Ghilla, pregnant, waddles in Lucas’s train like a duckling. If I venture from the hospital, Shinar’s eyes shoot daggers as I go.

  This, too, is as Alexander wants it. What iron and gold will not accomplish, he will work by flesh. He will stand this country on its head and shake it till it quits.