God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

by Christian Cameron

  I do not claim that this was a brilliant manoeuvre. I merely claim that there was no other army on earth that could have done it.

  Once we were clear of our own front files, we formed front – that is, the column formed a new phalanx at right angles to the old phalanx. The Thracians collapsed. It was almost instant, the moment we were formed, as if every Thracian saw the danger at the same moment – and perhaps they did, but an army has a remarkable level of non-verbal communication. They can ‘feel’ all together. It’s like the pressure of your buddy’s shield in your back – when it is gone, you ‘feel’ wrong.

  We slaughtered them as they ran by us – packed against the far cliff, pushing with all their might to escape, even shedding their armour to climb the cliffs. More than a thousand of them died – some men say two thousand, a fifth of the fighting strength of their whole nation slaughtered in a few minutes.

  Unfortunately, we could not pursue them on horseback. The downslope of the pass on the far side was too steep, had too many switchbacks, and even in panicked flight, Thracians were a redoubtable foe. Men threw spears, or stood at the bend in the road over the pass to cut at our feet. Had the ground been a little flatter, we might have ended the Thracians as a people for ever. As it was, they died and died, so that the streams that ran down both faces of the pass ran red.

  I was carried along with the pursuit for a long way – maybe ten stades, all the way down the pass on the far side to a deep stream with steep banks where one of their princes made a stand with several hundred men in good armour. I could see him – he had a silk standard, some sort of windsock such as the Sarmatians use, and his helmet was covered in gold and jewels. They stood atop the bank on the far side of that icy stream, and we lost as many men trying to push them off the bank as we lost in the whole battle. Three times we crossed the stream, and three times we were thrown back.

  Alexander led fifty hypaspitoi across the river farther down, where the water flowed like a torrent and an error meant certain death. He was the first across, and a dozen armoured Thracians ran at him, and he stood his ground, killed one, and then another, and then Alectus was with him.

  He was the king. We threw ourselves across that stream to reach him, and the Thracians gave way, and we had all but bridged the torrent with bodies. I ran south, towards where I’d last seen the king, and I found him sore pressed – Alectus with him, Philip Longsword down, twenty more hypaspitoi trying to push him into the rear and fifty Thracians hammering at them.

  He was unmarked, and he’d killed a third man, and he had a quiet smile on his face – the smile of a man who’s made a fine helmet, or carved a beautiful wood panel of Herakles, for example.

  ‘Ptolemy,’ he said warmly as I came up. ‘Well done.’

  Behind him, the last of the Thracians went down, neither asking nor giving quarter, as half a thousand Macedonians buried them in blades. Alexander stepped up on a big rock as if he hadn’t been fighting for his life a moment before.

  ‘Just for a moment, I thought we’d have them all,’ he said. He started walking to where we’d fought our way over the stream. The chieftain, their prince, lay pinned to the earth with a pair of spears. His banner lay fallen beside him.

  ‘This one saved all his friends,’ he said. ‘A true hero. A worthy adversary.’

  The man moaned.

  Alexander smiled. ‘If he lives, sign him up,’ he said cheerfully. ‘How were the wagons? You look terrible.’

  I laughed.

  We didn’t even rest a full day. That afternoon, we plundered the Thracian camp carefully – it was a rich haul of gold and women and children – and sent everything back to the coast with our wounded and Laodon’s pezhetaeroi, who had fought brilliantly and were held to deserve the ‘vacation’.

  We had about a hundred dead and twice that many wounded – a small enough bill for the victory, but still a visible percentage of our forces. Men were shifted back and forth, and the net result was two larger taxeis of roughly four thousand men each when we started down the mountains on to the plain of the Danube.

  All of us assumed that the Thracians were beaten. Even Alexander assumed it. We kept guards and flankers out – we weren’t foolish – but as we marched towards the Danube, we assumed we’d broken the Thracians not just for now but for years to come.

  We were wrong.

  The Triballians retreated in front of us – the survivors of the battle reinforced by other tribesmen – with their livestock and their families – those we hadn’t taken at the pass. They retreated, and we pursued, eager to catch them. On the third day, the Prodromoi reported that the Thracians had started a boat lift to move their families to a big island in the Danube.

  Alexander threw the hypaspitoi forward, leading them himself.

  It was sheer luck that one of our Hetaeroi patrols – under Nearchus – tripped over an army of Thracians coming up behind us. They were half a day away, and we’d almost missed them.

  The trap was closing. The Thracians behind us now held the pass at our rear and had at least another ten thousand men.

  I sent a messenger for Alexander and halted the army, putting out a ring of scouts and dispatching the skirmishers – the Psiloi – to the rear to slow the enemy if they appeared. I asked Philip the Red – remember, I wasn’t the commander of anything except one squadron of Hetaeroi – to scout to our rear, and he agreed.

  Hephaestion was with Alexander, Antipater was in Pella, and none of Parmenio’s precious family had arrived to take command of anything, so that our army had Alexander – and no level below him. In the next few hours, that showed. I was unwilling to take command – it wasn’t my job, and I felt the weight of Alexander’s displeasure here more than any other place. If I took command, there might be a price.

  On the other hand, we all knew what to do.

  Alexander came back after the sun was high in the sky. He approved all of our joint decisions, and then ordered the entire army to counter-march behind the Psiloi. He put the Prodromoi well out on to the flanks and we moved forward, leaving our baggage to the mercy of the Thracians behind us. I hated that decision, even as I understood it – that was Thaïs being left unprotected. He didn’t leave a single slinger behind.

  Our Psiloi went forward into another ambush. The force behind us had formed up in a wooded valley that fed into the Danube, right across our line of march, with steep sides and heavy woods to cover them, and as the archers prowled forward along the open floor of the valley, arrows fell on them from the trees, and Thracian noblemen on ponies charged them and killed a dozen before they scattered.

  An hour later, I sat beside Alexander as he looked up the pass. I was eating a sausage – I remember thinking how delicious it was, even though every bite hurt my jaw and my nose.

  We were all hungry.

  Alexander looked at the pass for a long time. It formed a shallow lambda with the point aimed at Pella – to the south.

  It would entail a journey of a hundred stades or more, across unknown country, to go around.

  ‘Well,’ he said, after a long hundred heartbeats, ‘I don’t want to attack into that.’

  I think we all sighed with relief. It looked like a death trap.

  As if to underscore its peril, a Thracian arrow whispered out of the air and fell – well short, but close enough to make Poseidon shy.

  Alexander looked around, and his eye fell on Cleitus, not me. ‘Cleitus,’ he said.

  Cleitus grinned. ‘Uh-oh,’ he said, with mock despair.

  Alexander nodded. ‘Take the Psiloi forward again. Far enough that they can almost cut you off. Make them taste their victory before you let the Psiloi run. Get them to chase you down their precious hills.’ He nodded at the rest of us. ‘Form in loose order – over here, behind the edge of the downslope. Spears down so we aren’t visible. If they pursue Cleitus, we’ll charge, and chance it. If we fail – don’t go more than a quarter of the way up the pass. Understand?’

  Many men didn’t. Again, it was
a simple plan. The Psiloi went forward as bait, and the rest of us formed a counter-ambush to attack the Thracians if they were stupid enough to bite down.

  As with the first battle at the pass, the whole plan was in the details. Most of all, the Psiloi had to go forward with determination and put a volume of fire into the Thracians that would force them to react – and then stand their ground for far too long. It’s easy to describe. It’s damn hard to do, when you have no shield, no armour and no hope of surviving even a moment of fierce combat – especially when you are a scrawny Cretan looking at gigantic red-haired barbarians with swords as long as your body.

  And for the rest of us – well, try hiding a phalanx in the open country by the Danube.

  I will say that the magic began that afternoon, because we walked away from that command meeting without a mutter. When Alexander told us to lie down under our shields for the Thracian wagons, we muttered. There were some harsh jokes. But at the Woods Battle, we just went to our posts.

  Cleitus went forward with the Psiloi, all the Toxophiloi and some of the Prodromoi, dismounted, as well as a few hundred mercenary slingers and a handful of the new crossbowmen. It is a common enough weapon now, but in the first year of the king’s reign, they were virtually unknown and we only had fifty of them. Some said Aristotle invented the crossbow, and others said it came, like all brilliant military engineering, from Sicily. Either way, a bolt from one of these small engines could go two hundred paces and penetrate a good bronze helmet. A Scythian or a Cretan archer could do the same, but took a lifetime to train, and couldn’t do either lying flat on his stomach.

  Forward he went.

  The Thracians let them come.

  I had a ringside seat, on the right of the line. All my Hetaeroi were going to fight mounted, if we had a chance to fight. We were to be the horns of the bull. All my troopers stood beside their horses, well over the crest of the low ridge that separated our main body from the wooded valley – the killing zone.

  I had climbed up the low ridge with Philip the Red, and we lay under our dun cloaks in the sunshine – sweating profusely, I suppose, although I don’t remember. I only remember my heart hammering in my chest as our archers began to shoot into the Thracians – Cleitus had taken them right up the valley, and boldly formed a deep ‘v’ where both lines of Psiloi had their backs to the stream.

  Our archers outranged the Thracian archers, and were better. The Cretans especially were deadly.

  I had never seen a contest of shot before. Our men had training and density of firepower, and the Thracians had the protection of brush and woods.

  The protection was not enough. I could see men hit in the woods, and other men moving back up the slopes of the valley, and then there were horns blowing high on the crests of the hills, and sunlight glinted off spears and helmets as the main force of the Thracians moved.

  Cleitus did not let his men slacken their shots. Nearer to us, we saw the Rhodian slingers begin to pound away at the exposed Thracians in the low, marshy ground at the nearest end of the valley. Archers can’t stand tight together to loose, and slingers are worse, needing a spear’s length around them; but when a hundred slingers throw all together, their pellets of lead tear at tree branches and pass through brush like a wicked wind. Men screamed.

  The archers kept shooting. Philip, at my side, had begun to count arrows, as every archer had twenty-four. The Cretans had loosed sixteen when I saw the glittering might of the Thracian main host start down the ridge.

  ‘We’re hurting them,’ I said.

  Alexander flopped down next to me. ‘Of course we’re hurting them,’ he said. ‘We have more archers and slingers than they’ve ever seen. They have to do something.’

  We watched for as long as it takes a slave to start a fire, and then the Thracians began to charge the Psiloi. There was no order, and if anything the trumpet calls were to restrain them. But the wounds – and deaths – were literally driving them down the hill.

  They broke cover and took casualties crossing the open ground, because Cleitus – in his first command – held them by sheer force of will for one more volley of missiles. He had so many archers – more than six hundred – they staggered the charge.

  Just for a moment, I wondered if the archers could hold the line without us.

  Then the Psiloi broke. They all ran together, like a flock of birds taking flight, every wing beating together.

  The Thracians were right behind them.

  Out at the point of the lambda, where Cleitus was, the Thracians caught the Psiloi and killed them.

  The rest of the horse came pouring down the hills and into the gap, and our men died.

  Alexander lay beside me, counting. ‘See the old chiton tied to the bush?’ he said.

  That bush was less than a stade in front of me. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘When they pass that bush, stand up and wave.’ Alexander got to his feet well to the rear and ran down the slope to where a slave held Bucephalus.

  I watched. Our Psiloi were dying in numbers now, running desperately, tangled up with each other. A rout is ugly, and what starts as a trained flight turns all too easily into a rout.

  Thracians continued to pour down the slope. I assume – from the hindsight of history – that their king knew he was committed and decided not to send a half-measure. He sent his whole force.

  Now they were flowing through the gap, out of the valley and on to the flat ground, up the shallow ridge that closed the southern end of the valley. The first fugitives were passing the chiton. Then more and more.

  Behind me, Alexander had opened every tenth file in the phalanx, so that the Psiloi could run through. But the pezhetaeroi were still, for the most part, lying flat, except the men who had to move to open the files.

  I don’t think that it mattered any more – the Thracians were committed to all-out attack.

  The first Thracians passed the chiton. All the Psiloi who were going to be caught had been caught, by now. The weak. The injured. The unlucky.

  I waited a few more breaths, until the main shield line reached the bush, and then I stood up.

  I swear that as I stood, the whole Macedonian army rose to their feet. Alexander raised a fist and waved at me, and I raced for Poseidon like a sprinter. A sprinter in greaves and heavy armour.

  Polystratus was kind enough to stand at Poseidon’s head and give my butt a push as I climbed on to his broad back. I got up in one go and rode to take my place at the head of my wedge.

  Alexander raised his arm. Every man could see him – he was two horse lengths in front, and our whole army took up a little less than six stades.

  He pumped his arm. His trumpeter sounded the charge.

  And that was the sum total of the commands he gave.

  We went up the hill in perfect order. And I don’t use the term ‘perfect’ lightly. Every battle has something I remember – every battle is its own mistress, its own dark partner, its own spectacle. For that battle, it was the moment when we emerged from the brush and started up the hill, and two giants could have drawn a hawser, if one were long enough, taut across the front of the phalanx and touched every man’s chest at the same time.

  Just as we crested the low ridge, the flanks began to get a little ahead.

  The Thracians were caught flat-footed, spread over two stades of ground, killing the Psiloi they’d caught in no kind of order. A few noble households were all together, shields locked, but most of them were well spread out and unprepared for ten thousand Macedonians to hit them all together.

  Just in front of us, the main force of the Psiloi ran past us, eyes wide – registering delight as they crossed the crest and saw the army and the gaps, and men cheered them. Most of the Psiloi had probably never been cheered. Arms reached out in the phalanx and slapped their backs as they ran by, or pressed canteens full of wine on them. We already knew we’d won. And we knew we owed it to them.

  I led my squadron of Hetaeroi from the right. The moment I saw the Thracia
ns spread before me like a battle scene on a tapestry, I ordered the charge and we swept forward. Our wedge was unneeded – the wedge is a deep formation for penetrating an infantry block – and instead we passed through the Thracians left like a hot knife through cow’s butter. I doubt that we killed a hundred of them. But Perdiccas and I had the same notion – to get into the entrance to the wooded valley and plug the gap so that the pezhetaeroi could slaughter the Thracians against us, like a hammer against a very small anvil.

  We cut our way to the edge of the woods and I wheeled the Hetaeroi right round – try that some time. Great moments in cavalry drill! We got the Hetaeroi around, and formed in shallow blocks – half-files, only four deep. We took up more space that way, and we didn’t need to be eight deep – much less in wedge – to kill Thracians trying to get away.

  Then we rode forward slowly, into their rear, killing as we went.

  I saw the hypaspitoi slam into a nobleman’s retinue – there was a cloud of dust, as if a giant had thrown a huge clod of earth at the retinue, and then they were gone, and the hypaspitoi went forward over them. The Thracians went from hunters to hunted in moments, but there was nowhere to go except back into our spears, and we killed so many of them that when the fight was over – and there’s nothing much to tell about that fight – my hand was stuck to my spear shaft, glued with other men’s blood, my hand locked closed from hours of gripping the shaft too hard.

  It wasn’t glorious. But it was professional, and in three hours’ work, we’d broken the Thracian alliance at the cost of forty-one soldiers – a dozen cavalrymen from the first part of the charge, and thirty-nine Psiloi, and one – just one – pezhetaeros.

  I have no idea how many Thracians we actually killed. I walked over the western end of the field and counted all the dead in one square a stade on a side, and then I measured the battlefield and multiplied by the number in the one square, and got four thousand, two hundred dead Thracians, which seemed high, so I put three thousand five hundred into the Military Journal. See? My handwriting. See the brown smear? I could barely write – and usually we put this sort of info on to wax and let the scribes copy it fair on parchment or papyrus, but that day the scribes were back with the camp and we were too far away to use them.