The Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  The love a highlander bears for his crease is irrational and ineffaceable. I have officers whose fortunes exceed those of rajahs; yet each dreams of nothing grander than to return to his crease and tell his tales around the fire. Look there, to those three soldiers beside the stacked arms. They are from the same crease. Two are brothers; the third is their uncle. See the four beyond? They are from a rival crease. If they were home now, these fellows could not sleep, hatching schemes to split one another’s skulls. Yet here in this far country they are the best of mates.

  The Greek of the south grows to manhood in a polis, a city-state with a marketplace, an assembly, and walls of stone to keep out the foe. He is a good talker but a poor fighter. The plainsman of Scythia lives on horseback, trailing his stock and the seasonal grass. He is savage but not strong.

  Ah, but the hill clansman. Tough as dirt, mean as a snake, here is a man whose belly you can split with a pike of iron and he’ll still crawl back to carve out your heart and eat it raw before your face. The mountain man is proud; he will rend your liver over a trifle. Yet he knows how to obey. His father has schooled him by the oxhide of his belt.

  Here is the stock of which great soldiers are made. My father understood this. Once in the high country when I offered a smart remark of some clay-eating creaseman, Philip snatched me short. “My son has fallen under the spell of Homer’s Achilles,” he remarked to Parmenio and Telamon at his side (both of whom served my father before they served me). “He cites his descent from the hero—by his mother’s blood, not mine—and dreams of assembling his own corps of Myrmidons, the invincible ‘ant men’ who followed ‘the best of the Achaeans’ to Troy.” Philip laughed and swatted me gaily across the thigh. “Who do you imagine Achilles’ men were, my son, except raw bastards like these? Clansmen from the hinter creases of Thessaly, rude and unlettered, soaked in spirits, and hard as a centaur’s hoof.”

  Men are hard in my country, and women harder. My father understood this too. He paid court to these lasses of the uplands, or, more accurately, to their fathers, whose friendship and fealty he secured by all means. Thirty-nine marriages he made, seven official, by my mother’s count; the tally of his brats may only be guessed at. There is an old jest of my army’s loyalty: Of course they will not desert me; they are all my half brothers.

  When I was twelve, my dear mate Hephaestion and I accompanied a recruiting party under my father to a crease called Triessa in the highlands above Hyperasopian Mara. Horses may not be ridden into such rugged country; their legs will break. One must use mules. My father had invited the clans from a number of contending runs. They all showed up, all drunk. Philip was born to rule such men. He boasted that he could “outdrink, outfight, and outfuck” the lot, and he could. The clansmen loved him. It was just after dark; a pig-riding contest was in progress. A sow the size of a small pony had broken loose; men and boys, mud-slathered, attempted to bring her down. Hephaestion and I looked on from the ring of the stone corral as one rogue with great mustaches flung himself upon the beast’s neck. His mates began daring him to mount the sow and have intercourse with her. My father seconded this with exuberance, himself shit-faced and waist-deep in the slough. Cataracts of hilarity descended as the mustached fellow wrestled the sow in the slop. When the act had been accomplished, the luckless beast was butchered. The banquet of its flesh went on all night.

  As we rode home next day, I asked my father how he could countenance such brutishness in men he would soon lead into battle. “War,” he replied, “is a brutish business.”

  This response struck me as outrageous. “I would sooner have the sow,” I declared, “than the man.”

  Philip laughed. “You will not win battles, my son, leading an army of sows.”

  It was my father’s genius to forge these carlish highlanders into a disciplined modern army. He perceived the utility of recruiting such clansmen, who had been enslaved for centuries by their own vices and vendettas, to a new conception of soldiering, in which station and birth counted for nothing, but where a man might make his career on guts alone, and within whose order the very qualities that had held the hillman in chains—his own clannishness, brutishness, ignorance, and implacability—would be transformed into the warrior virtues of loyalty, obedience, dedication, and the ruthless application of force and terror.

  From the time I was a child, it was acknowledged that Philip’s Macedonians were the fiercest fighters on earth. Not only because they were individually tough, reared in this harsh and flinty land, or that my father and his great generals Parmenio and Antipater had drilled them to thoroughgoing professionalism, so that in discipline and cohesion, speed and mobility, tactics and weaponry, they surpassed all the militia armies of Greece and the royal and conscript levies of Asia, but also because they were possessed of such dynamis, such will to fight, born of their poverty and their hatred of the contempt with which their rivals had held them before Philip came, that it could be said truly of this force, as of none save the Spartans before them, that in action they never asked how many were the enemy but only where were they.

  My father never schooled me in warfare as such. Rather he plunged me into it. I first fought beneath his command at twelve, led infantry at fourteen, cavalry at sixteen. I never saw him so proud as when I showed him my first wound, a lance thrust through my left shoulder, got on Mount Rhodope against the Thracians of the Nestus valley. “Does it hurt?” he bawled, spurring up in the flush of victory, and when I answered yes, he roared, “Good, it’s supposed to!” Then turning to the officers and soldiers round about: “My son’s wound is in front, where it should be.”

  My father loved me, I believe, far more than he knew or cared to show. I loved him too and was as guilty as he of failing to display it. He drew a blade on me once, when I was seventeen, and would have spitted me through had he not been so soused he pitched flat on his cheesehole. My own dagger held poised in my fist, and I would have used it. For a time after that, my mother had to retire to her kinsmen’s court at Epirus and I take refuge among the Illyrians. For it was known to all that my ambition, even as a boy, exceeded my father’s and that I understood (or my mother did) that there may be, as the proverb declares,

  Only one lion on a hill.

  I was twenty when Philip was assassinated and the nation in arms called me forward as its king. I rarely, then, gave my father a thought. Lately, however, he has been much on my mind. I miss him. I would call upon his counsel. What would he do about mutiny on the plains of the Punjab? How would he reinspirit a corps gone sour?

  And how, by the track to hell, may I get across this river?

  Three

  INDIA

  HEPHAESTION ARRIVES FROM THE INDUS in time to witness the executions. Two captains and three warrant officers of the company of Malcontents have been put to the sword. Hephaestion comes straight to my side, in formation, without stopping even to relieve his thirst. He holds himself expressionless throughout the proceeding, but afterward, in my tent, he trembles and has to sit. He is thirty years old, nine months older than I; we have been the best of mates since childhood.

  He speaks of this unit of Malcontents. Their numbers are only three hundred, seemingly insignificant among a force whose total exceeds fifty thousand. Yet such is their prestige among the corps, from past performance of valor, that I can neither detain them in camp under arrest (where they would only spread the contagion of their disgruntlement) nor cashier them and post them home (where their appearance would foment yet further disaffection). I can’t break up the company and distribute its men among other units; it was to remedy this that I segregated them in the first place. What can I do with them? My skull aches just thinking of it. Worse, I need their prowess—and their courage—to cross this river.

  In India there is no such thing as a staked tent. It’s too hot. My pavilion is fly-rigged, open on all sides to catch the breeze. Papers blow; every scrap must be weighted. “Even my charts are trying to fly home.”

  Hephaestion glances
about, noting the composition of the corps of Royal Pages. “No more Persians?”

  “I got tired of them.”

  My mate says nothing. But I know he is relieved. That I have shown preference for homegrowns among my personal service is a good sign. It shows I am returning to my roots. My Macedonian roots. Hephaestion will not insult me by congratulation, but I see he is gratified.

  After me, Hephaestion is the ranking general of the expeditionary force, which is to say of the army entire. Many envy him bitterly. Craterus, Perdiccas, Coenus, Ptolemy, Seleucus—all consider themselves better field commanders. They are. But Hephaestion is worth the pack to me. Him awake, I can sleep. Him on my flank, I need look neither right nor left. His worth exceeds warcraft. He has brought over a hundred cities without bloodshed, simply by the excellence of his forward envoyage. Tact and charity, which would be weaknesses in a lesser man, are with him so innate that they disarm even the haughtiest and most ill-disposed of enemy chieftains. It is his gift to represent to these princes the reality of their position in such a way that accommodation (I resist the word submission) appears not at his instance, but at theirs, and with such generosity that we wind up straining to contain its excesses. Five score capitals have our forces entered, thanks to him, to find the populace lining the streets, hoarse with jubilation. He has saved the army deaths and casualties ten times its number. Nor have his feats of individual valor been less spectacular. He carries nine great wounds, all in the front. He is taller and better-looking than I, as good a speaker, with as keen an eye for country. Only one thing keeps him from being my equal. He lacks the element of the monstrous.

  For this I love him.

  I contain the monstrous. All my field commanders do. Hephaestion is a philosopher; they are warriors. He is a knight and a gentleman; they are murderers. Don’t mistake me; Hephaestion has depopulated districts. He has presided over massacres. Yet these don’t touch him. He remains a good man. The monstrous does not exist within him, and even the commission of monstrous acts cannot cede it purchase upon him. He suffers as I do not. He will not give voice to it, but the executions today appalled him. They appalled me too, but for different reasons. I despise the inutility of such measures; he hates their cruelty. I scourge myself for failure of attention and imagination. He looks in the eyes of the condemned and dies with them.

  “Whom will you set in command now?” he asks. He means over the Malcontents.

  I don’t know. “Telamon’s bringing the two youngest lieutenants. Stay and we’ll see what they look like.”

  Craterus enters; the mood lightens at once. He is my toughest and most resourceful general. The executions haven’t bothered him a bit. He has an appetite. He farts. He curses the heat. He launches into a tirade of this crust-sucking river and how, by the steam off a whore’s dish, can we get this salt-licking army across? He stalks to the water pitcher. “So,” he says, splashing his face and neck, “which marshals are plotting our ruin today?”

  Soldiers, the proverb says, are like children. Generals are worse. To the private soldier’s fecklessness and ungovernability, the general officer adds pride and petulance, impatience, intransigence, avarice, arrogance, and duplicity. I have generals who will stand unflinching before the battalions of hell, yet who cannot meet my eye to tell me they are broke, or played out, or need my assistance. My marshals will obey me but not one another. They duel like women. Do I fear their insurrection? Never, for they are so jealous of one another, they cannot abide beneath the same roof long enough to contrive my overthrow.

  My generals won’t stick their toes in this river. Each has his eye on the empire behind. Perdiccas wants Syria; Seleucus schemes for Babylon; I’m already calling Ptolemy “Egypt.” The last thing each marshal needs, he believes, is a spear in the guts, chasing some fresh adventure. Who can blame them? They’ve made their kill; they want to work their jaws on it. Of eleven corps commanders, I trust with my life only two, Hephaestion and Craterus. Do the others hate me? On the contrary. They adore me.

  This is an aspect to the art of war, my young friend, that does not appear in the manuals. I mean the combat within one’s own camp. The freshly commissioned officer imagines that the king rules his army. Not by far! The army rules him. He must feed its appetite for novelty and adventure, keep it fit and confident (but not too confident, lest it grow insolent), discipline it, coddle it, reward it with booty and bonuses but contrive to make sure it blows its loot on spirits and women, so that it’s hungry to march and fight again. Leading an army is like wrestling a hundred-headed hydra; you quell one serpent, only to duel ninety-nine more. And the farther you march, the harder it gets. It has been near nine years for this corps; of its original complement, many have sons who have since come out to us, and a few grandsons. They have earned and lost fortunes; how can I keep them keen? They are incapable of it themselves. I must play to them, as an actor to his audience, and love and drive them as a father his wayward sons. The commander’s options? In the end, he may lead his army only where it wants to go.

  “Well,” Craterus observes, “it didn’t come off too badly.”

  He means the executions.

  Not badly? “Yes, the show was a real crowd-pleaser!”

  “Well, it’s over. The pair you sent for are outside.”

  We step out. It is like entering an oven. The two lieutenants await on horseback. They are the most junior officers of the disaffected cohort, and the only ones unindicted. Telamon has brought them, as I instructed.

  I regard them, hoping they have the belly to take over. The younger is from Pella in Old Macedonia; the elder from Anthemos in the new provinces. We ride out along the levee. I aim to make trial of these bucks.

  The youth I know. His name is Arybbas; the men call him “Crow.” His father and brother fell at Gaugamela, both officers of the Royal Guards; he has two more brothers and a cousin in my service, all decorated veterans. Crow himself served as a Page in my tent from fourteen to eighteen; he can read and write and is the best lightweight wrestler in the camp. The other lieutenant, Matthias, is older, near thirty, an up-through-the-ranks man, what the troops call a “mule,” from a noble but poor family in the annexed Chersonese. He has a bride of Bactria, of extraordinary beauty, who left her people to follow him, and is, so I have been told, the engine of his ambition. Both officers are keen, and both in action stalwart, resourceful, and without fear.

  I indicate the enemy fortifications across the river. To the Anthemiot, Matthias: “How would you attack?”

  The river is eight hundred yards. Too deep to ford and too swift to swim; we must cross on boats and rafts. These will come under bowfire from enemy towers for the last hundred yards. The final fifty pass between further concentrations of archers, then terminate at an eight-foot mud bank, bristling with more bowmen and topped with ten feet of spiked and castellated dike. The length of this rampart is three miles. Behind it await Raj Porus and his war elephants, his corps of Indian ksatriyas—princes schooled from birth for war alone and renowned as the finest archers in the world—and an army of a hundred thousand.

  The lieutenant turns back to meet my eye. “How would I attack, sire, if I were you, or if I were myself?”

  Telamon laughs at such brass, and I too must bite my lip. I ask the lieutenant what the difference would be.

  “If the army attacks with myself commanding, no scheme on earth could take that position. But if you lead, lord, it will fall with ease, though our troops be ill-armed, half-starved, and ragged as dirt.”

  I ask why.

  “Knowing your eye is on them, sire, all men will compete furiously in valor, seeking to win your good opinion, which will mean more to them than their lives. Further, you, lord, by fighting at the fore, will inspire all to surpass themselves. Each will feel shame to call himself Alexander’s man and not prove worthy of such fame.”

  Matthias finishes; Craterus snorts. Such flattery, he declares, is unseemly coming from officers in a company whose freshest repute is for mut
iny!

  The buck rejoins respectfully but with heat. No man may fault his comrades for want of spirit. “Indeed the king,” he says, “has set us always the sternest chores, against the meat of the foe. If you condemn us, sir, cite the occasion and I shall refute it.”

  This is dynamis. I am encouraged.

  I ask the second youngster his plan. This is Arybbas, Crow.

  “First, lord,” he replies, “I would try all else before risking battle. Raj Porus is canny, men say. Can we not treat with him? Offer him sovereignty beneath our rule, or simply request, or purchase, passage through his kingdom? Perhaps Porus has enemies he hates and fears more than ourselves. Will he accept us as allies to turn, united, upon these foes? Can we promise him rule over his rivals, vanquished by our mutual exertions, while our army passes eastward out of his realm, leaving it enlarged and enriched?”

  It sounds so easy. Anything else?

  “Sire, this river. Must we cross it here? Under fire? Against fixed fortifications? Why not ten miles north? Or twenty, or a hundred? Why even permit the river to remain?”

  Why indeed?

  “Divert her course, sire. Dig sluiceways and run her westward into the plain, as Cyrus the Great did at Babylon. Leave her high and dry and let our cavalry cross at the gallop!”

  “Hear, hear,” remarks Telamon. Craterus taps his breastplate in mock applause. I indicate the river, swollen by premonsoon rains. To turn it will take ten armies.

  “Then let us raise ten armies, lord. I would sooner spend a barrel of my men’s sweat than one thimble of their blood. Tyre took half a year to reduce. Let us spend two, if that’s what it takes! And here is a further point, sire. The audacity of the stroke. Its temerity alone will awe the foe. He will believe the men who besiege his country are unlike any he has encountered, with resources of will and scale of imagination against which he cannot contend. He may delay, he will see, but not prevail. And this will render him more tractable to accommodation.”