Alexander took care to keep his forces out of sight for the time being while discreetly observing Porus’s dispositions. The Macedonian troops eventually caught up with the cavalry and were allowed to rest and recover a little from the exertions of the night.
Meanwhile the king devised his tactics. Once more he brought deception into play. He arranged his army in a conventional lineup, with his phalanx and hypaspists in the center, flanked on both sides by Companion cavalry. He led two squadrons on the right and Coenus commanded two on the left. But Alexander introduced a twist. His squadrons and the center moved forward toward the enemy and came into view. However, Coenus at the far end of the field was instructed to hold back and stay out of sight behind trees or in dead ground.
The king sent mounted archers against the Indian cavalry and the chariots on Porus’s left wing. In Arrian’s words, their task was “to create havoc among the troops stationed there with their dense volleys of arrows and quick charges in and out.” The enemy horse was soon in disarray and the chariots were more or less annihilated. Alexander then led a charge against them.
He was playing a mind game with the Indian king. He guessed that Porus would suppose that the Macedonians were fielding only two cavalry squadrons. He would know nothing of Coenus and his horsemen and would assume that the cavalry on his right wing had nobody to fight and nothing to do. He would be tempted to order it across the battlefield behind his lines and reinforce his cavalry on the left, which was now under fierce attack.
In this way, Porus would substantially outnumber Alexander’s squadrons and would be able to prevent his left from breaking. With any luck, he might even drive off the Macedonians and win the battle. Coenus had been instructed in advance to keep an eye on the Indian right, and if the cavalry there left its station to follow on behind it.
Porus acted just as Alexander’s psychological insight had predicted he would. With Coenus’s arrival, the combined Indian horse unexpectedly found itself assailed in the rear as well as the front. They began to break up and fell back onto the elephants nearby.
The mahouts drove their animals against the Macedonian cavalry. The phalanx took this as a signal to encircle the elephants. They speared them, hacked off their feet, and chopped at their trunks. Some of the crazed beasts charged into the Macedonian infantry lines, which prompted the Indian cavalry to launch an unsuccessful counterattack.
The fighting now became general. The Macedonians soon gained the upper hand, with Alexander and his Companions charging again and again into the trapped enemy horse. The elephants went berserk. Arrian takes up the gory narrative:
Crowded now into a narrow space, the elephants caused as much damage to their own side as to the enemy, turning round and round, barging, and trampling. The Indian cavalry, tightly corralled among the elephants, suffered massive carnage. Most of the mahouts had been shot down: wounded, exhausted, and with no one to control them, the elephants could no longer play their specific role in the battle but, maddened by pain, they began attacking friends and enemies alike, crushing, trampling, and killing indiscriminately.
The phalanx recovered its élan and pressed its bristling sarissas against the wavering line of enemy foot-soldiers. The Macedonian horse began to set a cordon around them and were perhaps joined by the Greek mercenaries who had been waiting at the riverside. The tiring and lengthy business of butchery began. Craterus moved his troops across the ford and joined in the mopping up.
By the end of the day it is said that twenty thousand Indian infantry and three thousand cavalry lay dead on the rain-soaked earth. The chariots were all wrecked. The Macedonians lost about eighty foot soldiers at most, ten mounted archers, and 220 cavalry.
One particular casualty of the battle or its aftermath struck Alexander to the heart. About this time, his horse Bucephalas died. He was thirty years old and probably succumbed not to a wound but to heat exhaustion. Alexander, who loved him as a comrade-in-arms, was grief-stricken. Of the two garrison towns he founded on the battle site and at the base camp, the first was named Nicaea, “City of Victory,” and the other Bucephala in honor of a much-missed friend.
A gigantic figure towering over the field on his enormous elephant, Porus surveyed the ruin of his army and his hopes. He ran through with a javelin a valued ally for recommending surrender. Unlike Darius he did not quit the struggle early and precipitate a rout. Bleeding profusely from a wound in his shoulder, he eventually accepted defeat when it was absolutely clear that the day was lost. He asked to be taken to Alexander.
Typically, the Macedonian king admired his adversary’s bravery. He asked Porus to say how he wished to be treated.
“Like a king,” came the perfect answer.
“As far as I am concerned, Porus, I shall do as you ask. Tell me now what you would like for yourself.”
“Everything is contained in my one request.”
The two men shared the same heroic code and understood each other. Alexander confirmed Porus’s kingship and added some territory to the Indian’s realm. As for Porus, from this moment he remained unfailingly loyal to his conqueror.
As was his custom, the victor honored the fallen. In thanksgiving, he sacrificed to the gods. Among them on this occasion was Helios, god of the sun (was he praying for more blue skies and less rain?). The king staged athletic and equestrian competitions on the bank of the Hydaspes at the very point where he had first crossed with his army. He left Craterus there with a detachment to build and fortify the cities he was founding, while he himself moved on against the Indians bordering the area ruled by Porus.
Two celebratory medallions were struck. One was a tetradrachm, or four-drachma coin, which showed an Indian archer with his bow on the obverse and an elephant on the reverse. The other was a decadrachm (ten drachmas); this shows a horseman, doubtless Alexander, attacking an elephant with two riders, doubtless representing Porus attended by a mahout. On the reverse Nike, goddess of victory, crowns a standing figure, presumably Alexander. He is clasping a thunderbolt, perhaps a reference to the thunderstorm that preceded the battle and, one supposes, an indication of his Zeus-born divinity.
* * *
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THE PIECES OF ALEXANDER’S strategic jigsaw were falling into place. One by one the kingdoms and states of the Indus Valley joined a buffer zone that marked the Persian empire’s eastern frontier. The Macedonian conqueror was to be their overlord, but otherwise he would leave them to govern themselves.
Porus, now a close and trusted ally, was instructed to bring his best surviving troops and some elephants. The army was divided again into separate contingents, which roamed the Indus Valley requesting surrenders from the various states in the region. Most did as they were told, but some resisted. Taxiles was reconciled, a little reluctantly, with Porus. Abisares, who had been expected to join the Indian king at the Hydaspes but had failed to show up, sent an embassy, headed by his brother, to make peace. He was appointed satrap of his own kingdom. A force was dispatched to quash a revolt among the Assacenians.
Another king called Porus (the first one’s cousin) offered his submission. However, he was alarmed by Alexander’s favoritism toward his namesake, a long-standing enemy of his, and fled eastward with as many of his fighting men as he could persuade to join him. Hephaestion was sent off to annex his kingdom and pass it on to the first Porus; after he had done this, he founded a couple of fortified settlements.
A people called the Cathaeans rose up in arms and made a stand at the strongly fortified city of Sangala. They encircled a hill just outside the gates with three lines of wagons. Alexander captured these improvised defenses and the enemy retreated behind Sangala’s brick wall. After an attempted breakout, the Macedonians built a double stockade which ringed the city except for a shallow lake. The king guessed correctly that the defenders would attempt another breakout across the water; his Macedonians, reinforced by Porus, slaughtered them as th
ey emerged.
Siege engines were moved up, ladders were installed around the circuit, and Sangala was taken by storm. Seventeen thousand Indians were reportedly killed and seventy thousand captured. The city was razed.
The chivalry which Alexander had shown to his royal adversary had given way once more to ferocity and inhumanity. Indian public opinion was disgusted by the destruction of Sangala. Polyaenus, a strategy expert during the reign of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, observes: “This act greatly damaged his reputation in the eyes of the Indians, who considered him a bloodthirsty savage.”
Alexander’s campaigning had been crowned with military success, but the morale of the troops was plummeting. The Battle of the Hydaspes had taken place in May, but in the following weeks the spring thunderstorms that announced the monsoon gave way to continuous heavy rain. As the Macedonians crossed one tributary of the Indus after another, the waters rose higher and flowed faster. The cities of Nicaea and Bucephala were washed away and had to be rebuilt.
Nothing is more injurious to a sense of well-being than being permanently wet. Alexander’s men may have adored him, but there were limits to what they would put up with.
* * *
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INDIA WAS TURNING OUT to be a much larger place than had originally been anticipated. Alexander and the Greek scientific experts he had recruited had assumed that it was no larger than today’s Punjab and that a short march would bring them to the edge of the Ocean. Now that they were actually in the subcontinent, reports could not be ignored which showed that land, states, and populations stretched indefinitely eastward.
A local king spoke of a desert that would take twelve days to cross. The traveler would then arrive at a vast river, the Ganges. The ruler there had at his disposal two hundred thousand infantry, two thousand chariots, and four thousand elephants equipped for war. Alexander was impressed and consulted Porus, who happily confirmed the accuracy of the report (despite the fact that no such desert existed and the Indian army numbers were hyperinflated). Other accounts spoke of fertile lands with many elephants.
We are now confronted by an enigma. By now the Macedonians were approaching the last of the Indus tributaries, the Hyphasis (today’s Beas). It was six fathoms deep and with a violent current, and would be difficult to cross. The king could not care less about obstacles; he had a pothos to journey to the ends of the earth, and that was that. According to Arrian, he “advanced with his army to the river…intent on subduing the Indians yet further to the east. In his mind there could be no end to the war as long as there was any enemy left.”
The army disagreed. It had had a surfeit of water and refused to follow him. So far as they were concerned, the war was over.
Alexander had detected incipient discontent: after the victory over Porus, he had distributed large bonuses both to his generals and to other ranks. Soldiers’ wives were granted monthly rations, and their children received an allowance calculated according to their fathers’ military record. He gave generous rewards for bravery. None of this improved the mood. Men gathered in small groups and muttered. Some simply complained; others swore they would not take another step, even with Alexander as their leader. But no one spoke out openly.
The king saw that he had to intervene. He summoned his senior officers and gave them a pep talk. He had shared the work, the danger, and, notably, the recompense, with every member of the army, he said, and deserved their continuing loyalty. He told them: “All this land is yours, and you are its satraps.”
The men said nothing and hung their heads. “I must have hurt you in some way without knowing it,” added Alexander bitterly. “You don’t even want to look at me. I seem to be completely alone—nobody answers me, nobody even says no to me.”
A long silence followed. This was a political crisis of the first order. The future of the entire expedition depended on the trust that flowed back and forth between the king and his men, and that appeared to have drained away. At last one of the generals, the able and trusted Coenus, took his career in his hands and spoke for the army. He chose his words carefully and respectfully, but he did not mince them. The men wanted to see their homeland again and their loved ones. He referred pointedly to the poor condition of their equipment, their clothes, their armor, and their weapons. Arrian has him say, to loud applause:
You should not now lead forward a reluctant army. You won’t find them as ready as they once were to meet danger, when they have lost their will for battle. But, if you agree, go home with them to Macedonia, see your mother, settle what needs to be settled in Greece, bring back all these great victories to adorn your father’s house. Then, if you so choose, begin again from scratch—and launch another campaign.
Alexander was unaccustomed to rebuffs, and he took this one very badly. Much of his fury was directed at Coenus. He abruptly suspended the meeting and recalled it in a foul temper on the following day. He announced that he himself was going on and anyone who wished to join him was welcome to do so. Everybody else was free to go home. They could tell their friends that they had abandoned their king surrounded by enemies.
With these words he jumped down from the dais and withdrew like Achilles to brood in his tent. For three days he refused to allow anyone in, even his closest associates and Companions. Learning from his behavior after the murder of Cleitus, he hoped this might compel the army to change its mind. In fact, it remained obstinate. The men were sorry that Alexander was upset, but they were not going to change their minds.
The only question now was how the king would give way without loss of face. As was his practice on important occasions, he conducted a sacrifice before crossing the Hyphasis. He found that the omens were inauspicious. Is it too much to suppose that a quiet word was dropped into Aristander’s ear? In any event, Alexander called off the offensive, but made it clear that he was yielding to the gods, not to his men. The soldiers responded to the announcement with an earsplitting roar of joy.
To translate his renunciation into something that looked like a victory, the king arranged for twelve massive altars as high as his highest siege towers to be erected. He sacrificed on them to the gods in thanksgiving for his unbroken line of victories. As usual he staged athletic and equestrian competitions. This pause gave time for the army to recuperate after its exertions and ready themselves for the long return.
Within a few days of these events, Coenus took ill of some unspecified disease and died. Modern scholars have suspected foul play, but nobody did at the time. Alexander was saddened and the general was given a fine funeral.
* * *
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THIS IS A CURIOUS TALE.
For all his pothos, Alexander was a practical man and did not give way to a random yen before assessing the risks and the benefits. Throughout his campaigning in Thrace and Asia, he had sought to secure his borders and resisted the temptation to annex new territory. If we judge the king by his deeds rather than by the rhetoric of war without end, his aims in the Indus Valley were rational and attainable. As we have seen, these were to protect the ramshackle, largely ungoverned eastern end of the Persian empire by establishing a reliable set of allied states that would stand between it and whatever and whoever lay beyond.
So the fact is that he never had any intention of marching to Ocean. He had displayed his standards along his empire’s final frontier and now the Indian adventure was over.
In that case, what lay behind the quarrel with his men? His passion for travel and discovery, for global dominion, was a feature of his public image. Perhaps when planning his departure from India, he needed someone else to blame for not fighting his way across the subcontinent to the world’s end. Otherwise he could be accused of losing his nerve. The obvious candidate was his army; he knew that if he broadcast his intention to carry on campaigning permanently, he would set off something approaching a mutiny. So that was what he did.
More mu
ndanely, it can be argued that, while he had no serious plan to vanquish all India, he did fancy a brief foray, rather as when he crossed the Danube, to frighten the local people. It would also enable his experts to pursue their scientific inquiries and gain a more accurate notion of the geography of India. In the imagination of his men—and of ancient historians—this was inflated into a more all-embracing project.
We will never know the truth of the matter, but once the Indus Valley had been secured, Alexander’s next step was predictable. The only imperial frontier he had not yet visited lay to the south—down the Indus, along the coastline of the Arabian Sea, and up the Persian Gulf.
* * *
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THEN, WITH THE CONCLUSION of his circuit of empire, rest and relaxation awaited him in Babylon, city of wonders.
CHAPTER 14
SHOW ME THE WAY TO GO HOME
A city was dancing on the waves.
Timber had been floated down from the mountain forests and transformed over the summer into a fleet of open boats and thirty-oared triaconters, of war galleys and troop ferries or horse ferries. They were joined by a myriad of Indian river craft, making a grand total of nearly two thousand vessels. Men in the army with sailing experience were recruited as crew. They assembled on the Hydaspes at the new garrison towns of Nicaea and Bucephala, where an artificial harbor had been created. Their destination was the southern sea into which the Indus poured its iced waters from the Himalayas.
It was the autumn of 326; the monsoons had done their worst and the sun had reappeared. The multitude of sails and oars and rigging made for a brilliant spectacle. But this was no armada prepared for war. Its task was simply to transport Alexander’s men and animals. The seers presided over the customary sacrifices for a lucky voyage, but, to make assurance doubly sure, insisted that they include in their devotions the Hydaspes.
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