Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  Our main line still advances at a walk. A quarter mile separates us from Darius’s front.

  I have returned to the Companions from the flank. The army books show eleven aides and couriers in my rotation that day; I employ only two for the center and left; the other nine shuttle continually to the right. Every message coming in says the same: Send help. And every one going back: Hang on.

  I can’t spare men, so I send champions. Telamon and Love Locks, Ptolemy and Peucestas. I want to dispatch Black Cleitus but he won’t go; he saved my life at the Granicus and he intends to do it again here.

  We can see Darius’s station now. The colors of his Guard regiments collect about him, with his own royal pennants snapping overhead. Massed foot troops front his post—Greek mercenaries and his own Royal Apple Bearer Guard. His four-horse chariot stands, though we can’t see it, amid squadrons of Kinsman Cavalry, twenty or thirty ranks back from the front.

  We can no longer see the fight on our right; storms of murk obscure it. We can hear it though. It sounds like an earthquake. Fronting the Companions, I have Balacrus with five hundred Agrianian javelineers and the same number of Thracian archers and darters. The companies on the wing cry for them. But I need them here. I need them to stop Darius’s scythed chariots when they come.

  At three hundred yards, they do.

  The foe’s front is a hundred cars across. The machines strain from the blocks with a tantalizing indolence. We can see but not hear the drivers’ whips. Sun-dazzle flashes off the scythes as the chariots work to speed. It seems to take forever. “The cars are heavy,” Cleitus remarks, “packing all that iron.”

  The cutters’ front is two-thirds of a mile across. It makes straight for our squadrons of Companion Cavalry and, left of them, Hephaestion’s and Nicanor’s Royal Guardsmen and the rightmost two regiments, Perdiccas’s and Coenus’s, of the phalanx. Cleitus looks on with absolute calm. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”

  I sign to him and Philotas: Open order! Hold silence. . . .

  “All captains, eyes on me!”

  I look left, across two miles of field. This is the last moment when even a quarter of the fight is visible from my vantage. Darius’s chariots are charging there too. Fifty toward the meat of our phalanx, fifty more into Parmenio’s guard on our left. The foe’s conventional cavalry will make the next wave. Twenty thousand of Armenia and Cappadocia, Syria and Mesopotamia, Media, Parthia, Tapuria, Areia, Hyrcania, and Sogdiana. Zeus help you, Craterus. Heaven preserve you, Parmenio.

  I glance right, to the dust and murk. Somewhere in there, beyond the chariots’ killing zone but engulfed in the battle on the wing, fight Aretes’ eight hundred Royal Lancers, my best mounted shock troops, short of the Companions. The courier next in rotation is a sixteen-year-old Page named Demades. They call him “Boar” for his spiky mane. He will die delivering the message I now charge him with.

  “Aretes from Alexander: Pull half your Lancers; when the scythed chariots’ rush has been broken, hurl your wedges at the thinnest sector of the enemy’s front. Wherever you judge that to be.”

  The Page’s pupils are the size of bread plates.

  “Say it back to me, Boar.”

  He does, verbatim.

  “Boar, I’ll drink with you in Babylon!”

  He spurs into the gloom.

  Out front, Balacrus’s darters attack the cutters in clouds. “At the horses!” I hear Philotas shout, as if anyone can hear. “Throw at the horses!”

  Scythed chariots must attack in lanes. The teams have to maintain intervals right and left, so as not to foul one another. In these gaps, our brave javelineers work their havoc. These superb troops, who can hit a foot-wide plank at fifty yards, launch their second salvos while the first is still in the air, and their third as the chariots hurtle upon them. Our archers loose broadsides point-blank. In moments, the cutters’ rush breaks apart. The crusty underfooting is our ally; it mires the heavy chariots’ wheels. The chalk won’t let the machines get to full flying speed. I see one four-horse hurtling straight toward us as its leftmost charger takes a dart flush at the base of the neck. The animal overends in the traces, taking the whole team with him and launching the driver like a doll. The team to its left is struck by no missile; only the shock of the fusillade and the sight and sound of men racing on foot in their sight line sends the animals shying in terror; the car careers wildly right, across the lanes of its fellows. Other machines swerve to avoid its blades. In instants a sector of a dozen chariots is hurled into chaos. Into the riot pour Balacrus’s missile troops. I had hoped and believed that their volleys would impede the foe’s rush; in the event they rout it entirely. Scythed chariots must not only attack in lanes; they must maintain a solid front. Otherwise the enemy, ourselves, can simply open ranks and let the lone car through. But in the heat of action, the braver and faster drivers outlash the laggards, so that additional gaps develop along the axis as well as the front, leaving isolated both chariots too fast and too slow. Our archers and javelineers can assault these from the flanks without fear of the scythes.

  I send my next courier with the same message I gave Boar. Go! In case Boar hasn’t gotten through.

  On my immediate right, the battle of the flank rages without letup. Each side’s squadrons have broken through the other’s so repeatedly, we will learn later, that across the field an observer might remark as many of our fellows on their side as their own, and as many of theirs on ours. The brawl is not concentrated upon any single front or post; one sees neither massed melees nor heaps of men cut down together. Rather individuals fall with a terrible randomness across the breadth of the pitch. Riders are picked off in ones and twos as their mounts are brought down or tumble or give way of exhaustion. Upon a site, momentum alternates with a grisly caprice as one horseman, striving valiantly beneath the foe’s assault, is retrieved by the charge of his comrades, only to have these in turn cut off and massacred by a counterrush of those who had moments earlier fled before them. Engagements involving hundreds pass without a man suffering a scratch, while two-man skirmishes swell into routs as wings of horse or clouds of foot appear from the murk to wreathe the foe beyond escape. Blown horses cave in beneath the weight of their riders. Mounts’ hearts burst from exertion. A horse pushed past his limit “ties up.” His muscles seize; he breaks down. Others expire of heat and shock. Scores succumb to terror alone. When the enemy finally turns and takes flight, horses on both sides are frothing not foam but blood. Hundreds lie foundered upon the field. Those not slain or leg-broken have been worked so to exhaustion that they can never be used again. These are fine animals, quality stock trained from birth and loved by their men to a depth that no one who has not served in a mounted corps can understand. To lose a brave horse is almost as bad as to lose a man; worse in its way, for no horse understands why he fights; he does so only for love of us. His loss is as cruel as the death of a child. There is no solace for it.

  At what stage does the battle now stand? I spoke afterward to Onesicritus (who would become my fleet steersman in India), who remained in camp and was observing from the heights, three miles back. The sight, he reported, gave fresh meaning to the word pandemonium. Onesicritus was thoroughly familiar with our battle plan and possessed as well an excellent conception of the Persians’ order; yet, even with these held firmly in mind, he declared, he could make no sense of the spectacle sprawling across the plain beneath him. It seemed to him as if the field had not only inverted but revolved upon its axis, so that what should have been left was right and what ought to have been fore had become aft. Compounding this chaos were the towering clouds of alkaline dust, which rendered ghostly the movements of units and wings and from which ascended such sounds as rendered it impossible for any man with a bent toward philosophy, so Onesicritus attested, to declare the race of humans anything but mad.

  I credit his report. The field must have looked to him as he portrayed it. Yet from where I ride, at the fore of the Companion Cavalry, all is in order. Powerful division
s of both sides are engaged. Battles of monumental scale rage left, right, and center. Yet for Darius and me, the fatal blows remain undelivered. We occupy the maelstrom’s eye.

  The Companions advance, still at a walk. A hundred scythed chariots drive at us from the front. In thousands, Bactrian, Scythian, Sacae, and Massagetae horsemen charge upon us from the right. Preposterous as it sounds, every piece is right where it should be.

  The first scythed chariot bursts through Balacrus’s screen. Its driver is dead, dragged behind, entangled in the reins; three of the four horses are shot through with darts and bolts; they gallop, driven on by terror alone. The car plunges into our ranks, which part in wild haste, driven by our grooms afoot, amid the curses of riders and the bawling of beasts. A second and third cutter hurtle toward us, only to overturn out front beneath broadsides of shafts and javelins launched by Balacrus’s Thracians and Agrianes. I have never seen such rage as that directed by our fellows against these machines. They hate them. Our horses’ state is so high now they can barely be contained. At the left of each charger trots its groom, his right hand clutching the cheek piece of the bridle, holding the animal in check (no rider can do this alone under such conditions) while employing the weight of his body to keep the beast from bolting, as even the most impeccably trained horse will do under such conditions.

  The condition is serious. If one mount flies, the whole troop will follow. Cleitus catches my eye. “Go now?” The temptation to attack prematurely is overwhelming. How can one “direct” such chaos? The attempt is excruciating. You feed one company into the fight, dispatch another to a different sector. Based on what? The sound of the brawl? A dispatch minutes old? The ordeal of command consists in this: that one makes decisions of fatal consequence based on ludicrously inadequate intelligence.

  The din of bedlam ascends on the right. Tension mounts to an apogee. Riderless horses break from the gloom and bolt through our Companions’ formation. I command Cleitus to hold. More cutters rush upon us. Every man and horse is coming out of his skin.

  We keep advancing at a walk. One can still see. Despite cyclones of grit, vision remains possible through rifts opened by the wind. Now these, too, begin to occlude as the fight presses closer on the flank. Arrow shafts begin lancing in. Out front the clash between chariots and missile troops mounts to an excruciating pitch. In formation, one of our horses bolts, taking groom and rider with him. Two more rear in place. Terror is unstringing the animals. Cleitus at my shoulder: “Take them to a trot.”

  I sign for it. We bump the pace; the horses settle. Beneath me Bucephalus is a mountain. He who on parade will stamp and plunge becomes, amid the trumpets, the soul of calm. I should steady him; it is he who steadies me.

  Everything comes down to Aretes, out front somewhere with his four hundred Lancers. I send a third courier, after the one I sent succeeding Boar, and another after that. “Black!” I call Cleitus. If Aretes’ squadrons can’t charge, I will send the Royal. I can’t pull out more; the fate of all rides on the Companions’ rush at Darius.

  Do I tell too much detail, Itanes? You must learn how events turn on real ground. The blindness of it, the dislocation, the luck. The foe’s assault from the right presses so close now that defenders of our own flank guard, dueling the enemy lance-to-lance, break rearward across the wing of the Companions’ formation. Spent arrow shafts clatter among our ranks. In moments our squadrons’ cohesion will break.

  Now Aretes charges.

  We can’t hear or see it, but we sense it from the dust and the feel of the field. “Contain your horses!” I bawl, though not even Black Cleitus at my shoulder can hear me. Aretes’ orders are to find the soft belly where the Persians’ drawing off of units to the flank has thinned their front—and charge into it. My Companions will follow.

  But in the event (though we will not learn this till days later), when this soft spot appears, two thousand of the foe’s Royal Indian Horse, recalled from the wing by Darius, emerge from the dust directly in the path upon which Aretes’ four hundred have come to the gallop. I cannot see this. It is beyond my sight in the gloom, nor could I have seen it on the clearest field, so screened is my position by the collision between the scythed chariots and our archers and javelineers. Aretes recounted later that he believed in the moment that all was lost. He took his four hundred straight into the Royal Indian two thousand. He could think of no other course. He knew only, he said, that to balk would be fatal. He made the decision at the stretching gallop and communicated it to his men, neither by sound nor sign, but only by the direction in which he himself plunged.

  For this act I awarded him, when we took Persepolis, five hundred talents of gold, a sum equal to half the yearly tribute of Athens’s empire at its pinnacle of power.

  Luck is no small part of war, and here, at this instant, another stroke breaks our way. As Black Cleitus draws the Royal Squadron rightward, to charge in Aretes’ stead, should he fail, I come up on the right of his leading wedge. The formation I have ordered is what we call a “side and one”—that is, a wedge heavied up on one wing, in this case the right, because the Royal Squadron’s role, replacing Aretes’, is to break a lane through for the main body of the Companions, who will follow, and to shield this body’s critical flank (its right as it wheels left and pushes behind the Persian front toward Darius) against the mass of the foe.

  Fortune conspires to place me here, beside Cleitus, when his second in command, named Alexander, spurs out of the murk at stretching speed.

  “Aretes is engaged!” Alexander shouts. It turns out that Cleitus, outstanding officer that he is, has sent scouts forward on his own the moment I called the Royal to the wing, and these riders have observed the appearance of the two thousand Indian cavalry—and seen Aretes hurl his Lancers into them. Where? Alexander points into the soup. We can hear the clash, ongoing, some points to the right.

  The soft spot will be there.

  I make two changes. I return the Royal Squadron to the fore of the Companions (I will ride, with Cleitus, at its point). And I bring up an additional squadron, the Bottiaean, into the position we call “fist”—that is, immediately to the rear of the Royal. I want power to penetrate.

  Does it sound mad, Itanes, that I, with one-twentieth of Darius’s force, lay designs to break through at his threshold and wring his royal neck?

  I know what I have and haven’t.

  I know what he has and hasn’t.

  I hurl myself and my Companions into the murk. Great prizes are won only at great hazard.

  Twenty- Six

  THE BIG WEDGE

  THE THRUST AT DARIUS COMES IN ONE GREAT WEDGE. The Royal and Bottiaean squadrons comprise the point, with the Toronean, Anthemiot, and Amphipolitan making the right; the remaining Companion Cavalry squadrons compose the left, with the foot brigades of Royal Guardsmen extending this wing as they advance at the double beside the leftmost squadron of Companions; the Guardsmen yoke the cavalry to the two phalanx brigades, Coenus’s and Perdiccas’s, which make up the leftmost extremity of the Big Wedge.

  This is one battle.

  On the right, Cleander, Menidas, Aretes, Ariston, Attalus, and Brison fight another; the central phalanx fights a third; while on the left wing, Parmenio and Craterus duel the foe in a fourth. One may add a fifth and sixth. Our secondary phalanx clashes with elements of enemy horse and foot on the rear and left wing, while two miles back, in our forward camp, our disabled and noncombatants are being overrun by Royal Indian and Parthian cavalry seeking to rescue the queen and queen mother of Persia (who are not there, in fact, but in the main base camp, five miles to the rear).

  No one of these struggles is visible from any other, nor is the breadth of any one discernible even to those within its sphere, so dense is the storm of grit and murk flung up by the feet and hooves of the contending multitudes.

  From my post with the Companions, I can see nothing. I initiate the charge on sound alone—the clash of Aretes’ Lancers against the Royal Indian Horse, which
we can hear (or imagine we do) some points to the right and about three hundred yards forward.

  What one unacquainted with battle does not understand is its terrible freight of fatigue. The weight of armor and weapons alone, just to bear on the parade ground, will break a man’s back in an hour. And our soldier is not on the parade ground. He is in the field. He has marched under full kit, in all likelihood, half a day just to reach the ground of conflict. Has he got food in his belly? When did he last sleep? Is he sick or injured? Now add fear. Add excitement, add anticipation. There is a type of exhaustion called by the Greeks apantlesis. It is that enervation produced not by physical fatigue alone but also by strain on the nerves. An officer or soldier in this state is prey to make bad decisions, to fail to take actions clearly called for, to misapprehend obvious situations, and in general to become deaf, blind, and stupid. Worse, this state comes upon one with the suddenness of night and the power of a punch in the teeth. One minute a man is able; the next he is an imbecile.

  This strain that a man experiences, a horse feels doubly—and a highly strung cavalry mount doubles that again. Horses cannot comprehend delay, or conservation of effort. The moment is all that exists for them, and in that moment they know only the command that you and I communicate. Is it any wonder they become so “high”? Their nerves are excruciatingly attuned to ours; they take on our fear and our excitement, and the fear and excitement of the other horses. Horses are herd animals: Dread is communicated from beast to beast instantaneously. And horses are flight animals: Their first impulse is to run. What holds them? Only their bond with us. For each horse is twinned with his rider, whose will to fight, and the union of trust he has forged over years with his animal, contains the beast and checks him from reverting to instinct. Remember, our horses have come up with us from foals. For many, we were present in their stalls at the hour of their births; our breath into their nostrils is the earliest sensation they have known. We have fed them and groomed them, curried and combed them, sat up nights when they were ill or hurt; thousands of hours we have trained together, in the ring and on the field. Not our wives or children, not Zeus Himself knows us as our horses do, or has labored in our company so many hours. Yet the truest mount will bolt; the bravest will fly. It is a wonder they remain at all, to such an unendurable pitch are their nerves wound in ranks awaiting action. Look in your charger’s eye. He is wild still, for all your decade of labor, and poised so precariously between fidelity to you and the instincts of flight and fury, that one knows he can contain him no more than quicksilver or summer lightning.