Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  Why are we in Afghanistan? Because it commands the track to India and the Shore of Ocean. Because its warlords must be subdued before I take the army over the Hindu Kush to the Indus and the Punjab.

  Examine the daybooks for this period. You will see that the corps fought for almost three years across Areia, Parthia, Drangiana, Bactria, Arachosia, and Sogdiana and could not force a single pitched battle. It was all sieges and unconventional warfare, against native fighters the troops called “wolf warriors.” (Bessus had been surrendered to us by then and turned over to the Persians for their justice.) These were steppe raiders and hill tribesmen, the former mounting at one time as many as thirty thousand, the latter thrice that number, who fought both as armies and as clans. Their commander, when they had one, was the last Persian lord, Spitamenes, whom our men came to call the Grey Wolf, for the streak in his beard and his elusiveness over that stony and barren ground.

  One cannot engage guerrilla forces with conventional ones. A new order must be evolved. Anticipating this after Gaugamela, I reorganized the army, making it lighter and more mobile. I chopped four feet off the sarissas. Each man dumped twenty pounds of kit. Helmets became light caps; armor we dispensed with entirely. Of cavalry, I doubled the number of Companions, integrating the Lancers and Paeonians and the best of the Persian and foreign horse. I wanted units that were fast and flexible, that could live off the land and operate independently in hostile country.

  Tactics too had to adjust. Against the civilized foe, a commander has strategic targets he may seize or destroy, such as cities or supply depots, bridges or roads, the loss of which produces suffering in the foe and renders him tractable to accommodation. Against wild tribes this avails nothing. They own no property. They have nothing to lose. Indeed they care nothing even for their persons or their lives. To say one fights guerrillas is inexact. One hunts them, as he would jackals or wild boars, and he can permit himself to feel pity for them no more than for savage beasts. The tribesmen of Afghanistan were the fiercest fighters I ever faced, and their general, the Grey Wolf, the only adversary I ever feared.

  The wolf warriors’ religion is fatalism. They worship freedom and death. The language they understand is terror. To prevail, one must be more terrible than they. This takes some going, as these clansmen, like all rude and insular races, perceive each person outside their blood sphere not as a human being but as a beast or devil. You cannot negotiate with such foes; they are proof against all blandishment or subornation and are animated by warrior pride alone. They would rather die than submit. They are vain, greedy, cunning, vicious, mean, cowardly, gallant, generous, stubborn, and corrupt. They are capable of endurance beyond all human measure and can bear such suffering, of both flesh and spirit, as would break a block of stone.

  Pursuit is the essence of wolf warfare, by which I mean pursuit until the last enemy is cornered and slain. One fights wild tribesmen best in winter. That’s when the snow drives them down out of the mountains. With our reconfigured forces, we sought to go this one better. We went up after them. To defeat wolf warriors, one denies them sanctuary. When you take a village, raze it. Overhauling the foe, kill him to the last man. Leave no one. Put to death or deport the entire population. It accomplishes nothing to drive the men off; they’ll just come back. Pacts or treaties? Forget them. The tribesman owns no compunction. What honor he knows is confined strictly to his own kind; to you, he cannot breathe without perjuring himself. Every oath is a sham, every promise a hoax. I have sat in tribal parleys a hundred times; if the truth was ever spoken, I never heard it.

  And yet, despite their treacherousness and duplicity, one could not help but admire these fellows. I came, myself, to love them. They reminded me of our wild highlanders back home. Their women were proud and beautiful, their children bright and fearless; they knew how to laugh and how to be happy. In the end I could not tame them, so I married them. I wed your sister, the princess Roxanne, and paid your father Oxyartes more for the privilege than I hope you ever learn. It was the kind of stunt my own father would have approved of. And it has worked.

  As for Spitamenes, at the finish I beat him with money. The free cavalry of Afghanistan—Parthians, Areians, Bactrians, Drangians, Arachosians, Sogdians, Daans, Massagetae—cared nothing for whom they worked. After twenty-odd months of chasing the Grey Wolf into dead ends and onto blind spurs, I saw wisdom and called up the cash. You never saw foes turn into friends so fast. Within days we had pacified four thousand square miles. I simply bought the country. If Spitamenes had had deeper coffers, he might have bested me. I could not outfight him, but I outspent him.

  The Afghan will fight for money, but he won’t work for it. To ask is an insult. Here is how we got round it. Say we wished to transport a hundred wine jars to Kabul. We learned to ask for ghinnouse, “a favor”—and to let the natives themselves turn it into work. One approaches the chief. “Would you please, as a favor to me, transport with your pack train this lamp when you trek to Kabul?” “Of course,” replies the fellow, “it would be my pleasure.” Then when he shows up, you have your wine jars waiting. “Hmm,” observes the chief, “would you like us to take these wine jars to Kabul with this lamp?” Since no one has offered pay and no one has accepted, no one is offended. One is free to “defray expenses” by a cash contribution.

  After I married into your family, I had my engineers labor an entire summer building roads into the highlands for your father, so that the army could supply him and keep him strong. Returning from campaign next spring, I saw the roads had been torn up. Rebel tribes! I went to your father to mount an action. The old man blandly announced that he had wrecked the tracks himself. I just shook my head. The clans didn’t want access. They liked being isolated. It kept them free.

  We fought this upside-down war for the better part of three years. To operate in such an environment, all assumptions had to be turned on their head. Whereas it is an axiom of conventional warfare never to detach from the central force a unit weaker than the whole, these tribal clashes demanded the opposite. I broke up the army into half and quarter corps, each self-contained, with its own heavy and light infantry, cavalry, archers, javelineers, engineers, and siege train. We conducted “sweeps.” Two or three columns would enter a province on parallel courses. Fast couriers kept the units in contact. All commanders were instructed, upon striking the foe, to drive him toward the flanking corps. Boxing the enemy in this way was the only chance we had of drawing him into an iron-to-iron fight, and even then, the Grey Wolf slipped away more often than not.

  The instrument of counterguerrilla warfare is the massacre. One must learn this art if he hopes to prevail. There is a liability to this, however. It is combat shorn of chivalry. Telamon called it “the Butcher’s War,” and it was. Numbers of our fellows couldn’t take it. I permitted them to retire or accept discharge with honor, allotting them double and triple bonuses and making it known that no disgrace attached to their delicacy, as Craterus called it. Other men joined up, who had the stomach for such work.

  You cannot fight guerrillas with ordinary forces, and you cannot fight them with ordinary men.

  In this new war, certain generals came into their own. Craterus was one, Coenus another. These two had always been, with Perdiccas, my toughest and most resourceful commanders; this campaign without rules was raw meat to him. I began to operate my own corps more and more in conjunction with theirs; they were the only ones I could send into the mountains and not fear they would be ambushed and cut to pieces. Ptolemy and Perdiccas proved suited to wolf warfare as well, the former showing himself a superb siege general, the latter a spirited leader of light horse and foot.

  The one commander who failed was Hephaestion. He could not kill women and children. For this, I respected him. But I could not send him into the field against a foe as formidable as the Grey Wolf; the jeopardy to his men was too great. So I brought him in to my staff. I made him my Number Two, second in command of the expeditionary force. The other generals responded with o
utrage. Hephaestion himself perceived this promotion as charity. Far from being gratified, he felt humiliated, and his rival marshals, who had seethed for years at his privileged station, worked now—in private, if not yet in public—to advance their own standing by producing his fall. The more I backed Hephaestion or interceded on his behalf, the more he resented me. The result was a bitter estrangement between myself and the man I needed most and depended most upon.

  In Afghanistan the schism cracked open between the New Men and the Old Corps. Those veteran commanders who had cut their teeth under my father were all but gone now: Antipater and Antigonus One-Eye in garrison commands, Parmenio slain, Philotas executed; Nicanor, Meleager, Amyntas; scores more fallen in battle, passed over, or granted discharge. Only Black Cleitus remained. When I told him I planned to name him governor of Bactria, he would not even take my hand, so furious was he at what he perceived to be a sentence of exile, a posting, as he put it, to “the bunghole of the known world.”

  In Afghanistan too I was compelled to form that unit called the Malcontents. These, as I have said, were veterans of the Old Corps primarily, good men, many of them twenty years my senior, who remained loyal to Parmenio and bitterly resented me for the sequence of his end. These fellows were scattered across every unit of the army, sowing the contagion of disgruntlement. I quarantined them into one company, where I could keep my eye on them. But this was only a temporary answer.

  Something final would have to be done with them.

  The New Men now comprise the bulk of my corps. These are the young commanders, my age, thirty and under, who have made their fame with me, and owe their careers to me. But Afghanistan strains the fidelity even of this group. Guerrilla war has made my captains independent, and they have gotten a taste for it. Emboldened by autonomous command, my generals grow impatient with this backwater fray. They burn for the bright nexus of empire, for Babylon and Egypt, where the money is, and the fame and power. Worse, with administrative autonomy, the loyalty of individual soldiers has become attached to their division commanders, upon whom their advancement depends, and not to me—so that a fellow calls himself Coenus’s man or Perdiccas’s, and not Alexander’s. Each victory these companies bring home enlarges their unit pride, not their pride in the army as a whole. And each act of barbarity committed turns them more barbarous.

  Perceiving the toll this Butcher’s War is taking on the army, I press the campaign even more vigorously, hoping to secure the country and move on. But one year becomes two and two three. Our divisions have depopulated entire territories. Regions thrice the size of Macedonia have been emptied of everything except dogs and crows. From a letter to my mother from Maracanda:

  My daimon is at home in this kind of fighting. I am not. My genius suffers no scruple at the decimation of villages or the dispeopling of provinces. To me such actions are unknightly. They border upon the criminal. I abhor their commission.

  In Afghanistan my daimon begins to talk to me. He comes forward in resonance with the wolf warriors against whom we fight. Like them, the daimon knows no pity. Like them he owns no fear of death. You have asked, Itanes, if the daimon is properly identified with the soul. He is not. The daimon and the self are subordinate to the soul, but the daimon, should he overcome the self, may abrogate the soul. At that point a man becomes a monster.

  In Maracanda, my spear took the life of Black Cleitus. I murdered him in a drunken rage. This was the most infamous act I have ever committed. More criminal than Thebes, more brutal than Tyre, far more wicked than the execution of Philotas (who earned his death by perfidy) and the elimination of Parmenio (which act was mandated by the treachery of his son).

  The night had begun like every other in those years—with liquor, bragging, and contention, then more liquor and harsher contention. Coenus had just returned from a victory in the mountains, in which the two supporting columns, Ptolemy’s and Perdiccas’s, had shared his success. Praise for these New Men flowed with the wine.

  Black Cleitus stood, defending the Old Corps.

  Cleitus had a lover, a Page named Angelides; his passion for this boy knew no bounds, but the lad, a bright and ambitious fellow, could see that Cleitus’s star was falling (as signalized by my appointment of him as governor of Bactria) and had come keenly to regret his choice of mentor. In secret he had made overtures to another; Cleitus knew it. He began bullying the boy, this night, commanding him to take sides.

  Who were more worthy, the New Men or the Old Corps?

  When Ptolemy and Perdiccas defended the former, Cleitus turned to me as arbiter. I praised both bodies, indicating by this that I wished the subject dropped.

  Cleitus would not let it be. In the most brutal and invidious fashion, he reviled not only the New Men but all who had fought under me without prior service beneath Philip. When Love Locks ordered him to sober up or leave, Cleitus hurled his wine bowl in fury. “And what will you do if I don’t? The same as you did to Philip?”

  When my father was assassinated, Love Locks and Perdiccas were two of the three Bodyguards who overtook the killer and slew him. Many of suspicious bent had seized upon this swift and too-convenient stilling of the murderer’s tongue and believed the pair complicit in his crime. As Love Locks and Perdiccas were my dear friends, the implication was that mine was the covert hand behind Philip’s murder.

  This was a murmur I had heard a thousand times and had dismissed as often with a rueful sigh. This night something tore inside me. I leapt from my seat, seizing the spear of Medon, the Page who stood at my shoulder. “Thou villain!” I shouted at Cleitus. “Do you dare call me parricide?”

  Hephaestion intercepted me. Ptolemy and Coenus pinned my arms. A great cry filled the room. Three Pages, including Angelides, gripped Cleitus fast.

  Now every long-stifled grudge spewed from the veteran’s maw. He cursed me for arrogance and ingratitude, conceit and self-infatuation. Cleitus’s sister Hellanice had been my nurse. Cleitus now invoked the name of this excellent matron, at whose breast I had suckled (and whose two sons had fallen gallantly in my service), and his own, whose right arm had saved my life at the Granicus.

  “Yet now I and Philip are nothing to you, Alexander, but you preen in Persian purple and ordain the extinction of the same brave men without whom you would be nothing but a knave and a petty prince!”

  Love Locks and Perdiccas hauled Cleitus from the chamber while I, shaking with rage, summoned every resource to maintain self-command.

  Suddenly: a cry. Cleitus burst again into the hall. There was a bronze brazier in the center; Cleitus strode to it as a speaker to a stand. Before he could open his mouth, I fell upon him.

  I drove the point of Medon’s spear, which I still clutched, with both hands, uppercutting, into the meat of Cleitus’s belly at the point below the breastbone where his cloak was bound by its regimental clasp, then thrust up and in, seeking his heart. My chest was pressed flat against his; we grappled like two rams in the mountains. I could feel the broadening wedge of the warhead as it hung up momentarily between the ribs of his dorsal spine, then punched through, with a sound like a spike cleaving a plank, and exited the flesh of his back. Cleitus was still very much alive, striking at the back of my neck with the butt of his sword. I crashed on top of him with all my weight. I felt his spine shear. For an instant there was no sensation of grief or of satisfaction. I thought only, This man will never defame me again.

  The story goes that I was seized in that moment with such contrition that I sought to turn my weapon upon myself. No. That came later. Rather, I became stone-sober on the instant. Shame suffused me. I felt such mortification as I thought would part me from my reason. I was told later that I lifted Cleitus’s body in my arms and, crying to heaven, pleaded for its reanimation. I shouted for the physicians—I remember that—and was only parted from the dead man’s breast by the strong arms of my friends, whose expressions of horror, when I beheld them, served only to redouble my despair.

  The river of Sogdiana is the Jaxartes.
Across this five days later storms Spitamenes with nine thousand mounted raiders. Grief for Cleitus (and self-excoriation for my own felony) will have to wait. I marshal five flying divisions, taking the first for myself and setting in command over the others Craterus, Coenus, Perdiccas, and Hephaestion, whose pride will not endure another exclusion from action.

  Here is how the Grey Wolf fights. He has grasped our tactics of pursuit by linked columns. His method is to lure us into the chase and wear us down with the country, which he knows and we don’t. Then he strikes. By night upon our camps, by day from ambush on our columns. His Bactrian ponies can’t outsprint our Parthians and Medians in a straight charge, but they can withdraw before us at the trot for hours, until, having run our mounts to exhaustion, he turns upon us and takes the offensive. Using these tactics, Spitamenes massacres east of Cyropolis a Macedonian column including sixty Companions, led by my brave Andromachus, who held the left wing at Gaugamela, eight hundred mercenary cavalry, and fifteen hundred hired infantry. Only three hundred and fifty escape. The rest are butchered, corpses stripped and mutilated and left for wolves.

  You may imagine the state of our own divisions when report reaches us. The men’s anger, frustration, and loathing for this badlands war threatens to carry them apart from themselves. They blaze to take it out on the foe, and no man owns less credibility than I to counsel restraint; nor do I wish to.

  We chase Spitamenes to the Jaxartes with all five columns. At Nebdara is a ford, over which the Grey Wolf has escaped many times. He beats us there again, masses his forces on the far bank, and resists our crossing with everything he’s got. Even his women shoot at us, from atop a palisade of wagons. By the time we mount a heavy assault, the marauders have fled into Scythia, vanishing onto their home sod.