Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  For myself, even amid the debacle of the island, I fought in a state of occupation so extreme as to constitute transport. Beneath me, Bucephalus, at twenty-one years, nearly burst his heart swimming the river; I sought to spare him and move to Corona and my other remounts for the downstream trek; he would not let me. At battle’s verge again I tried to hand him off to my groom Evagoras. The fury in his eye overruled me. He would not let me from his back until the lion standard of Macedon commanded all the field.

  What army could have done what we did? And, most difficult of all from a command standpoint: Up until the morning of battle, the body of the corps not only resisted even taking part in the fight but very nearly mutinied and set all our works at naught. I confess I took keener satisfaction in this triumph than in any heretofore, and I saw on the faces of my generals and comrades that they felt the same. It required no proclamation to check the army’s blood lust; esteem of the foe reined it of its own.

  Porus himself fought magnificently. He struggled on, atop his war elephant (a hero in its own right), after suffering numerous wounds, the toll of which was so severe that when at battle’s close he at last dismounted from his bunker, he could not remount on his own, but had to be lifted, so men said, by the beast’s own trunk. When I dispatched Raj Ambhi to him, seeking his surrender, Porus defied this man he considered his enemy, though by this hour he knew his own cause to be without hope, and would yield at last only to the prince Beos, his friend, whom I sent next, with pledges of clemency and honorable handling for himself and his men. “How do you wish to be treated?” I asked Porus when I had caught up in person. “Like a king,” he replied, and like a king we honored him.

  Most gratifying of this battle’s issue was its affording of an occasion for magnanimity. A noble foe may be dealt with nobly. I was able to accept from Porus not his surrender but his undertaking of alliance and to press upon him not articles of capitulation but gifts of friendship. Prisoners were repatriated within the same day, without ransom, their arms restored to them. Further it was my pleasure, in the days succeeding the fight, to vie in munificence with my new friend. The fallen of both sides were interred with honor beneath the same mound, while the bitterness of their loss was alleviated, as much as such woe can be, by oaths exchanged, both sides pledging never to take up arms against each other again.

  Finally and most significantly, the men’s dynamis, their will to fight, had been restored. The long, degrading struggle against bandits and butchers was over. Porus’s gift to the army of Macedon was itself, the reanimation of its pride and esprit.

  The hour was sunset, battle’s close. Rain had begun. Not the deluge of the night before, but a bright, cleansing squall that turned the sky opalescent. Astride Corona, I returned, to the shorefront opposite our camp. Surgeons and medical elements of Craterus’s and Meleager’s brigades, which had played the holding wing on the far side of the Hydaspes, were just now being brought over, as all available craft had till then been required for the ferrying of troops employed in the assault. A field hospital was being set up beside a farmer’s plot of leeks; wounded men, Indians as well as Macedonians, were being borne in on wagons and carts. All ill will had fled. I could see, across the field, two physicians of our corps, Marsyas of Croton and Lucas of Rhodes. They had not seen me. A boy ran up to them, delivering a message. Suddenly both burst from the tent hospital and sprinted, such as they could across the muck of the field, toward a sunken road hard by the levee. My eye followed them. A clutch of soldiers huddled in postures of exigency. Clearly someone had fallen—someone of consequence.

  The hair stood up all over my body. Hephaestion? No, I’d just seen him, wounded but in no danger. Craterus, Ptolemy, Perdiccas—all accounted for. I was spurring now, at the trot and then the canter. The Indians cultivate vegetables in raised beds; the wet sucking troughs clutched at Corona’s shanks. As I emerged from the plot, about fifty feet from the cluster of soldiers, several, recognizing me, stood to their feet, blanched and stricken. I saw, among the kneeling troops, my groom Evagoras.

  I knew then that it was not a man they labored over.

  I dismounted and crossed on foot toward the company, whose ranks parted before me, the men removing their helmets and undercaps. Bucephalus lay on his right side. I saw at once that his great heart beat no more. A thousand times in imagination I had rehearsed this hour, which I knew must come, yet the impact, in the moment, was moderated not in the slightest. I felt as if a blow had been struck with titanic execution upon the plexus of my breast. The emotion was not grief for Bucephalus, for I saw that his spirit had safely fled; rather, desolation descended for me, for my own loss, and the nation’s, bereft of his soul and spirit. I sunk to one knee, clutching Evagoras’s arm to keep from keeling.

  One of the men cradled Bucephalus’s head across his thighs. My apparition, I saw, caused him distress; he feared offering offense, should he stay or rise. I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Set his head on this,” I said, but I could not shed my cloak, so without strength had my arms become. Evagoras had to remove it for me. The troopers had been ministering to Bucephalus for no short time, it was clear, struggling desperately to save him. He had expired of age and exhaustion. There was nothing they could do.

  “Take the names of these gentlemen,” I instructed Evagoras when sense returned. They were Odrysian cavalrymen of Menidas’s squadrons, commanded in his absence by Philip, son of Amyntas. I met the eyes of each. “I shall never forget your kindness here this day.”

  I ordered the surgeons Marsyas and Lucas to return to their duties. Wounded men needed their care. The Odrysians, too, I released. They would not go. Like the Macedones, these knights of Thrace slay a man’s horse over his grave and bury both within the same crypt; they believe the mount will bear its master again in the life to come. Here in a field of leeks, with a drizzle descending, these men now offered me their own lives, and those of their horses, to consecrate Bucephalus’s tomb.

  “No, my friends. But each drop of blood you proffer, I shall requite to you, made of gold. Now retire to your companies, please, and bear my gratitude with you always.”

  Here is the eulogy I pronounced two days later over Bucephalus’s grave:

  “The first time I saw this horse, he was four years old and barely broken to the bit. A dealer showed him at Pella, among other magnificent specimens. Bucephalus eclipsed them as the sun the stars, but he reared and kicked and would permit no one upon his back. My father rejected him as ungovernable. I was thirteen at the time and full of myself, as boys, and princes, are. I saw at once that who mastered such a prodigy would be worthy of the world. And I reckoned, too, that to tame a spirit like his, one must break his own heart.

  “No tutor has taught me more than this horse. No campaign of war has taxed my resources as has the schooling of this beast. Days and nights in thousands have I labored, boy and man, seeking to lift myself to the plane on which his soul dwelt. He has demanded everything of me, and, receiving it, has borne me beyond myself.

  “This army stands here today because of Bucephalus. It was he who broke the Sacred Band at Chaeronea; no other horse could have done it. At Issus and Gaugamela, the charges of Companions did not follow me; their mounts followed Bucephalus. Yes, he could be savage; yes, he would not be ruled. But such a spirit may not be judged by standards set for lesser beings. Why does Zeus send prodigies to earth? For the same reason He makes a comet streak across the sky. To show not what has been done, but what can be.”

  On this site, I pronounced, I would found a city, to be called Bucephala. May heaven bless all who make their homes within its walls.

  We spaded the earth atop my dear companion’s mound.

  “My friends, many of you have sought to console me for this loss, citing Bucephalus’s long life, his love of me and of this enterprise, his fame, his place, even, among the stars. You have recalled to me that the wide world is mine to search, and from its precincts I may select any horse I wish and train it to be a second Bucep
halus. I don’t believe it. In all the earth we shall not find his fellow. He was, and is no more. My own end, when it comes, is by his passing rendered less hateful to me in that hope, only, that I shall meet him again in the life to come.”

  Thunder broke then across the plain. Heaven’s bolts cleaved the sky. The men, and I, too, wondered at the might and incidence of this sign.

  “Macedonians and allies, I have tested you sorely, I know. The demands I have placed upon you would have broken any lesser company. Brothers, believe in me and in one another! This victory has brought us back. We are ourselves again. Nothing else matters. Believe in our destiny and press on. No force on earth can stop us now!”

  EPILOGUE

  ITANES

  THESE WERE THE LAST WORDS Alexander spoke for this record. That evening, when I presented myself, he thanked me for my witness (which had now served its purpose, he declared) and commanded me to return full-time to my post with the corps. This I did.

  After a rest of thirty days, the army continued its advance to the east. It crossed the river Acesines, another mighty torrent, and the Hydraotes, adding to Porus’s dominions the kingdoms of his enemies. The southwest monsoons had begun. Seventy days the army labored on, beneath stupefying deluges, amid ungodly heat, across a quagmire of mud. Illness ravaged the column. Morale plunged. Worse, natives, when queried as to the proximity of the Eastern Ocean (which Alexander had declared “not far” when he established it as the ultimate object of the expedition), reported that thousands of miles yet remained, across territory obstructed by impassable rivers, uncrossable mountains and deserts, and defended by warriors in hosts innumerable—if in fact such Ocean existed at all. As measured by the expedition surveyors, the army had marched 11,250 miles over the past eight years. At last, on the river Hyphasis, a delegation of commanders and Companions presented themselves to the king, begging him to take pity on them. The Macedonians’ endurance had reached its end. They would march east no farther.

  Alexander rejected this and retired in fury to his tent. On all prior occasions this device had brought the army swiftly to heel. But the men this time had set their purpose. When Alexander realized that no word or act could turn them from their course, he made a show of taking the omens, which declared, so the diviners testified, that heaven itself accorded with the wishes of his countrymen. He would not compel them onward. The army would turn back.

  He who had proved invincible to every force of man or nature yielded at last to the misery of his compatriots. When they learned of his acquiescence, they flocked about his tent in thousands, weeping for joy. They blessed and praised him, rejoicing that at last they might put a period to their trials and hope to see again dear wives and children, aged fathers and mothers, and their beloved homeland, from which they had been parted for so long.

  Alexander continued his conquests on the return west, bringing into subjection numerous nations and peoples, of whom the greatest were the Oxydracae, the Mallians, Brachmanes, Agalasseis, Sydracae, the kingdoms of Musicanus, Porticanus, and Sambus, and, as well, charting heretofore-undiscovered passages to the Arabian Ocean and the Persian Sea.

  At Susa he took Persian brides for the most high ranking of the Companions, ninety-two in all, in one magnificent ceremony. He himself wed Darius’s eldest daughter, Stateira, selecting for Hephaestion her sister Drypetis, it being his wish that his children and Hephaestion’s be cousins. He presented dowries to all the Companions and their brides, as well as a golden cup to every man of Macedon (some ten thousand, when they registered) who had taken a consort of the East.

  At Ecbatana, two years after turning back, Hephaestion took fever and died. In seemed the earth itself could not contain Alexander’s grief. To honor his friend, he commanded the construction of a monument two hundred feet high, at a cost of ten thousand talents. He ordered the manes of every horse and mule cropped in mourning and directed even that the battlements of the empire be broken down, every other one, so they appeared as if they wept.

  I served the king then as a captain in the agema of the Companions, so that I stood in his presence between six and twelve hours a day. I may state, and you may believe, that, though he displayed without fail a cheerful and enterprising mien, yet, from the death of Hephaestion, he was never the same man.

  For the first time, he began to speak of his own death and to project with apprehension the strife that must follow, predicting the succession struggles that would inevitably ensue. Roxanne was with child then. Alexander warned me to look to her safety and my own, for, when he was gone, ambitious men would discover means to discredit and disown us, if not murder us outright, to further their own ends.

  Alexander returned to Babylon and turned his attention to future campaigns. He planned to bring Arabia next beneath his sway. In late spring of the eleventh year after his crossing out of Europe into Asia, he took sick. His state deteriorated rapidly over the succeeding days; no measure of the physicians availed.

  The soldiers of the army, driven frantic by the rumor that their king had succumbed, and refusing to believe reassurances of their officers that he still lived, swarmed about the palace, demanding entry to him in person. This was granted. One by one, Alexander’s comrades filed past his bed, dressed in their military tunics. The king could no longer speak, but he recognized each soldier and blessed him with his eyes. The following evening, his spirit departed from life among men. The date was 15 Thargelion of the Athenian calendar, 28 Daesius of the Macedonian, in the first year of the 114th Olympiad.

  Alexander was thirty-two years, eight months old.

  No portrayal of mine could represent the passion of lamentation that succeeded his decease, save to say that Persians and Macedonians vied in extravagance of woe, the former bewailing the loss of so mild and gracious a master, the latter the end of their brilliant and peerless king.

  It is a measure of Alexander’s superhuman personality and achievements that at his death the chronicle of his days did not remain as history even for an hour, but vaulted at once into the sphere of legend. Such fables of his exploits proliferated as no mortal could have accomplished. His passing left a hole at the center of the world. And yet at the same time, his presence remained so powerfully that when in succeeding seasons his generals contested one another bitterly over division of the empire, they could be made to convene civilly by one dispensation only: that they meet in Alexander’s tent, before his vacant throne, upon which rested the king’s crown and scepter. Men feared to offend even the shade of Alexander, lest they encounter him again beneath the earth, for surely in that world, too, none would surpass him.

  And now, perhaps, it may not be out of place for this witness to speak from his own heart.

  I leave to historians the reckoning of Alexander the king. Let me address only the man. Many have indicted him for the vice of self-inflation (as if these critics would have proved superior to it in his place), yet I found him the most kind and knightly of men. He treated me, a youth, as a comrade and as a soldier, never condescending, always opening his heart absent artifice.

  No one was less impressed than he with the scale of his triumphs. He stated in this journal that he wished only to be a soldier. That he was. He was superior to heat and cold, hunger and fatigue, and, what is more, to greed and cupidity. Time and again, I watched him turn the choicest portions to his comrades. His bed was a camp cot; he dressed in moments, despising all adornment and superfluity. Winter and summer were the same to him; his idea of hell was absence of toil. He was more himself amid adversity and craved never ease, but hardship and danger. No man was more loved by his comrades or more feared by his enemies. He needed no speeches to fire the hearts of his fellows (though none excelled him as an orator), only to show himself before them. The sight of their king in arms rendered timid men brave and brave men prodigious. His years of campaign were not thirteen. Who has won what he has? Who shall ever again?

  What Alexander said of his beloved Bucephalus may be applied to his own case: that he b
elonged to no one, not even himself, but only to heaven.

  Why does Zeus send prodigies to earth? For the same reason He makes a comet streak across the sky. To show not what has been done, but what can be.

  I would add of Alexander that he was human, if anything too human, for his glories and excesses alike were spawned of passion and noble aspiration, never bloodless calculation. The inner plane upon which he dwelt was peopled not by his contemporaries but by Achilles and Hector, Heracles and Homer. He was not a man of his time, though no one ever shaped an epoch so powerfully, but of an era of gallantry and heroic ideals, which perhaps never existed save in his imagination, spawned by the verses of the poet. Since his death, I have not heard one man who knew him speak a word against him. His faults and crimes are eclipsed in the brilliance of his apparition, which we perceive now with terrible clarity, made bereft by its absence.