Steven Pressfield

by The Afghan Campaign

  Ahead, our column of infantry stretches along the river for more than a mile. From the rear we can see the foe already starting to swarm them. These are tactics ancient as hell itself. But they work. Run rings round the trapped enemy, shooting at him on the run; when he rushes you, pull back; when he wears out, attack again. Against infantry with no defendable flanks, like ours along this shallow river, victory is only a matter of patience and time. We can see Spitamenes’ auxiliaries spurring up from the bluffs and the stream, leading mules and horses laden with additional arrows. The shafts are tied in bunches like sheaves, so the horse archers can grab them at the gallop and return to the fight with their saddle-quivers reloaded.

  In the rear, the enemy does not wait to receive the charge of our wedges. His front parts while we’re still two hundred feet off, scattering for the bluffs on one side and the river on the other. We have no tactic to counter this. We cannot break formation to chase these bastards man-on-man. But to maintain the assault past the foe’s original front means being taken in the rear by them when they reform, which they do as swiftly as swallows, and in flank by their fellows waiting in concealment, whom we now see, in hundreds, emerging from behind the shoulders of the washes descending from the cliffs. Our unit has been tasked as reconnaissance; we don’t have the weight to take on such numbers. The Wolf knows this. He has outskulled us again. As Rags and I rein our tens, the foe’s front reunites and gallops behind us, seeking to cut us off from the body of the column. We can do nothing except wheel and spur back as fast as we can.

  We’re dead and we know it. The sensation is like a game of Castle against a master, in which each move you make, no matter how right or valiant, only drives you deeper into the bag. Our minds race, seeking some ploy or stratagem that will return us to the initiative. But we are caught like thrushes in birdlime, and the more we struggle, the more furiously we are fixed. Events unravel so fast that our senses can conjure no scheme except to revert to basics: form up, face the foe, prepare to stand and die.

  Meanwhile, the Wolf has sprung the same trap on our rearguard infantry assaulting the island. Our fellows advance, up to their calves in the river. Now the foe brings more horsemen from the flank. He cuts our troops off and swarms them. His mounts are massive Parthians, seventeen-handers, whose great hooves throw up spray in the shallows, dazzling in the late light. The sight would be beautiful if its import were not so calamitous. More horsemen swing round on our rear. Flag and Stephanos take their wedges straight at them.

  The fight goes exactly as we have dreaded.

  The foe falls upon our infantry in two columns—one inland, paralleling the bluffs, the other at the river’s edge and in the river. In other words, he runs down both sides of our axis. At quarter-mile intervals he strikes across and severs the column. In the rear, we can’t see this. But we hear. There is no sound in the world like armored cavalry clashing with heavy infantry. Spitamenes’ Bactrians and Sogdians are disciplined troopers, main-force units recruited and trained under Persian officers. They are drilled to fight in columns and wedges; they can exploit gaps in infantry squares as efficiently as any horsemen in the world. The foe’s Daans and Massagetae are simply savages. They have no tactics but to swarm. This is enough. The Massagetae pad their mounts’ chests with thick felt-and-bronze plates called “bundlers” and armor their own legs, hip to ankle. Let such heavy horse get to close quarters with infantry and the men on the ground don’t stand a chance. That said, our mercenaries under Andromachus are among the stubbornest and best-disciplined troops in the corps. They are Greeks—Arcadians, Achaeans, and Mantineans, with their own and Spartan officers—all veterans, many over fifty years old. They have fought on the side of the throne of Persia, first under the superb commanders Memnon of Rhodes and his son Thymondas, then under Glaucus and Patron, two extraordinary captains of infantry, who served Darius till the last—and have only come over to Alexander, accepting pay to take his service, when the Persian king’s cause is utterly lost. These warriors have fought for five years across three thousand miles and endured every kind of action imaginable, in victory and defeat. Their weapon is the twelve-foot lance, a wicked anticavalry arm, and their prowess with it is without peer. The slaughter in the shallows that day surpasses any action of the Afghan war, outside of fixed battles and massacres, for neither side will yield. The Wolf’s Daan, Sacae, and Massagetae tribesmen fight for plunder and glory, to destroy the hated invader, while the mercenaries struggle simply to survive.

  Where our half squadron rides, in the rear, we can see none of this. We know nothing of the other battles playing out along the forward three-quarters of the column. We have been cut off. We are eighty horse and four hundred foot. That any get out alive at all must be credited to Flag and Stephanos, who, in the midst of the melee, divine that the Wolf’s intention, structuring the ambush, is to drive our troops either in the direction of the rear or of the river (which routes seem to offer the only hope of breaking free) and that along these courses he, Spitamenes, has concealed further concentrations of horse and foot to massacre us. Our commanders drive us toward the bluffs instead. Here the enemy waits in place to pound us with javelins and hurled stones. But it’s better than facing line after line in the other directions. If our mounts had been fresher, if we had gotten one rest of even an hour during the day, the main of the company might have broken through and, once up the bluffs, gotten clear.

  But the foe is fresh and we are spent. Our limbs, and our horses’, have no strength to mount the face. Hooves lose purchase in the sand; riders spill and tumble. Those who dismount are cut down where they fall; troopers who stay in the saddle wear their mounts out and crash beside them. Only handfuls get through. When our front gives way, the foe pours upon us from both flanks and begins to shove us, infantry and cavalry, in a great mass back into the river.

  To fight and win is now out of the question. The only hope is to break away. I turn my ten, or what’s left of them—Lucas, Little Red, Boxer, Rags, Knuckles, and two brothers called Torch and Turtle—to force a break on the river side. Lucas has the point. The foe are all horse archers, armed with powerful compound bows of horn and bone. They shoot for our mounts. I see Lucas’s Intrepid take two shafts simultaneously, one in the chest and the other in the throat. The horse does not even slow but plunges onward; the arrow-shafts snap from the working of his great muscles, while his eyes roll white in terror. Lucas thrusts his lance into the throat of a Daan bowman. I am on his left and see the fellow’s head snap back like a doll’s and tear open at the gorge. Lucas’s lance shivers, broken by the weight of the foe; he nearly spills from the sudden dislocation. My own half-pike has splintered long since; all I have is my saber, useless as a wand against the heavily armored foe. A Daan with great mustaches blocks my escape. I see his mace has lost its head; I go after him with my saber, but as I raise it to strike, something catches my arm and holds it. I have been shot. A bolt as long as a carpenter’s rule and as thick as a thumb has entered my right shoulder from the rear and driven clean through. The arrowhead has broken off but the splintered shaft juts out half a foot before me. It binds my shoulder. My arm goes dead. My saber falls. The limb plunges like a puppet’s whose strings have been cut. I am excruciatingly aware that whoever has shot the arrow is still right behind me, and very close, judging by the power with which the shaft has driven through. He will drill me again if I don’t get clear. I spin Snow toward the river. Directly before me rises another Afghan archer, on foot. He fires. I can see both wings of his bow kick forward. Shaft and warhead hurtle straight at the center of my chest. Over my corselet I wear an ancient iron breastplate that had been my grandfather’s and that I have cursed a thousand times for its weight and ungainliness. I have tried again and again to unload it on unsuspecting scuffs at bargain prices; no one has been dumb enough to take it off my hands. This piece of antique plate now saves my life. The bolt strikes me squarely in the solar plexus. The sound rings off the iron like a bell. But the warhead does not penetr
ate. The impact bowls me rearward over Snow’s hindquarters.

  All sounds ceases. Light goes queer. I can’t move my limbs. Am I dead? Is this hell?

  It’s water.

  I’m in the river.

  Instinct makes me cling to my horse’s reins. But as I go down, cleaving to this lifeline, Snow plants her hooves and rears; the leather snaps. I plunge under. The foe is everywhere. I’m going into the books for sure this time. The enemy is trampling us in the shallows. It’s a tactic; they perform it with skill. A hoof steps on my back. I inhale a mouthful of mud. The weight of my armor is pulling me under. I can’t tell up from down. I open my eyes underwater. Arrow-shafts are ripping through the gray-green silt. The Wolf’s men are right above us, firing point-blank. Those with lances impale us like fish. I am seized by the mad notion that I must save my fellows. I grab hold of a merc I don’t know and haul him surface-ward with my one good arm. I am furious that he makes no effort to help. It occurs to me that he is dead; this elevates the pitch of my rage. I heave to the surface. There, in the current, lurches my mate, Rags. Three arrow-shafts protrude from his belly. His eyes are the color of glass. He plunges in death; a Daan carves his scalp.

  I am overcome with terror. I go under. A horse’s knee wallops my skull; I hear as much as feel the bone crack. I vault upward, seeking air. A merc thrashes into the soup before me. A tribesman rides him down, impales him with a lance thrust through the dorsal spine. The savage dismounts into the current and scalps the Greek while he’s still alive, then turns back, whooping, elevating his trophy. Impossibly, the merc emerges, blood sheeting from his torn and naked skull. With his last strength, he drives the severed shaft of his twelve-footer into his murderer’s liver. At this, three more clansmen rush upon him; the merc inverts his weapon, plunging it into his own throat; while he’s still alive the Daans hack off his head.

  Scenes of matching horror are enacted all along the column. My last sight before unconsciousness closes over me is of my pretty little mare being led away by a dashing and handsomely accoutered Afghan. The warrior neither vaunts nor displays himself like his savage countrymen, but simply trots off, like a satisfied market-goer who has just made a canny purchase.

  25.

  Night has descended when I come to. Lucas supports me. We hunker in the river, the pair of us, concealed beneath a cut-bank, with only our eyes, noses, and mouths above the surface.

  Lucas has been sabered across the forehead. He has lost an eye. The whole left side of his face, bound up, is a mass of matted blood, hair, and flesh. Several ribs are cracked, though I don’t know this yet; his right knee is half-staved, stepped on by a horse. He holds me up from behind, arms round my chest to keep me from going under. My head lolls against his shoulder. Roots and branches screen our hideout. I struggle to speak, to thank him. He hisses me silent.

  Out in the current, the enemy are pillaging corpses. They troll for survivors—their own to rescue, ours to murder and loot. They carry torches. When one of them spots movement, he elevates his brand; together he and his mates converge on the site.

  I am freezing. A terrible thirst torments me. My skull is pierced with such agony as to nearly make me blind. The arrow shaft has been extracted from my shoulder. Lucas has saved my life. I feel bitter culpability. I plead with him to get away, save himself. He stills me with two fingers.

  “You’re out of your head, Matthias.”

  I pass out again. When I come to, the moon, which had been high over my left shoulder, now sinks below my right.

  “Can you take your own weight?”

  I find a root and sag against it. Lucas frees himself. God knows how long he has been holding me up.

  The river sprawls thick with bodies. Corpses have piled up against deadfall and downed limbs. The Daans and Massagetae scalp a man, then strip everything of value. They leave the bodies naked. The dead Macks and mercs bump together in the current like a boom of logs. These are our fellows. Flag and Stephanos may be among them. Rags, I know has gone in the books. I saw Knuckles take a ticket. Flea, my last glimpse of him, had a lance through one hip and an arrow wedged through his windpipe.

  River rats have found this banquet; they scamper across the boom of flesh, their wet fur glistening in the torchlight.

  The foe has built bonfires along both banks. One would have thought of such savages that they would, by now, be given over to riot and licentiousness. But either they are possessed of strong native discipline or their officers are made of keener stuff than we have believed. Sentries have been posted. Mounts are being tended to. Even the parties plundering corpses in the river do so with the formality, even stateliness, of magistrates dividing an inheritance. A protocol governs the despoliation. We can hear the braves. “Did you kill this one? No, I think that one’s yours.” At least that’s what we imagine they’re saying—before the points of their scalping knives inscribe the half-circle ear to ear and then the trophy-taker’s fist, gathering the victim’s hair into one hank, with a swift and practiced twist rips the crown free. The depth of horror one experiences to witness this is impossible to convey by the medium of speech. You’re sick with it; your being, in every viscera, revolts. Most excruciating is to be disabled and weaponless. And of course you fear. You loathe yourself for calling in your heart so shamelessly upon heaven, in whose clemency you not only have never believed but have actively scorned and ridiculed. But you can’t stop yourself. Your breast pounds, setting up such a din, you are certain, that the enemy cannot fail to hear it and be led by its drumbeat to your hiding hole. Yet you can’t curb this, either, any more than you can quell the throttled wheezing that passes for your breath.

  Downstream, the foe has strung a barricade across the river. Warriors on horseback and afoot form a picket line, bank to bank. They inspect each drifting log and limb. A Mack who tries to ride the current will fetch up against them.

  Lucas shows me, by his mark scratched on a root, that the river is dropping. By sunrise our nest will be exposed. We have to dig.

  I said before that shame is mightier than terror. But even shame has a master, and that is fatigue. We are too exhausted, Lucas and I, to feel pride or fear. Numbness is all that’s left. Search parties quarter the island above us. If they find our dugout, they will flay us alive. We burrow into the muck, dumb as toads in a bog.

  Spent as I am, I can still appreciate the brilliance of the ambush and the massacre, which the Desert Wolf has orchestrated like a master of war. It was boxes within boxes, wheels within wheels. Each time he showed our captains elements of his design, they responded with the proper, even aggressive, counter. Yet each evolution only drove our fellows deeper into the snare. To participate was like watching a tragedy on stage, where each scene reveals itself in sequence, only the drama is death and we ourselves are its actors.

  In Spitamenes, the enemy has found his genius—a commander of cunning, ruthlessness, and audacity, who understands not only Alexander’s tactics but the heart behind them and is, in truth, ahead of our king both in conception and in execution.

  The moon continues its descent; the foe winds down his search for survivors. At one point a man passes our hideout on horseback, in the current, at a walk, surrounded by a retinue of Bactrian and Sogdian knights. Can this be Spitamenes? The Wolf himself? If it is, he is younger than I imagined, not far over forty, with a hooked nose and hawk eyes, slender as a stalk. His mount is a chestnut Arabian, not big but with perfect conformation, a strong proud neck and a barrel like a racer.

  For about the count of five, I get a look at the Wolf’s face. If this is indeed he, and not some subordinate commander, he is, as we have heard, no savage, but a man of learning and cultivation. He looks more like a scholar than a warrior, and more like a priest than either. His dress is in the Bactrian style, except for the Persian tarbousse—the felt cap that covers ears, brow, and chin—with a dun-colored cavalry cloak over trousers and blouse. His boots are ox-hide troopers, not the calfskin skippers of the dandy. His lone emblem of co
mmand, if indeed it is one, is an ivory-handled dagger of the Damascene type, slung from a strap about his neck and shoulders. His aspect is grave, and his companions reflect this. Will you account me disloyal if I confess I felt attraction to the man? One could not help it. The fellow possessed that quality, innate to all born commanders, of focused and dominating intention. The champions about him were all of superlative comeliness, all mounted on spectacular stock. Yet I recall no aspect of any of them. My attention was held by this commander alone.

  In later stages of the campaign, the myth surrounding Spitamenes evolved and enlarged. One heard again and again of his devout Zoroastrianism; the modesty of his bearing; his piety and austerity; devotion to scripture; that he employed no groom save his fourteen-year-old son, Derdas, but tended his own stock; that he slept on the ground alongside his warriors and would take no refreshment himself until every other’s hunger had been sated. His hatred for the Macedonian invader was legendary, as was his valor in action. Though his tribal origins were of the Anah of Sogdiana, through his mother, he commanded the respect of all nations, even the Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae, for his dedication to the common cause; he was the only commander they would follow outside their own. We heard over and over of his reverence for the shrines of his ancestors, his eloquence in addressing his fellows, and his superiority to avarice. The Wolf was, men said, a yokemate for Alexander. Yet the sense that I took away from this brief glimpse by the river was that, if events had not dictated otherwise, he would have preferred the life of contemplation to that of action, and that he was at heart more of an ascetic than a warrior. In this he differed from our king, who was before all a fighter and a conqueror and who, deprived of the glory and exhilaration of war, would sooner abandon life than fashion some lesser mode of inhabiting it.