Steven Pressfield

by The Afghan Campaign

  That the Wolf got his forces safely away, even his women and wagons, must be accounted a feat of tactical brilliance equal to any in this campaign. He made his escape by back trails unknown to the besiegers, concealing his withdrawal by darkness and by the ruse of hundreds of watch fires, which boys and youths kept blazing nightlong, to simulate the appearance of a camp on customary alert.

  Still, the foe had been dealt a tremendous moral defeat. Our chronicler friend, Costas, evaluated it in the following account, which made its way in under three months, I am told, via Sidon and Damascus to Athens:

  The enemy’s tribal troops cannot appreciate the utility of such a tactical withdrawal, engineered here with such brilliance by their commander Spitamenes. To them it is an ashan, or “runaway,” a term of shame. Who is the enemy? His types run in hundreds. He is a Sogdian soldier; he is a sheepherder; he is a savage, a shopkeeper. He has fought under Darius, trained by Persian officers; he is a boy armed with a sling and a stone. The Wolf’s rolls contain thugs and bandits, patriots in it for glory and opportunists out only for gold. The foe is someone whose son we have killed, whose village we have burned, whose sister we have outraged. He enrolls with the spring and vanishes in the fall. Sometimes brothers take turns serving, employing by rounds the one pony and one set of arms the family possesses. Is this weakness in an army? Not the way Spitamenes manages it. For what all own in common is hatred of the invader. The native is not going anywhere, but we are—and he knows it.

  The Afghan fights neither as we do, nor for what we do. He lives to distinguish himself as an individual champion. By nature he is a raider, restless, avaricious, constantly craving excitement and opportunity for plunder. The Bactrians and Sogdians, and especially their allies of the savage Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae, are not soldiers in the Greek or Macedonian sense, that is, disciplined men possessed of patience, order, and cohesion. They are more like wild children; impatient, hot-blooded, easily bored. Spitamenes, who understands their hearts better than they do themselves, knows he must produce a redeeming strike soon against his nemesis, Alexander, or forfeit a portion of the faith his dashing and piratical cohorts have placed in him.

  Summer ends with more Mack victories, no one conclusive but all collectively diminishing the Wolf’s freedom of maneuver. Hephaestion’s division has constructed and garrisoned no fewer than forty-seven forts and strongpoints, forming a chain south of the Jaxartes. Many of these are no grander than a dozen meres roosting on a stone summit, but all are in communication by courier and by fire and smoke. Wherever Spitamenes sticks his head up, one of these outposts will sound the alarm.

  Meanwhile, construction nears completion on a new garrison city—the bastion of Alexandria-on-the-Jaxartes. Palisades and ditches stand ready; the armed force will be in place by fall. Oxyartes and the other Afghan warlords have retired south for the winter to fastnesses in the Scythian Caucasus, unassailable after the first snows. Alexander takes his elite brigades, with Perdiccas’s, Ptolemy’s, and Polyperchon’s, and establishes a ready base at Nautaca. From here he can ride quickly to the aid of Craterus in the south or us in the north. That is his plan.

  The initiative has gone over to the Macedonians. Alexander tasks our brigade with flushing Spitamenes from his sanctuaries beyond the Jaxartes. He reinforces Coenus by placing under his command Meleager and his regiment of mobile infantry, stiffened with four hundred Companion cavalry under Alcetas Arridhaeus; all the mounted javelineers of Hyrcania; and the allied Bactrians and Sogdians who had been attached to the brigade of Amyntas Nicolaus (Amyntas himself being named governor of Bactria, the post that would have belonged to Black Cleitus). Alexander’s instructions to Coenus are to hunt and harass Spitamenes.

  “Drive the Wolf from his lair,” are our king’s orders posted throughout the Maracanda camp. “And I will finish him in the open.”

  38.

  In this operation I encounter Shinar’s brother for the first time. It happens like this:

  The brigade has pushed north to Alexandria-on-the-Jaxartes, preparing to cross into the Wild Lands on the hunt for Spitamenes. Several days earlier, however, the foe has made an attack on the pontoon bridges that here span the river. Striking from upstream, using fire-rafts and booms of pitch-soaked logs, the enemy has succeeded in cutting both spans. Mack engineers on-site are overtaxed, racing winter to complete construction of the garrison town. The upshot is it’s up to us. We have to rebuild the bridges.

  Every able-bodied scuff in camp is drafted into the labor gangs, including three companies of southern Afghan irregulars who happen to be on hand, awaiting orders to rejoin Ptolemy’s brigade down south.

  Except the Afghans refuse to work. In their eyes, such labor is for women. They won’t do it.

  The Afghans are under Macedonian captains, but these officers’ orders must be passed via the maliks beneath them, who alone command obedience of the actual troops. You may imagine with what patience our commander Coenus regards this practice.

  He summons the two ranking Afghan chiefs and, when they again defy his orders, has them hauled up in chains. The brigade is assembled to witness punishment. There is no doubt that Coenus intends to flog these fellows, if not to death, then to within an inch of it. The catastrophe is averted at the last instant by the intercession of Agathocles, the captain of Intelligence who originally debriefed Lucas and me after our captivity. Or perhaps the whole spectacle has been staged for the Afghans’ benefit. In any event, it concludes with a tribal council, or jurga, to which the call is put out for a Mack who can speak the southern dialect.

  That’s me.

  I know it from Shinar.

  My Afghan counterpart in the parley tells me he knows who I am. He is Shinar’s cousin. His male cousin—Shinar’s brother—serves in this company as well.

  In the rush of events, I pay little attention to this. It is only days later, when the bridge repairs are near completion, that it occurs to me that here is an opportunity I must seize—to sit down with the brother and make peace.

  You don’t just ride into an Afghan camp. They’ll kill you if you do. You must first send your dashar (a sort of calling card), announcing your presence and requesting permission to be escorted in.

  I go with Flag and Lucas. The day is bright and bone-rattling cold. All of us are armed to the teeth. Dice, Boxer, and three other mates back us up from the perimeter.

  The brother meets us in a field of winter clover. He is accompanied by the cousin I met and another cousin. All are muffled to the eyeballs and packing gut-cutters and iron lances, whose use they have learned from us. A dozen armed Afghans keep the conclave in sight from the margins.

  The brother is not at all what I expected. He’s young, only a few years older than Shinar, but with eyes stony as an ancient. He is dressed entirely in black. Though his khetal cloak is threadbare, his belt and sling are studded with silver spits—trophies of enemy slain. I tell him my name and hold out my hand. Afghans do not share our European admiration for a firm grip. They touch your palm as if they think you are carrying something contagious. Nor does the Asiatic believe in looking you in the eye and speaking plain and strong. They mutter and look away. They don’t introduce themselves. The brother does not tell me his name.

  I feel Flag stiffen at my shoulder. He hates these bastards. Lucas, on my other side, takes everything in with a ready, open receptivity.

  The interview is over as soon as it begins. The brother plainly wants no part of it. He keeps glancing to the caucus of elders looking on, whose presence, it is clear, compels him against his will to this appointment.

  I tell him that Shinar is well and that I hope to return her to him and her family. He grimaces as if I have just plunged a spike into his guts.

  “Can you understand,” he says in perfect Dari, “that I have no wish for this obligation?”

  I don’t get it. “You mean to take her back?”

  “You should have killed her.”

  He means it. I think of our former gu
ide Elihu. My crime in Afghan eyes, I understand, is not that I have slept with Shinar, or impregnated her, or taken her away among foreigners. What I can never be forgiven for is that I have taken that action—preserving her life on the trail in the mountains—that by the code of nangwali should have been taken only by her own kin.

  The cousins hate me. Their eyes speak plain.

  The brother is different. His expression looks…condemned.

  “Do you imagine, Macedonian,” he says, “that I wish to bring grief to my sister? I am twenty-two years old and responsible for forty-one people, most of whom are women and children.” He means, apparently, his immediate family, whose protection must have fallen to him by reason of elders’ deaths or other misfortunes. “I have had to take service in the cause of my enemy, only to fill the bellies of those for whom I must provide.”

  To my surprise, I find myself respecting the fellow. I study his intelligent, fine-featured face.

  “The blood that will be shed over this matter,” he says, “is your doing, not mine. For though you and your countrymen call us barbarians, it is you who are brutish and meanly bred—and blind to all concept of pride and honor. You should have killed her,” the brother repeats, turning on his heel. In a moment he has stalked away across the brown clover.

  Flag turns to me and Lucas. “What was that all about?”

  The cousins remain. Hate radiates from their postures.

  “What,” I ask, “is your cousin’s name?”

  The elder faces me.

  “Baz.”

  39.

  Coenus’s division crosses the Jaxartes on the morning setting of the Pleiades, the first day of winter. It’s cold. A dusting of snow howls across the frozen steppe. Our orders, as I said, are to hunt Spitamenes. The sense is of climax approaching.

  The Wolf has been sighted eighty miles east on the frontier, near a village called Gabae. This is a trading outpost frequented by tribesmen of the Massagetae. They rally there in spring before raiding to the south. Will Spitamenes bring them forth in winter?

  Indeed, something must be up: Costas the correspondent rides with us. So does Agathocles, the intelligence captain. “By Hades,” says Flag, “the mice have all come out of their burrows.”

  Patrols push north and east into the wasteland. Our company is split into three to make the broadest possible sweep. Scores of penetrations are being run by other outfits. Day on day we discover sign of the passage of great numbers of horses, not fanned wide as tribesmen customarily ride but in column to conceal their numbers. Winter has come down hard. We have just made camp along some iced-over creek when a courier gallops in from Coenus with orders to break off our patrol and follow him at speed.

  West of the region we’ve been searching lies a gale-scoured grassland called Tol Nelan, “the Nothing.” There, a probe of one of our sister companies has stumbled onto a camp of several hundred of the foe, on the move without wagons and women. The patrol has gotten under cover without being spotted and sent back to the column for help. Our section is among the units called in to reinforce.

  We ride for a night and day, linking with another recalled patrol and two companies of mounted infantry dispatched from Coenus. Scouts from the original patrol pick us up ten miles out and lead us in by a wide circuit. We take up concealed positions.

  Our force consists of three patrols, about sixty men, and the two companies sent from column. Coenus has stiffened it with artillery, two furlongers—stone-throwers—and a half battery of light bolt catapults, the kind that can be broken down and carried, one on two mules. Our commander is Leander Arimmas, a Companion captain sent with the two companies. Costas the chronicler has come with him. So has Agathocles. Apparently they’re expecting a show. Leander orders a base camp set up in a frozen watercourse two miles from the enemy camp, then divides our force into strike elements and a blocking force.

  For once a scheme actually works. Two hours before dawn, our companies get two wings of thirty horses each into position on the steppe side of the enemy camp. Lucas and I ride with the southern arm. The troop shows itself at first light, striking out of the pale sun. At the same time a company of infantry, which had got into position that night on the adjacent heights, rushes down on the foe.

  The enemy flees into the iced-over courses. Their horses carry two, even three fugitives. When the foe strikes the riverbed, Mack artillery opens up. A furlonger can sling a ten-pound stone two hundred yards, downhill three hundred. As these missiles crash among the rocks and the ice-shards of the frozen river, panic undoes the enemy. Our captain Leander falls, struck by one of our own stones. The fight is sharp and violent. When it’s over, the bag is sixty ponies and forty men. And an unexpected bonus:

  Derdas, the fourteen-year-old son of Spitamenes.

  40.

  A melee erupts over this prize. Our Daans scrap with each other like barn cats (they recognize the lad from their days fighting on his father’s side), believing the boy’s head will bring a bucket of gold. Stephanos and other Mack officers order the lad impounded apart. Meanwhile, despite desperate efforts to save him, our captain Leander bleeds to death. Three other Macks have received fatal wounds; a dozen more have been cut up badly by the fiercely defending foe. The boy looks on with cool, intelligent eyes.

  Spitamenes’ son is dressed Massagetae style, in boots and bloused trousers, long khetal cloak, and earflap cap. Nothing distinguishes him from his less illustrious companions, save an onyx-handled dagger, which two of our Daans have produced from the youth’s undervest when he and the others are disarmed. A fracas breaks out over ownership of this trophy. In the confusion a handful of the foe make getaways, on horseback, before our fellows can throw a cordon around the capture scene.

  These runaways will fly on wings to Spitamenes, whose forces may be as close as beyond the next range of hills. Wherever he is, the Wolf will not spare the whip, racing to pay us out—and rescue his boy.

  Stephanos and two lieutenants struggle to establish order. A council is called. As corporals, Lucas and I take part. Stephanos declares that the mixed composition of the enemy party—Daans and Massagetae with main-force Bactrians and Sogdians—can mean only that the foe is assembling. “When these bastards scatter, they break up into tribal bands. They only ride in one pack when they’re massing.”

  Lucas and I confirm this. We saw it with our own eyes when we were captives.

  Costas backs up Stephanos’s supposition. “Persian-trained officers”—meaning Spitamenes—“bring their sons when they believe they’re entering a fight to the death. The youth must be on hand to witness his father’s heroism in victory—or to secure from violation his remains in defeat.”

  In other words, something big is coming.

  A rider must be dispatched back to column. A row breaks out over this. Agathocles, the intelligence officer, demands custody of Spitamenes’ son. Whatever the meaning of the lad’s presence, his physical person must be delivered at once—to Coenus and then to Alexander. The boy represents a significant counter in the game of war and peace. Agathocles will bring the prize in himself. He commands Stephanos to detail an escort.

  Stephanos refuses.

  Agathocles, the poet declares, will be run down by the foe in hours, alone on the steppe with only a few men. “You must stay with the main body, sir.” Both lieutenants defer to Stephanos, though they outrank him, in favor of his experience in war and his fame as a soldier. The poet orders the column organized, prisoners bound, and our wounded tended to. We will move out as a body, as soon as we’re able.

  Agathocles insists on starting off with Spitamenes’ son at once. Time, he says, is of the essence. He demands a guide and eight men on fast horses.

  Stephanos laughs in his face. It goes without saying that our commander despises the intelligence officer’s unspoken motive: to claim for himself the glory of this capture.

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Color Sergeant,” says Agathocles.

  “Nor I with you,” answer
s Stephanos. He will not risk the loss of so valuable a prisoner, nor any Mack sent onto the steppe to protect him.

  Costas steps up. “I’ll go.”

  The parley cracks up. Flag points into the badlands. “They bleed blood out there, correspondent, not ink.”

  To his credit, the chronicler stands fast. “Then I’ll write my story in it.”

  Agathocles’ patience has run out. “If you refuse to give me men, poet, then come yourself. Protect me. Or do you lack the belly?”

  I have rarely seen Stephanos parted from his self-command. But Agathocles, now, drives him to it. Flag and Lucas have to step in, restraining Stephanos.

  Agathocles calls for horses. His aide picks out men to form an escort. Several are Daans, never to be trusted; the Macks who come forward can charitably be called opportunists. I glance to Lucas. Something has to be done. “I’ll go,” I say.

  My mate blocks me.

  “You went with Tollo.”

  He means it’s his turn to risk his neck for no good reason.

  Stephanos bars everyone. “No one’s going!”

  But Agathocles is already in the saddle. His rank is full captain; Stephanos is only a color sergeant. The other riders bring their prize captive. Lucas takes up his arms and kit; he mounts; Agathocles again orders Stephanos to remember his station.