The Afgan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  Aeropus serves as surrogate for Alexander. His role this night is to be harangued and brutalized. At the base of the bluffs stands Sadites. A commotion beyond our sight distracts his attention. More riders appear. Around Sadites, the front of barbarians swells outward and begins to part. The chief comes forward toward Aeropus, who waits, held by two braves, in the center of the torchlit flat.

  “God has spared you this night,” declares Sadites. He indicates the shoulder of the mountain. From there, mounted on his pretty Arabian, surrounded by his honor guard of knights, advances into view our nemesis and now savior, Spitamenes.

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  “Tell me, Macedonians and hirelings, who have crossed deserts and seas to bring war to our impoverished peoples: What harm have we worked to your king? Have our armies set foot within his dominions? Have we made away with his livestock? Outraged his women? Are not even we, who dwell in the wilderness, permitted to be ignorant of his glory?”

  The Desert Wolf addresses us prisoners, but his oration is for the ears of his fellows. The mob packs every square foot of the lower mountain. Their clamorous citations break in on Spitamenes’ speech again and again. The throng beats spear-shafts against shields and pounds the earth with the butts of its cudgels and skull-busters.

  “Your lord Alexander,” Spitamenes continues to us captives, “has vanquished Lydia and Syria; Egypt and Mesopotamia bow before him; Persia he possesses; the Afghans of Bactria have been taken into his power. Now he stretches his insatiable hands for our flocks and herds. Is the world not wide enough to contain his greed?”

  Thunderous acclamation again compels the Wolf to break off. He holds up his arms for silence. Lucas and I can see him clearly. He is indeed the man we glimpsed at the Many Blessings. Up close, he looks older and thinner. But his eyes in the torchlight shoot sparks of fierce intelligence and his voice carries easily with power and command. The hair stands up on my neck. Here is an adversary. Here is an enemy to freeze the blood.

  “Macedonians, can your king not see that while he subdues the Bactrians, the Sogdians revolt, and when he turns, seeking to bring these to heel, the Daans and Sacae leap at his throat? All other tyrants grow sated with conquest. For yours only, victory is the spring of further avarice! He cannot go on winning forever. See how our tribes unite to face him? Hatred of him has made brothers of the wolf and the lion and causes raven and eagle to soar as comrades in the sky.”

  For days, Spitamenes informs the assembly, Alexander has been massing his army, preparing to cross the Jaxartes. He poises now to invade even the Wild Lands.

  “Soon this suppositious bantam will learn how far the races of the Scythians extend, yet he will never overtake them. Our poverty will be swifter than his army, which bears the plunder of so many nations. How can he get to grips with us? When he believes us far off, he will see us in his camp. When his eyes say we stand before him, he will find us at his back. We are the cloud and the ghosts of night. He cannot bear us down with fire nor fix us in place with stone. For we pursue and flee with the same swiftness. I hear that the solitudes of the Scythians are made fun of in Greek proverbs, but we seek after places that are desert rather than cities and rich fields. Why? For freedom! Rather would we dine on coarse meal at liberty than feast on honeyed cakes in chains.”

  At this the whole mountain seems to levitate off its base. The host bawls for our blood and the blood of our king.

  Spitamenes prowls beneath the torchlight. He has stripped his tarbousse; he paces bareheaded. Gray streaks his hair, which is thick and falls below his shoulders. His gait hitches; his flesh appears sallow. Is he unwell? Only in his voice and eyes does he seem to command unbroken strength. He speaks of Alexander’s presumption to strike across the Jaxartes.

  “As our warriors, only days past, have slaughtered the foe in the shallows of the Many Blessings, so shall we now butcher Alexander and his paid murderers when they attempt to force the Jaxartes. God will not permit this blasphemer to set foot upon holy soil. By the sword of the Almighty shall our river run red, stained with the blood of the invader!”

  Like Hook in prior harangues, Spitamenes rattles off the catalog of would-be conquerors whom Afghan and Scythian valor has in the glorious past brought to grief. Let Alexander not trust in his celebrated good fortune, for that wind which commences in the north comes about and blows from the south. The Wolf turns again to address us prisoners.

  “Your king believes us savages and ignorant, but we have learned a thing that he has not: the proper measure of man’s portion under heaven.

  “Great trees are long in growing but fall in a single hour. Even the lion has been made food for the smallest of birds, and rust consumes iron. Therefore tell your king to hold his fortune with tight hands; she is slippery and cannot be confined against her will.

  “Finally, if your lord Alexander is a god, he ought to confer benefits on mankind, not strip them of those few they have. But if he is a mortal man, let him remember his place in the scheme of the Almighty. For what indeed is madness, save to recall those things that make one forget himself?”

  Two dawns later, Alexander strikes across the Jaxartes. Our knot of captives, held by Ham and others, observes from a peak overlooking the vast, treeless plain.

  The river is three hundred yards wide. On the near bank mass thirty thousand Bactrians and Sogdians, Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae. The host blackens the shore for two miles, dense as a mound of ants. I can’t make myself even glance at Lucas. What chance do our fellows have, forcing a hostile shore against such numbers?

  Alexander’s rafts and floats launch into the crossing. We can see riders, dispatched by Spitamenes, gallop to the troops on their right and left wings, calling them in. The foe’s front contracts. His depth and density concentrate within that section of the bank, a thousand yards across, toward which Alexander’s armada advances. The Wolf stations his bowmen up front, at the very brink of the shore. Numbers of archers thrash forward on their own, thigh-deep into the river, so eager are they to hurl their bolts upon our men. The massive Scythian bow is wielded with one foot bracing it against the earth; it launches shafts half the size of javelins. Such missiles can fly a hundred yards with enough power to pierce armor.

  How will Alexander cross the final stretch into the teeth of such volleys?

  Among our first rank of captives watching from the peak is Aeropus. We can hear his mates narrating the action to him. Have our troops, he asks, made any kind of flanking move? Is this crossing point only a ruse? Has our king sent cavalry upstream or down, to get over and take the foe from the flank and rear?

  Every eye strains.

  Nothing.

  What about our watercraft? Aeropus curses his blindness. Are they barges or rafts? How many are they?

  The Mack assault advances in waves. Rafts built up into bunkers. Floats carrying twenty, thirty, fifty men, rigged with side-screens and prow mantlets. The fleet numbers at least five thousand. They cross in ranks, dense as hornets. Scores of pontoon spans have been prerigged. These extend from the Macedonian shore two-thirds of the way across the river-as far as they dare, without getting in range of Scythian bows. From these fixed platforms, anchored in the channel, hundreds of cables run back to the embarkation bank. From our peak we can barely make these threads out, so great is the distance, but clearly our fellows are not propelling their craft by oar (or we would see the current deflecting their course). Instead, they are warping the vessels across by tackle strung from the pontoon stations fixed in the channel.

  “Our fellows must be hauling hand-over-hand,” Aeropus says when this is described to him. “How much of the channel have they crossed?”

  Halfway, he is told. Another fifty yards will bring them in range of the Scythian bows.

  “What of the horses?”

  They are being swum across. They trail the rafts and barges. Light infantry in tens of thousands swim behind the horses, floating their arms and armor on bhoosa bags of goatskin filled with straw.

 
“Where is Alexander? Can you see?”

  Up front of course. Even at our extreme distance, we can make out the flash of his armor and the dazzle off his double-plumed helmet, of iron burnished to silver.

  The first Mack barges have reached the two-thirds mark. At the pontoons. Archers of the Scyths begin loosing their volleys from shore. We can see the broadsides arcing across the open space, to splash within yards of our foremost craft. Great shouts ascend from the enemy. We can see the tribesmen surging forward. Thousands jam up at the water’s edge. Hundreds press into the current in their zeal to get to grips with the advancing Macks.

  On our peak, Ham and the guards have come forward. They want to see the show too. Captors and prisoners take up posts side by side, transfixed by the drama mounting to a pitch below. I can see Ham’s jaw work, and his feet beat a dance upon the earth. “Now,” says he to Lucas and me, “we will see your king strangle on his own blood.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Lucas tells him.

  The first wave of Macedonian assault craft has come to a standstill. The second moves up behind, then a third and fourth. United, they form a solid mass, a thousand yards end-to-end and seventy-five deep. A hundred-odd yards across from them, the Scythian hordes jig on the shoreline, bawling curses and taunts. We all hold our breath.

  Suddenly a pennant ascends on Alexander’s craft. Along the Macedonian shore stand a thousand tented squares, what we (and the foe) have assumed are quarters for the army. Now at our king’s signal, the hides and fabric are flung back. Crews and machines appear beneath.

  “What is it?” cries Aeropus.

  “Catapults!” one of our fellows cries. “Bolt- and fire-throwers!”

  A thousand-bolt volley hurtles skyward from the Macedonian shore. Streaks of smoke smudge the sky. Trajectories light up like parabolas of fire.

  Every eye strains. We can barely see the machines, the range is too far. But there’s no mistaking the salvos of smoke and flame slinging from the Macedonian shore.

  Incendiary jars.

  Flaming naphtha.

  “Stones and bolts! The barges are hurling them too!”

  Now the assault craft surge forward. They have catapults too. Each craft is a naval bunker armed with a hurling engine; the thousand-yard front is one great platform for artillery.

  So densely have the barbarians packed themselves at the water’s edge that it’s impossible for our gunners to miss. A second volley arcs over. Before these missiles strike, our catapults launch a third. Stones, shafts, and fire rain upon the foe. Chaos seizes the enemy shore. Every Mack bolt impales a man or horse of the Scyths, every fire-jar explodes among a jam-up of warriors and beasts.

  The Afghan has no experience of modern artillery. Ham certainly hasn’t. He goggles in horror at the spectacle unspooling below. That sound which is like no other-the clamor of men and beasts giving over to panic-ascends with such amplitude that we hear it plain, far away as we are. The foe’s archers up front have turned and stampeded, throwing the horse warriors behind them into disorder. Great rifts open in the enemy’s fore ranks. We can see his wings bolting right and left and his rear guard taking to flight. In the melee, riders trample foot troops, infantry inflicts chaos on horse cohorts.

  Alexander’s first wave presses forward, fifty yards from shore. Bolt- and stone-throwers fire point-blank. Where is Spitamenes? The condition of the enemy can only be described as pandemonium. Mack assault waves make for the bank at full speed. Over their heads stream volley after volley of fire and iron. The enemy’s thousand-yard front, which had been carpeted so densely with troops, now scatters and breaks apart like smoke in the wind.

  We captives whoop in elation. Ham and his mates hold stricken. And now the oddest thing happens. Though our captors are as numerous as we and are armed, while we stand before them with empty hands, it is they who are gripped by terror and we to whom initiative flows.

  First to strike the shore is Alexander. We won’t learn this till later. But we can see the swarms of our countrymen surging from the shallows, while the enemy slings away his shields and weapons and flees in disorder.

  On the peak, we rush our captors. Before we’ve taken three strides, Ham and his confederates are in full flight down the mountain.

  By nightfall the plain below has emptied entirely, as the foe flies north into the Wild Lands, pursued by the horse and foot brigades of Alexander.

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  Twenty-one days later the army of Macedon returns to the Many Blessings, this time in force and with Alexander in command. Our king has chased Spitamenes a hundred miles into the steppe before bad water poisons him and compels the king to break off pursuit. The Wolf gets away. Autumn approaches. Alexander returns to Jaxartes town. We prisoners have been incorporated there into the hospital camp. Inside of a month we are well enough to travel. The corps returns to the site of the original massacre.

  Both margins of the Many Blessings have been secured, days past, by the brigades of Antigenes and White Cleitus and by the Horse Command of Hephaestion. Stewards of Graves Registry have collected what remains they can recover of our fallen comrades. The official number of dead is 1,723. The army is given a day to inspect the site at leisure and to learn from us survivors, who have been held apart under Alexander’s orders for this purpose, what outrages have been visited upon the living flesh of their countrymen, not only by those Afghans and Scyths serving under Spitamenes but by the matrons and brats of Maracanda and the downvalley villages.

  A funeral mound is raised. At dawn the army assembles. Full military honors are rendered to the fallen. By regiments the army parades past the barrow, upon whose summit the colors of her entombed battalions flutter on the air.

  Alexander conducts the obsequies in person. The rite is performed entirely in silence. In that interval where the Hymn for the Fallen would customarily be given by the corps, a solitary flame is lit, by Alexander’s own hand, again without speech. This mute enactment produces a keen and excruciating grief and a terrible hardening of resolve.

  When at last the king speaks, it is to offer only five lines, not from the funerary canon but from Euripides’ Prometheus. In this scene, which closes the tragedy, Odysseus in his wanderings has reached the Rock upon which the titan lies fettered, by judgment of Zeus, in chains of adamant. Odysseus inquires of Prometheus if there is anything he can do to ease his suffering. The captive declines with gratitude so much as a mouthful of water to slake his thirst. Then he offers the wanderer such wisdom as he has gleaned from his revolt against heaven.

  Even at earth’s extremity,

  Almighty Zeus reigns.

  Men fly in vain from his justice, from which no crag stands too distant and no fastness too remote.

  This is the sum of Alexander’s oration. He turns and retires.

  That night passes like no other. There is no drinking and no gambling. Men wait only for orders. They apprehend what their king means by “justice.” Here at earth’s end, they will exact it. Each time a messenger appears, the soldiers rise, eager to receive their assignments.

  Lucas and I are still too infirm to participate. Still we must, or never face our comrades again. Orders are passed next morning. With them comes mail from home. This from my sister Eleni’s husband Agathon, a decorated captain of infantry, who lost his right hand at Issus in Alexander’s earlier, more honorable wars.

  Matthias from Agathon, greetings,

  I feel I can talk to you, now that you’ve been out there a while and know what it’s like. I sit now, watching my infant son, who is your sister’s child and your nephew, playing in the sunlight of the yard. Do you know, dear brother, that my own disfigurement had impressed itself so powerfully upon my imagination that when this child was born I expected that he, like me, would possess a stump instead of a limb. When I saw him whole and perfect, I wept. Through this babe I feel the whole world has been made new.

  Come home, brother! Well I know the seduction of war and of anger and fear! When your term expires, let no
folly hold you. Come home to us before it is too late!

  Tears drizzle into the brush of my beard as I read these lines. Come home? How can I?

  Am I blind to the madness of vengeance? Can I not imagine armies and armies, stretching back across centuries, each crying the same meritless anthem of payback and revenge?

  I roll Agathon’s letter into my pack. There it remains, wedged beneath my sack of lentils and parched barley, when the corps moves downvalley, village to village, exacting God’s justice, until nothing remains living in all the region except old women and crows.

  BOOK FIVE

  Winter Quarters

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  The army winters at Bactra City.

  Alexander has retaken Maracanda; the Desert Wolf has fled north to the Wild Lands. Spitamenes’ purpose is still not served by facing Macedonians straight-up. The foe disperses, waiting for spring.

  Afghanistan-once the passes close-becomes six different nations, each isolated from the others. Susia and Artacoana in the west are cut off from Bamian in the center, itself separated by impassable peaks from Phrada (now called Prophthasia, “Anticipation”) and Kandahar in the south, and from Kabul in the central Paropamisus. From the Areian Plateau, a hardy force can take the caravan road south via the Desert of Death and work back up the Helmand and Arghandab Valleys to Ghazni and Kapisa and Bagram, but from there there’s no mounting out via the Panjshir, Khawak, or any other pass north into Bactria. In Bactra City you’re cut off from the south by the Hindu Kush and from the northeast by the Scythian Caucasus. South of the Oxus, the tribal Sogdians scatter to their strongholds. As for the steppe beyond the Jaxartes, the place in winter becomes so inhospitable that the Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae themselves retire to balmier quarters.