Virtues of War (3 page)

T
hree

INDIA

H
EPHAESTION ARRIVES FROM THE INDUS
in time to witness the executions. Two captains and three warrant officers of the company of Malcontents have been put to the sword. Hephaestion comes straight to my side, in formation, without stopping even to relieve his thirst. He holds himself expressionless throughout the proceeding, but afterward, in my tent, he trembles and has to sit. He is thirty years old, nine months older than I; we have been the best of mates since childhood.

He speaks of this unit of Malcontents. Their numbers are only three hundred, seemingly insignificant among a force whose total exceeds fifty thousand. Yet such is their prestige among the corps, from past performance of valor, that I can neither detain them in camp under arrest (where they would only spread the contagion of their disgruntlement) nor cashier them and post them home (where their appearance would foment yet further disaffection). I can't break up the company and distribute its men among other units; it was to remedy this that I segregated them in the first place. What can I do with them? My skull aches just thinking of it. Worse, I need their prowess—and their courage—to cross this river.

In India there is no such thing as a staked tent. It's too hot. My pavilion is fly-rigged, open on all sides to catch the breeze. Papers blow; every scrap must be weighted. “Even my charts are trying to fly home.”

Hephaestion glances about, noting the composition of the corps of Royal Pages. “No more Persians?”

“I got tired of them.”

My mate says nothing. But I know he is relieved. That I have shown preference for homegrowns among my personal service is a good sign. It shows I am returning to my roots. My Macedonian roots. Hephaestion will not insult me by congratulation, but I see he is gratified.

After me, Hephaestion is the ranking general of the expeditionary force, which is to say of the army entire. Many envy him bitterly. Craterus, Perdiccas, Coenus, Ptolemy, Seleucus—all consider themselves better field commanders. They are. But Hephaestion is worth the pack to me. Him awake, I can sleep. Him on my flank, I need look neither right nor left. His worth exceeds warcraft. He has brought over a hundred cities without bloodshed, simply by the excellence of his forward envoyage. Tact and charity, which would be weaknesses in a lesser man, are with him so innate that they disarm even the haughtiest and most ill-disposed of enemy chieftains. It is his gift to represent to these princes the reality of their position in such a way that accommodation (I resist the word
submission
) appears not at his instance, but at theirs, and with such generosity that we wind up straining to contain its excesses. Five score capitals have our forces entered, thanks to him, to find the populace lining the streets, hoarse with jubilation. He has saved the army deaths and casualties ten times its number. Nor have his feats of individual valor been less spectacular. He carries nine great wounds, all in the front. He is taller and better-looking than I, as good a speaker, with as keen an eye for country. Only one thing keeps him from being my equal. He lacks the element of the monstrous.

For this I love him.

I contain the monstrous. All my field commanders do. Hephaestion is a philosopher; they are warriors. He is a knight and a gentleman; they are murderers. Don't mistake me; Hephaestion has depopulated districts. He has presided over massacres. Yet these don't touch him. He remains a good man. The monstrous does not exist within him, and even the commission of monstrous acts cannot cede it purchase upon him. He suffers as I do not. He will not give voice to it, but the executions today appalled him. They appalled me too, but for different reasons. I despise the inutility of such measures; he hates their cruelty. I scourge myself for failure of attention and imagination. He looks in the eyes of the condemned and dies with them.

“Whom will you set in command now?” he asks. He means over the Malcontents.

I don't know. “Telamon's bringing the two youngest lieutenants. Stay and we'll see what they look like.”

Craterus enters; the mood lightens at once. He is my toughest and most resourceful general. The executions haven't bothered him a bit. He has an appetite. He farts. He curses the heat. He launches into a tirade of this crust-sucking river and how, by the steam off a whore's dish, can we get this salt-licking army across? He stalks to the water pitcher. “So,” he says, splashing his face and neck, “which marshals are plotting our ruin today?”

Soldiers, the proverb says, are like children. Generals are worse. To the private soldier's fecklessness and ungovernability, the general officer adds pride and petulance, impatience, intransigence, avarice, arrogance, and duplicity. I have generals who will stand unflinching before the battalions of hell, yet who cannot meet my eye to tell me they are broke, or played out, or need my assistance. My marshals will obey me but not one another. They duel like women. Do I fear their insurrection? Never, for they are so jealous of one another, they cannot abide beneath the same roof long enough to contrive my overthrow.

My generals won't stick their toes in this river. Each has his eye on the empire behind. Perdiccas wants Syria; Seleucus schemes for Babylon; I'm already calling Ptolemy “Egypt.” The last thing each marshal needs, he believes, is a spear in the guts, chasing some fresh adventure. Who can blame them? They've made their kill; they want to work their jaws on it. Of eleven corps commanders, I trust with my life only two, Hephaestion and Craterus. Do the others hate me? On the contrary. They adore me.

This is an aspect to the art of war, my young friend, that does not appear in the manuals. I mean the combat within one's own camp. The freshly commissioned officer imagines that the king rules his army. Not by far! The army rules him. He must feed its appetite for novelty and adventure, keep it fit and confident (but not too confident, lest it grow insolent), discipline it, coddle it, reward it with booty and bonuses but contrive to make sure it blows its loot on spirits and women, so that it's hungry to march and fight again. Leading an army is like wrestling a hundred-headed hydra; you quell one serpent, only to duel ninety-nine more. And the farther you march, the harder it gets. It has been near nine years for this corps; of its original complement, many have sons who have since come out to us, and a few grandsons. They have earned and lost fortunes; how can I keep them keen? They are incapable of it themselves. I must play to them, as an actor to his audience, and love and drive them as a father his wayward sons. The commander's options? In the end, he may lead his army only where it wants to go.

“Well,” Craterus observes, “it didn't come off too badly.”

He means the executions.

Not badly? “Yes, the show was a real crowd-pleaser!”

“Well, it's over. The pair you sent for are outside.”

We step out. It is like entering an oven. The two lieutenants await on horseback. They are the most junior officers of the disaffected cohort, and the only ones unindicted. Telamon has brought them, as I instructed.

I regard them, hoping they have the belly to take over. The younger is from Pella in Old Macedonia; the elder from Anthemos in the new provinces. We ride out along the levee. I aim to make trial of these bucks.

The youth I know. His name is Arybbas; the men call him “Crow.” His father and brother fell at Gaugamela, both officers of the Royal Guards; he has two more brothers and a cousin in my service, all decorated veterans. Crow himself served as a Page in my tent from fourteen to eighteen; he can read and write and is the best lightweight wrestler in the camp. The other lieutenant, Matthias, is older, near thirty, an up-through-the-ranks man, what the troops call a “mule,” from a noble but poor family in the annexed Chersonese. He has a bride of Bactria, of extraordinary beauty, who left her people to follow him, and is, so I have been told, the engine of his ambition. Both officers are keen, and both in action stalwart, resourceful, and without fear.

I indicate the enemy fortifications across the river. To the Anthemiot, Matthias: “How would you attack?”

The river is eight hundred yards. Too deep to ford and too swift to swim; we must cross on boats and rafts. These will come under bowfire from enemy towers for the last hundred yards. The final fifty pass between further concentrations of archers, then terminate at an eight-foot mud bank, bristling with more bowmen and topped with ten feet of spiked and castellated dike. The length of this rampart is three miles. Behind it await Raj Porus and his war elephants, his corps of Indian
ksatriyas
—princes schooled from birth for war alone and renowned as the finest archers in the world—and an army of a hundred thousand.

The lieutenant turns back to meet my eye. “How would I attack, sire, if I were you, or if I were myself?”

Telamon laughs at such brass, and I too must bite my lip. I ask the lieutenant what the difference would be.

“If the army attacks with myself commanding, no scheme on earth could take that position. But if you lead, lord, it will fall with ease, though our troops be ill-armed, half-starved, and ragged as dirt.”

I ask why.

“Knowing your eye is on them, sire, all men will compete furiously in valor, seeking to win your good opinion, which will mean more to them than their lives. Further, you, lord, by fighting at the fore, will inspire all to surpass themselves. Each will feel shame to call himself Alexander's man and not prove worthy of such fame.”

Matthias finishes; Craterus snorts. Such flattery, he declares, is unseemly coming from officers in a company whose freshest repute is for mutiny!

The buck rejoins respectfully but with heat. No man may fault his comrades for want of spirit. “Indeed the king,” he says, “has set us always the sternest chores, against the meat of the foe. If you condemn us, sir, cite the occasion and I shall refute it.”

This is
dynamis.
I am encouraged.

I ask the second youngster his plan. This is Arybbas, Crow.

“First, lord,” he replies, “I would try all else before risking battle. Raj Porus is canny, men say. Can we not treat with him? Offer him sovereignty beneath our rule, or simply request, or purchase, passage through his kingdom? Perhaps Porus has enemies he hates and fears more than ourselves. Will he accept us as allies to turn, united, upon these foes? Can we promise him rule over his rivals, vanquished by our mutual exertions, while our army passes eastward out of his realm, leaving it enlarged and enriched?”

It sounds so easy. Anything else?

“Sire, this river. Must we cross it here? Under fire? Against fixed fortifications? Why not ten miles north? Or twenty, or a hundred? Why even permit the river to remain?”

Why indeed?

“Divert her course, sire. Dig sluiceways and run her westward into the plain, as Cyrus the Great did at Babylon. Leave her high and dry and let our cavalry cross at the gallop!”

“Hear, hear,” remarks Telamon. Craterus taps his breastplate in mock applause. I indicate the river, swollen by premonsoon rains. To turn it will take ten armies.

“Then let us raise ten armies, lord. I would sooner spend a barrel of my men's sweat than one thimble of their blood. Tyre took half a year to reduce. Let us spend two, if that's what it takes! And here is a further point, sire. The audacity of the stroke. Its temerity alone will awe the foe. He will believe the men who besiege his country are unlike any he has encountered, with resources of will and scale of imagination against which he cannot contend. He may delay, he will see, but not prevail. And this will render him more tractable to accommodation.”

The elder backs his mate up. “One thing your victories have taught us, lord, is to see all foes as potential allies. Why compel such formidable warriors to contest us, when, incented aright, they may march at our sides? After all, it is not our object to defeat and smash all peoples simply for the sake of defeating and smashing them.”

I raise a palm to shield the sun, regarding both officers. The older, Matthias, is near thirty, as I have said, with a dense chestnut beard and eyes that call to mind the image of Diomedes in the hero shrine at Leucadia. The younger, Crow, cannot be twenty-two, beardless and lean as a whippet, but with an aspect crackling of purpose and intelligence.

I have taken to our two lieutenants. Command of the Malcontents, I tell them, shall be theirs.

“Do you understand, gentlemen, why we must cross this river? God help us, upon those ramparts yonder stands the only worthy foe this army has faced since Persia! Look at me. Do you think I don't share your dissatisfaction? Am I not as frustrated by the petty campaigns and gloryless sieges we have been compelled to fight since the fall of Darius? There look, across the river . . . Raj Porus and his princes. I love him! He has brought me back to life! And he will reinspirit this corps too, and your company with it, when we face him, again as soldiers and as an army.”

F
our

TELAMON

W
HEN I WAS A BOY I HAD TWO TUTORS.
Aristotle taught me to reason. Telamon taught me to act. He was thirty-three; I was seven. No one appointed Telamon over me; rather I fell in love with him and refused to be driven from his side. He seemed to me then, and does to this day, the perfect incarnation of the soldier. I used to trek the drill field in his train, aping his gait. The men pissed themselves laughing. But I intended no disrespect. I wished only to walk like him, stand like him, ride like him. He is from Arcadia in southern Greece. My mother wished me to speak pure Attic. “Listen to the boy! He drawls like an Arcadian!” Telamon was a sergeant then; he is a general now. Still I cannot bring him in from the field to the staff tent; he will not come. His idea of a good breakfast is a night march, and of a good dinner, a light breakfast.

When I was ten I begged Telamon to teach me what it meant to be a soldier. He would not respond in words. Rather he packed Hephaestion and me three days into the winter mountains. We could not get him to speak. “Is this what being a soldier means, traveling in silence?” At night we nearly froze. “Is this what it means, enduring hardship?” Was he trying to teach us to hold silence? Obey orders? Follow without question?

At the third dusk we chanced upon a pack of wolves, chasing a stag onto a frozen lake. Telamon whipped onto the ice at the gallop. In the purple light we watched the pack fan out in its pursuit, turning the prey first one way, then another, always farther from the treeline and the shore. Wolf after wolf made its run at the fast-fatiguing buck. At last one caught him by the hamstring. The stag crashed to the ice; in an instant the pack was on him. Before Hephaestion and I could even draw rein, the wolves had torn his throat out and were already at their feed.

“That,” Telamon declared, “is a soldier.”

I remember looking on as a lad of eleven, when Telamon (serving then under my father) formed up his company prior to the first march-out against the Triballians. He ordered each trooper to unshoulder his pack and set it upright at his feet. Telamon then proceeded down the line, rifling each kit, discarding every item of excess. When he was done, the men had nothing left but a clay cup, an iron spit, and a chlamys cloak-and-blanket.

There are further items, Telamon taught, which have no place in the soldier's kit. Hope is one. Thought for future or past. Fear. Remorse. Hesitation.

On the eve of battle at Chaeronea, when I was eighteen and first commanded squadrons of Companion Cavalry, Hephaestion and I paced the lines, puzzling over this axiom of our mentor. How could a soldier perform without hope? Clearly our men's expectations were heaven-high, as were our own; in fact we had spared no measure to elevate their hopes of glory, riches, the mastery of Greece. We were laughing, as young men will, with our mates when a sergeant of the staff rode up with a secretary, taking down each man's will. Not a fellow would sign of course. “Give my globes to Antipater!” “Leave my ass to the army!” I was about to chip in my own remark, when Black Cleitus asked, “Who will get your horse, Alexander?” He meant Bucephalus, a prize worth ten lifetime's wages. The thought of parting from him sobered me. At once Telamon's axiom came clear.

A warrior must not advance to battle hopeless—that is, devoid of hope. Rather let him set aside all baggage of expectation—of riches, celebrity, even death—and spur beneath extinction's scythe lightened of all, save surrender to that outcome known only to the gods. There is no mystery to this. All soldiers do it. They must, or they could not fight at all.

This is what Telamon meant when he pared his soldiers' packs or trekked to frozen peaks to show two boys the cold kill of predation.

Another time when we were youths, Hephaestion and I asked Telamon if self-command had a place in the soldier's kit. “Indeed,” he replied, continuing to stitch his overcloak, which chore our query had interrupted. “For the self-control of the warrior, which we observe and admire in his comportment, is but the outward manifestation of the inner perfection of the man. Such virtues as patience, courage, selflessness, which the soldier seems to have acquired for the purpose of defeating the foe, are in truth for use against enemies within himself—the eternal antagonists of inattention, greed, sloth, self-conceit, and so on. When each of us recognizes, as we must, that we too are engaged in this struggle, we find ourselves drawn to the warrior, as the acolyte to the seer. The true man-at-arms, in fact, can overcome his enemy without even striking a blow, simply by the example of his virtue. In fact he can not only defeat this foe but also make him his willing friend and ally, and even, if he wishes, his slave.” Our mentor turned to us with a smile. “As I have done with you.”

There is a clue here.

Perhaps in the simple virtues I learned as a boy lies a way back, for myself and for this army. Time is short. The men will not wait, nor will this river.

Let us retrace the route then, my young friend—I to recount and you to attend. From the start.

From Chaeronea.