Текст книги "God of War -The Story of Alexander the Great"

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

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TWENTY-ONE

The king spent three more days in bed while the Great King of Persia sat on the far side of his mountains and held exercises for his army, and then Alexander marched northagainst hill tribes that threatened his communications – subjects of the Great King who were waging a very successful guerrilla war against our supplies.

He was as weak as a new colt, and on the second day of that small campaign, I saw him fall off a horse for the one and only time in his life. But he laughed and got back in the saddle, and the tribesmen saw their villages burned, gathered their flocks and retreated north of the Taurus mountains – unbeaten, but less of a threat to us. The last two thousand of my troops marched along the coast road from the west, with Asander and Queen Ada at their head, and Alexander decreed three days of games at Tarsus. He sat with Ada throughout the games, and she smiled a great deal. On the last day, he distributed prizes, money and crowns. Ada presented him with a magnificent chariot, with four beautiful white horses and harness-work all solid gold, and he embraced her in public, something he had never done. He told me later it was the finest present of his life, and he loved driving it.

I was astounded to find that I received a gold crown as reward for my victories in Caria. Asander received one, as well. I had the right to wear the crown on any public occasion. It was the highest award a Macedonian could receive. Parmenio had three, but Philotas, for example, had none.

And – perhaps the joy of my life – he gave me a phalanx of my own, ostensibly Macedonian, although more than half of my two thousand men were Isokles and his Athenians whom I had captured. Craterus, who I thought disliked me, embraced me on the platform, and Perdiccas thumped my back.

Local commands could come and go, but in Macedon a phalanx command was for ever. My phalanx would bear my name. I could only be displaced by death or treason.

Old Parmenio took both my hands, the bastard, and embraced me. ‘You deserve it, boy. Nowyou are good enough to have a command.’

The temptation to put my fist in his eye almost spoiled the occasion. But it didn’t. I don’t have Alexander’s need for praise, but it is pleasant, and the unforced admiration of my peers – the men I’d marched and fought with for eight years already – was a heady wine, and I drank it Scythian-style.

Thaïs lay next to me that night, stroking my crown of gilded oak leaves. ‘What does it mean?’ she asked.

‘Glory!’ I said.

She shook her head.

I laughed. ‘You, my love, killed Memnon. You stormed the Cilician Gates. It’s really your crown.’

She smiled sadly. ‘Will you remember that when my belly is round and my breasts are flat and I have wrinkles?’ she asked.

I sat back and appeared to consider. I took a long time about it, until she gave a little shriek and rammed her thumbs expertly into my armpits. Much later, she told me that she was pregnant again.

It may not have been the greatest day of my life, but it has few rivals.

TWENTY-TWO

I should tell you about the manoeuvrings before Issus, but I’ll have to keep it to a few sentences, because suddenly I was a taxiarch and not a cavalry officer. I wasn’t scouting, or running a temporary battle group just behind the scouting line – I was in the cloud of dust, plodding along the road with my men and their baggage carts. It’s a different view of war, I can tell you.

Of course, I had served on foot before, but the responsibility for two thousand pezhetaeroi was enormous and complicated, with everything from internal promotion to daily food, muster lists for the Military Journal (oh! how that boot was suddenly on the other foot!) and reports to Craterus on the progress of training.

In a way, I was lucky in that I had no predecessor. I’ve found that when you inherit a unit, either the man before you was a god, and you are constantly compared to him, or he was a fool, and you are constantly compared to him. Often both at the same time. Men do not really like to be disciplined – men detest taking orders. It’s easiest to focus that discontent on the man in charge, unless he has enormous talent, great wealth, good looks, charisma or birth. Best to have all of them, like Alexander, or Kineas.

Or me. I didn’t have the looks – but I had money, even by Asian standards, and a fair reputation, and I was getting a new taxeis, just raised from recruits and ‘mercenaries’ who were considered close enough to being Macedonians – Thessalians, Amphilopilans, men of the Chersonese. I was their first commander.

I spent my first day in command wandering around the army, looking for officers. I had Isokles, and he was first-rate, although as an Athenian he was widely distrusted. I had Polystratus, although I left him mounted. Marsyas was bored as a file leader in the Hetaeroi and an apprentice on the Journal – I made him a wing commander in the taxeis. Pyrrhus followed me as a matter of course, and Cleomenes was back from his wounds and bored as a trooper, and I gave him the other wing.

In fact, I ended up with more battalion officers than anyone else. I liked to subdivide, and I liked to have the ability to break my units up. So I had four companies – Isokles, Pyrrhus, Cleomenes and Marsyas – each a little shy of five hundred men. Every company commander had a tail of mounted men as messengers and a hyperetes with a trumpet.

Isokles had some excellent notions of drill. One was that his men should drill every day, the way we had in the hypaspitoi. He became our drill master. He was a professional who had fought everywhere, and he knew tricks I’d never seen – like reversing your deployment in camp so that when your column of files reached the battlefield, they could deploy left to right instead of right to left. I admit it’s an esoteric trick, but it had never occurred to me that I could reverse the order of my deployment just by ‘about-facing’ my men in camp and leading with the back of the column. I never won any battles with it, but there’s a habit to thinking outside the accepted drills – and that applies even to something as apparently rigid as the close-order drill of the phalanx.

By the fourth day after the games, we drilled well. Our recruits were above average in height and in strength, because the fringe districts where they’d been recruited were new ground to the recruiting officers. And our Athenian former mercenaries (every one of whom could now swear by Athena he’d been born in Amphilopolis, a former Athenian colony, and thus evade the prohibition on foreigners in the ranks) were excellent soldiers with as much experience as Philip’s veterans – some of it gained fighting them.

The truth was that the king was running short on troops. Our Asian campaign was killing men at a great rate – as I’ve said before, dysentery killed more than enemy action, but not a day passed in my taxeis that someone didn’t break an arm, a leg, fall off a wall, fall into a well, get sick, desert, run mad, get trampled by a horse – Zeus, the list goes on for ever. And the original nine recruiting districts couldn’t keep up, even if Hermes had been willing to pick up every new recruit at the door of his farm and fly him to his new duty station in the phalanx. Even if transport had been available, even if our rear areas were safe, even if we had rear areas – we were using men faster than Macedon could supply them, and on top of that Antipater had his own troubles with Athens and now with Sparta.

More and more non-Macedonians were put in the phalanx. Or rather, the definition of what made a man a ‘Macedonian’ became more and more flexible.

But I digress. We drilled hard every day – marched fifty stades, made camp, cooked and drilled. The army was rolling east. Somewhere far ahead of us, Parmenio was watching the mountain passes. We could justsee the mountains on the fourth day of march, and we knew that Darius and seventy thousand men – probably more, by now – were just over the mountains.

It was interesting to go from Viceroy of Caria – ultimate power, with lip-service to Ada – to unemployed ‘friend of the king’, in which capacity I got to watch every decision made – to pezhetaeroi commander, with a view of the world limited to my baggage carts, my drill field and the cloud of dust in which I lived. That dust – the dust raised by marching feet – was the symbol of our lives in the infantry, because we couldn’t see out of it. Unless it rained, we ate dust, slept in dust, marched in dust . . .

I think I’ve made my point. Horsemen eat dust too – but they canride out of it.

We marched east to the Amanus mountains and then south to Issus. Parmenio took a Persian cavalry patrol, and the officer knew all the details of Darius’s campaign plan – and confirmed the rumour we’d heard from the peasants that Darius would come across the southern pass, which was the kind of slow, conservative move that we expected from Darius, who always seemed, like all Persians, to act to best protect his own communications.

Let me just pause here to note that when I gained high command, I always acted to preserve my communications. Some forms of conservative behaviour just make sense. A starving army is no army at all.

At Epiphaneia, the coast of the sea turns sharply south and the terrain starts to change, from the austerity of Cilicia to the relative richness of Syria. Just a day’s march south of Epiphaneia, the king ordered all of us to leave our baggage and our sick at Issus, a very pleasant small town on its own river. That night, in Issus, there was a general officers’ meeting, and for the first time I attended as a general officer, as opposed to a king’s friend.

Parmenio argued that we should camp on the green plains around Issus and wait for Darius to cross the passes.

He talked for too long. I could see Alexander’s attention wandering, and I’ll just mention here that one of the things that stood between them was that neither of them could really speak to the other in his own language. Parmenio spoke to Alexander as a man speaks to a boy, which robbed even his best arguments of worth. Alexander, on the other hand, always spoke of glory, of religious duty, of omens – he phrased his strategies, which were often as brilliant as Parmenio’s, in the heroic terms of the Iliad. That’s how Alexander saw the world – through the Iliad. Parmenio had, I swear, never even read the Iliad. No, I mean it.

The result should have been lethal to us. I can only suppose that the internal divisions and miscommunications of the Persians were worse.

At any rate, Parmenio argued for putting the army between the passes, sitting and waiting for Darius to make his move. With our backs to the sea and our supplies intact, we had the rest of the fighting weather to wait – all autumn, if Darius hesitated. We had the wages to pay the troops, and we were holding his terrain. In effect, from a moral standpoint, Darius had to come to us.

Like most of Parmenio’s suggestions, it was sound, unexceptional and virtually guaranteed success.

Parmenio further argued, in a monotonous voice that put many officers to sleep, that on the narrow plains this side of the mountain, our flanks – both of them – would be secure, and the Persians’ numbers wouldn’t matter.

But somehow, in his summing up, Parmenio managed to offend Alexander. I watched it happen. He said that our army could not hope to triumph against the Persians in the open field.

Really, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Alexander reacted like a horse given too much bit.

He leaped to his feet. ‘If we cross the mountains, Darius will be forced to fight, and his army will be at the disadvantage of knowing themselves the lesser men. Our boldness will disconcert them and make up for any disparity in numbers. We know from the prisoners that Darius was going by the southerly, Syrian Gates. Let us go to the Gates and force our way through before he seizes them, and the whole plain of the Euphrates is before us.’

Like all of Alexander’s visions, it was bold to the point of madness. The young men were fired by it and the old men shook their heads. His voice rose with emotion, the more so as he was not yet fully recovered and his hands still shook when he got excited.

Parmenio shook his head. ‘Lord, this is folly.’

That was waving a red flag. Sometimes I thought that Parmenio did this on purpose, to drive Alexander to recklessness and defeat, but none of the old man’s other behaviours tended that way. Perhaps he couldn’t help himself. I’ve seen parents make the same error with a wayward child. In fact, I’ve made it myself.

Parmenio was shouted down, and we marched before light in the morning, headed south for the Syrian Gates. We were outnumbered two to one, but this, we all knew, was the battle for Asia.

If anyone worried because the king’s eyes glittered or his hands shook, they kept that to themselves.

The rains started two days south of Issus, and they battered us like a living embodiment of Poseidon pouring himself on the land, and men offered sacrifices – the sea was so angry, over to our right, and we passed very slowly through the Pillar of Jonah. Men were lost to the waves, and baggage animals. We had to march virtually single file, and when the water rose too high, we just had to wait. You don’t know it? Well, there’s a point south of Issus where the coast road has to go down the cliffs and across the beach. Just for a few stades – and the beach is wide and easy – unless Poseidon is angry. When we crossed, it was as narrow as a cart track in the mountains, and the penalty for slipping was drowning.

Then we marched farther along the coast, taking Myriandros. There, at Parmenio’s insistence, we sent Philotas with six hundred cavalry into the passes to make sure we could get across before Darius did. That much caution the king accepted.

I was summoned to the command tent in the morning, at which time I was standing on a wagon bed holding my morning orders group. I had just managed to get all of my phylarchs to laugh at a fairly weak witticism when Black Cleitus appeared behind me, spoke to Polystratus and literally ran off.

That caught my attention. I turned to Polystratus, who was mounted.

Polystratus was laconic. ‘Trouble,’ he said.

Such was my trust in Alexander that I assumed it was trouble between Parmenio and Alexander, or medical trouble. I left Isokles to command the troops and I jumped on Medea (a new Medea, a beautiful Arab palfrey with a small head and a wonderful stride), and cantered across the camp to Alexander’s pavilion. At the palisade gate, there were forty men – disfigured men, most of them blinded, many with other wounds. Prisoners? I passed them, thinking on the fates.

No one was talking when I entered. But every officer in the army was there. Parmenio’s face was white and red – blotches of red. That meant rage.

Alexander was smiling.

No one was saying anything.

Craterus was my brigadier, so I went and stood with him and Perdiccas, and he gave me a nod.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

Perdiccas caught my eye and I followed him out of the tent.

‘Darius tricked us. He’s already behind us – has retaken Issus and all our baggage. He . . . blinded most of our sick and wounded, except a few he left with one eye.’ Perdiccas shrugged.

‘Ares,’ I breathed. Now Darius had us. He was on ourcommunications. He’d outmarched us.

Darius, the slow, conservative Persian.

I followed Perdiccas back inside.

Parmenio was busy apportioning blame. ‘I told you!’ he shouted as I entered. ‘Darius will pick a river – the one with the steepest sides – and he’ll entrench on the other side, and we will haveto fight through him. We’re going to have to attack an entrenched army that is double our size.’

Alexander’s smile never wavered. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory. And now Darius is committed to fight. He won’t be allowed to slip away.’

Parmenio was about to go on with his (perfectly accurate) rant, but Alexander’s comment brought him up short.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Parmenio asked. ‘This is not a play. This is not a game. If we fail to break Darius, we are done. We will have lost.’ He was so angry that spittle flew from his mouth.

Alexander’s smile was like the grin of a satyr. ‘Then we’d best win, hadn’t we?’ he said, and his confidence was both infectious and offensive, all at the same time.

Two more days of rain, and we came backto the Pillar of Jonah. Darius could have held it against us for ever, but that wasn’t his style. He wanted a field battle as much as Alexander did. So we began to pass it, led by the Agrianians and the Thracians and Paeonians, who went through as fast as men could swim and run, and then spread out on the far side to give us some cover.

That night, we camped on the heights north of the Pillars, and we could see Darius’s fires like a carpet of fireflies. The weather was mild in the evening, but around midnight the rains returned, drowning out Alexander’s attempt to make a burned offering on an ancient altar in the hills.

I doubt my men were dry, but here’s the value of an old sweat like Isokles – he’d spent time training the new men to build shelters. Recruits build shelters that trap water and soak their cloaks – and then fall down at the first touch of wind. Veterans tend to build tiny, snug shelters that will last out a hurricane and have room for five men as long as the men don’t mind lying atop each other. Warm men can sleep, even if they are damp. Our men built some remarkable shelters that night – I remember them – my favourite of which (remember we were camped on a steep hillside) was a shallow cave with stakes driven deep into the sandy soil at the back – and then the file’s shields carefully laid across the stakes to form a roof of solid wood and hide. With some cloaks and some stolen cloth to pad it out, it was as dry as a bone and warm in there. I know, because that’s where I ate breakfast in the morning. With the rain still pouring down.

I had some old friends to breakfast, because we’d made camp late and were all camped together on the ridge – pezhetaeroi and Agrianians and hypaspitoi and Hetaeroi, too. So Bubores and Astibus shared my hot wine and honey, my barley with local yogurt – and those were a general officer’s provisions, gathered by expert foragers like Ochrid. We were in trouble, and everyone knew it.

Later, I gathered that the yogurt cost me a gold daric. The cost of a good donkey, at home.

Bubores was delighted by the provender, and deeply troubled. Astibus was less concerned, but he kept looking at the rain as he chewed his three-day-old bread, and both of them were damp and less than lively company.

Polystratus made room for Strakos, who pushed in under the shields like a dancer, carefully avoiding putting undue pressure on the supports or shaking water off the shields.

‘What news?’ Polystratus asked the Angelos.

Strakos laughed. ‘Darius has a huge army, and it is still raining,’ he said. He got his cloak off and threw it out into the rain.

Bubores looked at me from under his eyebrows. ‘It’s the wrath of the gods,’ he said quietly.

Astibus rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t start that crap again,’ he said. ‘It’s bad weather, and it is just as bad for the Persians.’

Bubores shrugged. ‘I know what I know,’ he muttered.

‘What do you know?’ I asked. Bubores had a reputation in Aegema as a seer and a bit of an astrologer – self-taught, but still respected.

He rocked back on his heels. He could sit on his heels more comfortably than any man I’d ever seen. ‘There’s a blood offence against the gods,’ he said firmly. ‘It must be expiated.’

This wasn’t just bad morale. This was a serious accusation. Ignoring this kind of thing is what got Parmenio into trouble. ‘Have you spoken to the king?’ I asked.

Bubores shrugged. ‘It is the king’s to answer,’ he said in his deep voice.

Astibus slapped his shoulder. ‘You and your dark premonitions! At Halicarnassus, you said—’

‘It’s the rain,’ Strakos said. ‘The Thracians are openly mutinous. Last night I heard a group of them preparing to desert to Darius.’

Polystratus nodded. ‘There’s men among the Paeonian cavalry who are suggesting the same.’

Polystratus handed me a cup of hot wine, and I drank it – rich with honey, the nectar of the gods. I passed it around. It was my job to tell them that this was all nonsense, and we’d be triumphant in the end, and I was just framing my reply when Cleomenes pointed to the beach below us.

‘Look at him,’ Cleomenes said, awe in his voice.

Alexander had ordered that his four-horse chariot be hitched on the beach. The horses were restless in the rain and thunder – but even in the rain, they gleamed with gold and animal magnificence. Alexander was practically at our feet – as I say, we were eating our barley in a dry cave on a steep hillside in the first light. The rain lashed us, the wind blew straight out to sea from the land, and the king’s pavilion was directly below mine.

Alexander emerged from it naked except for a wreath of gold. He had a good body – his legs were a little short for perfection, and his shoulders were a little narrow, but he was always in top shape, every ridge on his abdomen perfectly defined, and he never minded being seen naked. Now he leaped into his chariot and whipped his horses along the beach, and as he drove them along the front of the army, men stood up, despite the rain, and cheered him.

By the gods, he was the king.

He looked like a god, and the rain didn’t change that. Had he driven in a sodden purple cloak, he’d have looked like a fool, but naked he looked like Poseidon’s son, or Zeus’s, as much a creature of the weather as the horses.

I will never forget the sight. He was a god. What more can I say?

From the far end of the beach – the end closest to the Persians, about twenty-five stades away – he turned the chariot and drove it back along the army at a dead gallop, the wheels throwing sand, the horse’s hooves shaking the earth, so that we could feel his passage upon our ridge. His hair blew out behind him despite the rain.

And then he turned the chariot – right into the sea.

He drove his chariot, horses and all, until the horses were swimming. The weight of their harness dragged them down. They panicked when they were too deep to save themselves – there was a steep drop just off the beach, and the whole chariot, car, team, gold and all, vanished into the dark line of water just off the beach.

The whole beach was stunned into silence. We sat there. Thirty thousand men. Men coughed, and it disturbed the silence. That’s how quiet we were.

The rain stopped.

And just beyond the line where the dark water met the light water, a blond head, dark with wet and crowned with bright green kelp, surfaced.

The sun broke through the clouds.

I was there. The sun came out, and turned his hair to a fiery gold as he walked up the beach.

It was the greatest, most perfect sacrifice I have ever seen, and Poseidon gave us his favour immediately. I think of it every time I make sacrifice. Impiety is for the foolish, lad. I was there.

The army stood as one man, as if it was drill, and bellowed our cheers to Apollo Helios and to Zeus, and to Alexander, son of the gods, crowned by Poseidon.

Bubores was beaming like the sun, pumping his fist in the air, with Astibus pounding him on the back, and even Strakos, who never betrayed emotion, was grinning from ear to ear.

And then, in the light of the warm sun, we donned our sodden equipment and we marched towards Darius.

We marched out of the defile where we’d camped in a column of files. Alexander’s plan was as simple as one of Parmenio’s, with the difference that Alexander played with his plans constantly, so that a string of messengers altered our dispositions all the time.

I was at Issus, but my Issus was utterly different from everyone else’s. I’ve heard Alexander’s tale of the day, and Philotas’s, and Parmenio’s and Kineas’s, and Niceas’s – by Ares, I’ve heard a hundred versions and heard most of them told fifty times! And never heard the same story.

Darius was, as Parmenio expected, waiting for us at the Pindarus river. He had brought his finest troops, mounted and foot – we hadn’t had to contend with them at Granicus. He also had almost twelve thousand Greek mercenaries. They were notthe very best men – we had most of the best men in our army by then, or they lay dead. They were lower-class Greeks wearing the panoply, or Asians trained to look like Greeks. But they had Spartan and Athenian officers. Since everyone knows what happened at Issus, I won’t ruin my story if I say that those second-rate ‘Greeks’ almost wrecked our centre, and had they been Memnon’s men led by Memnon, I’d be dead. And so would everyone else from Macedon. Even as it was . . .

We went forward from camp in a column of files. We could see the Persian line by mid-morning, formed right across the beach where the beach and the farms of the plain were about twenty stades wide from the steep hills to the sea on our left. As the plain widened, the king kept ordering us to form to the right, and to double out into our battle formation. My taxeis was right in the middle of our line – the most junior position – and so we formed thirty-two deep by sixty wide early in the morning, when we were clear of the narrowest bottleneck; by the time we reached the Persian line, we were in normal order and just sixteen deep and one hundred and twenty wide.

Around noon, we were less than five stades from the Persians, and their line glittered with gold.

Alexander ordered us to halt and cook lunch. We had lost our baggage, remember – we’d lost all our slaves and all of our heavy equipment. What we hadn’t lost was our mess kettles, and old soldiers know that a hot meal matters, so most of my men, for instance, had gathered a dozen sticks before stepping off, and tied them inside their shields. We had food in minutes, our fires rising like sacrifices – or pyres.

The Persians didn’t even cross the river to scout us.

That made them seem cowardly. In retrospect, Darius had a polyglot army and he didn’t trust his commanders to cooperate, and now that I’ve had that experience, I feel for him, but at the time it made us confident.

Off to our right, in the low hills, there were a great many Persian light troops, and the whole front of their army was covered by more – I don’t want to guess how many ill-armed peasants the Great King had. It’s by counting this skirmisher cloud as soldiers that men come up with the ludicrous numbers the Persians supposedly had against us. I think he had fifteen thousand Psiloi, but there wasn’t a soldier among them, and they weren’t like our Thracians or our Agrianians, who could be counted on even when the fighting got stiff. These were peasants, and they had pointed sticks and light bows, slings, bags of rocks.

Still, there were an awful lot of them, and Alexander, who ate his sausage with me, was increasingly concerned about them and finally sent Cleitus with the Agrianians and a battalion of hypaspitoi to clear the ridge to our east. Alexander continued to eat. I was having a hard time eating.

It was not like Granicus. I had lots of time to look and see just how many Persians there were – a sea of them filling the beach. And to remember just how terrifying Granicus had been. This had never happened to me before, and is an essential part of being a veteran. Raw men fear what they do not know. Trained, experienced men fear what they doknow. I knew it was going to be horrible. The Persians were not foolish, not effeminate. Win or lose, we were going to wade through our own guts to beat them.

After lunch, a lunch I wanted to vomit up but could not, I rode forward with Anander, Perdiccas and Craterus to have a look at the part of the plain where we’d be going. All along the line, Macedonian officers rode forward to scout the enemy lines.

What I saw chilled my heart.

Right in front of my position, the Great King’s bodyguard stood, with their six-foot spears tipped in long steel cutting heads, and instead of sharp iron or bronze saurouters, or butt-spikes, every spear had a solid silver apple at the base of the shaft, making them fearsome weapons. I had never faced one, but Kineas’s father had one on the wall of his andron, as I’ve mentioned, and I knew what a deadly weapon it could be.

And I assumed that the Great King’s bodyguards would be the best.

And worst of all, the banks of the Pindarus, right there where my lads would cross, were five feet high.

Craterus looked it over, turned to me and said, ‘Well, you’re fucked. Better hope I can do better on your flank.’

And Perdiccas wouldn’t meet my eye. No one would. We rode back to our battalions, all of the other officers treating me with the gentle regard friends pay to a dying man, or one condemned for a crime.

Here’s how it was, five stades out. We were on a plain. It was flat – but rose steadily from the sea on our left to the steep hills on our right, so that every unit in the line was slightly uphill of the unit to its left and downhill of the unit on its right. I had Coenus to my right and the hypaspitoi just visible beyond – and past them were the king and Philotas and all the Hetaeroi. That’s where the king’s mighty blow was going to fall.

On my left was Craterus, and beyond him Perdiccas – and beyond him, Parmenio with the rest of the army. The king started with the Thessalians but sent them quite early, round our rear to help Parmenio. I missed all of that. I was busy.

Each of us had a front of roughly one hundred and twenty files. Each of our leftmost men locked shields with the rightmost man of the next taxeis in one continuous phalanx, but we all knew that would go to shit the moment we hit the river, because the river turned twice and the banks were all different heights, and some parts of the riverbank were heavily brushy.

Alexander, now dry and magnificent in his gold and green patina’d antique armour and leopard-skin saddlecloth, his lion-head helmet, his purple Tyrian cloak, rode along the front – back and forth. Every man I know says he gave a different speech.