Текст книги "Alexander the Great"

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infantry were conspicuously weak, for though plentiful, they had none of the drill of Alexander's Foot Companions. But Darius did not expect that the engagement would be won on foot.

Within this broad problem of encirclement, specific details were reported by scouts and needed close attention. In the centre of the Persian line, where by tradition a Persian king would take up his own position, Darius had stationed some fifteen Indian elephants whose trumpeting and tusking would scare off any frontal charge by Macedonian horses and riders who had never seen or smelt their like before. Some distance from the Persian front stakes and snags had been hammered into the ground as a further precaution against Alexander's cavalry, while closer to the line the plain had been levelled for a counter charge by the two hundred Persian scythed chariots. Their antique form of attack had been evaded by Greeks vith success before, but in the circumstances they posed an added danger. Their target was the phalanx as well as the cavalry, and to avoid them Alexander had best head for bumpy ground away from their level pitch. This bumpy ground, let alone a swing towards it, was likely to upset the massed sarissas of his own phalanx; like chariots diese were also most effective on smooth going.

There are few finer tributes to Alexander's intelligence than his plan to anticipate these dangers. The fundamentals of his battle line were those which he and his father had long exploited: the Foot-Companions, some 10,000 strong, held sarissas at the ready in the centre, while their unshielded right flank was protected by the 3,000 Shield Bearers, who in turn linked up with the aggressive right cavalry-wing of Companions, led by Alexander himself and preceded by some 2,000 archers, slingcrs and Agrianian javelin men for long-range skirmishing. On the left wing, the shielded flank of the Foot Companions joined directly with Parmenion and the Greek horse, who would fight their usual defensive battle as the anchor of the slanted line. The threat of outflanking and encirclement had called for special precautions. At the tip of each wing, Alexander had added mixed units of heavy cavalry and light infantry, concealing the foot soldiers among the horses and inclining the whole at an oblique angle to his already slanting front line, so that they extended backwards like flaps, behind his own forward cavalry and went some way towards guarding the flanks and rear if these forward units began to be encircled. If the encirclement continued, they were under orders to swing back to an even sharper incline, until they stood at right angles to the front line and joined, at their far end, with Alexander's second protection. This lay some distance behind the rear of the Foot Companions' rectangle and consisted of some 20,000 Greek and barbarian infantry arranged in a reserve formation, which would face about if the enemy cavalry escaped the flank guards and appeared at the gallop in the rear. This about-turn by reserves would change Alexander's army into a hollow oblong, bristling with spears to the front, rear and sides, and although there were obvious dangers if the rear units were forced back into their front-guards and robbed of any retreat, the use of reserves and a hollow formation were sophistications unusual, if not unprecedented, in Greek warfare. Designed for an outnumbered defence, it was to set an example which would not be forgotten ; specific plans against the elephants, snags and chariots would become clear in the course of the action.

After a sound but not excessive sleep Alexander gave the word for his units to take up these new positions and returned to don his armour in a manner worthy of any Homeric hero:

His shirt had been woven in Sicily, his breastplate was a double thickness of linen, taken as spoil at Issus. His iron helmet gleamed like pure silver, a work of Theophilus, while his neck-piece fitted him closely, likewise of iron, studded with precious stones. His sword was amazingly light and well-tempered, a present from a Cypriot king: he also sported a cloak, more elaborately worked than the rest of his armour. It had been dyed by Helicon, the famous weaver of Cyprus, and given to him by the city of Rhodes.

In this cosmoplitan dress he mounted one of his reserve horses and rode out to review his troops; only when the preliminaries were over would the ageing Bucephalas be led forwards.

Riding up and down the line Alexander exhorted each unit as he thought fit. To the Thessalian horsemen and the other Greeks on the far left under Parmenion's command, he had much to say, 'and when they urged him on, shouting to him to lead them against the barbarians, he shifted his lance from right hand to left and began to call on the gods, praying, so Callisthenes said, that if he were truly sprung from Zeus, they would defend and help to strengthen the Greeks'. This prayer says much for how Alexander wished himself to be seen. So far from being blasphemous or implausible, a reference to his own special descent from Zeus was the fitting climax to his harangue of Greek troops at a moment of high excitement; similarly, on the eve of battle, Julius Caesar would remind his men of his descent from the goddess Venus, whom he claimed as his family protector. Taken loosely, Alexander's words need mean no more than that Zeus was his ancestor, as for all Macedonian kings, and the same phrase could be applied, in this unexceptionable sense, to the kings of Greek Sicily or half-barbarian Cyprus. But this ancestry was undisputed, and neither Alexander nor his court historian would ever have hedged it about

with the words 'if it were truly so ..This cautious reference implies a deeper meaning, and to an audience who had lived with the rumours and flattery that had gathered since Siwah, the words would surely have been taken as hinting at direct sonship of the god. Even then they were an encouragement, not an impossibility; their guarded phrasing is not a proof that Alexander was sceptical of stories of his own divine origin. Unlike others, he realized that such delicate matters can never be considered certain. Support was given by Aristander, his tame prophet, who accompanied him along the lines, dressed in a white cloak with a crown of gold on his head: he 'pointed out an eagle', symbol of Zeus and of Alexander's own royal coinage, 'which soared above Alexander's head and directed its flight straight against the enemy'. Preparing to fight for their lives, no troops would wish to dispute that the bird in the sky was anything less momentous.

Orders and exhortations take time to be delivered, and it cannot have been long before midday that Alexander finally marched his 47,000 men down into the plain against a foe some six times their numbers, whom they had kept waiting under arms, fretful and sleepless, for the past two days. Much ingenuity has been devoted to what follows, but there were facts in the advance which only serve to discredit such attempts; no general, least of all a rival of Achilles, had remained on a vantage point to describe the overall engagement, and no historian, least of all Callisthenes, was in a position to survey the scene with the naked eye. Such a broad view would clearly be impossible: the enemy were relying on horsemen, who always charge and career in frantic competition, and the plain beneath Tell Gomel is dry and dusty. Every account agreed that the battle would end in a billowing dust-cloud. When orders could only be passed by trumpet or word of mouth to distant commanders whose line-up left them to choose between several alternative positions, this dust is a disruptive fact of the first importance: 'Anyone who has witnesscd a cavalry charge in dry weather over an Indian maidan will be able to picture what the dust at Gaugamela was like. On one such occasion, the writer remembers that visibility was reduced to four or five yards.'* In every account of the battle, ancient and modem, the dust is only allowed to intervene when the fighting is almost finished. But if the retreat was obscured by a dust-cloud, so too was the advance over exactly similar ground; like philosophers, historians of Gaugamela would do better first to raise the dust and then complain that they, like Alexander, are unable to see from the start.

The more the historian is removed from the facts, the more he imposes a pattern on their disorder: contemporaries would soon describe a battle

* Major General J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great (1958) p. 178. 236 rich in about-turns and flanking manoeuvres,

and within twenty years their details had been muddled and elaborated by a literary historian. By a Roman, four hundred years later, these various narratives were clumsily intertwined and now, two thousand years afterwards, men draw maps to reconcile differences which ought to be left to conflict. To participants, a battle is neither tidy nor explicable; the earliest accounts of Gaugamela tell more of the mood of Alexander's court after victory than of events on the field itself. Romance and flattery singled out what suited them; though one coherent document, the Persians' order of battle, was captured among the spoils, even this cannot be believed unreservedly. It may only have been one copy among many, never enacted in practice.

Among the dust and disorder, one crucial movement is agreed, all the more credible for being a habit. On sounding the final advance, a mile, perhaps, from the enemy line which comfortably overlapped him, Alexander advanced obliquely, as his men had long learnt from Philip, thrusting his Companions forward on the right, holding Parmenion and the Greeks behind on the left. But when he came closer, he began to lead the whole line briskly to the right, a sideways movement which was made possible by the wedged shape of his units. Parmenion and the left were now exposed to a still more serious encirclement, but if Alexander could ride out beyond the Persian left, he would have saved his own attacking cavalry wing from being outflanked; to cover him, the Persians would probably shift to the left, and in their hurried surprise a gap might open in their front, which was not neatly ordered in wedge-shaped triangles. On the far right, to which he now headed, the ground was rough and unsuited to scythed chariots, and it was well away from the stakes and snares which had been laid against a conventional head-on charge. The line of advance was a sound one, but it was partly defeated by the Persians' swift adjustments.

Darius, too, could move horsemen quickly to the left, and although this was to cost him control of the battle, it was not long before his furthest cavalry were riding parallel to the units on Alexander's right, outpacing them and once more regaining the outside position. By this mad gallop, Alexander's spurt to the right was halted before he reached the rough ground, and at once, two thousand or so heavy armed Scythian and Bactrian horsemen began their expected charge to outflank and encircle. They had not prepared for an intelligent retort by the Macedonians' mobile flank guards. First, the seven hundred or so leading mercenary cavalry provoked them into a direct attack which diverted them from the rear by the promise of an easy victory; then, when they were engaged beyond recall, the rest of the flank-guards were loosed to repulse them, first, the mounted Paeonians, then the several thousand veteran mercenaries concealed in between. 'If each unit of cavalry were to contain infantrymen,' Xenophon had written in a pamphlet on cavalry command, 'and if these were to be hidden behind the horsemen, then by suddenly appearing and coming to blows I think they would work for victory all the more.' The manoeuvre had been used by the Theban generals whom Philip had often copied; Alexander, who had also read his Xenophon, felt likewise, and the Scyths, entangled among what had seemed a simple enemy, were in turn outnumbered and forced to retreat.

As the Scyths recoiled on the extreme flank, the rest of the Persian left poured out to back them up; on the inner wings and centre, the scythed chariots hurtled forwards while the going was still smooth. Again in the manner of Xenophon, they had been anticipated. In front of the Companion cavalry, some two thousand Agrianians and javelin throwers had been placed to shoot them down at long range; their volley was accurate, and such charioteers as continued soon found themselves being hauled off their platforms by the bravest units in Alexander's army, while their horses were hacked with long knives. Those who survived this double assault were received by the Companions behind: ranks had been parted wide, and the chariots bolted harmlessly through into the baggage camp in the rear, where they were given a final mauling by the grooms and royal Squires. To be effective, a chariot must charge in a straight line without interruption: Alexander knew this; first he interrupted them and then, as Xenophon had suggested and he had practised against Thracian wagons four years earlier, he cleared an open path down which their scythed wheels would whirl to no purpose. According to the Macedonian officers, the chariots 'caused no casualties'; others, with a taste for drama, said that 'many arms were cut in half, shields and all; not a few necks were sliced through, as heads fell to the ground with their eyes still open and the expression of the face preserved'. On the centre and the far left, where the greater part of the chariots charged with unknown effect, this may have been true. However, many shins were grazed, the dust must surely have been stirred and the battle must have begun to be obscured.

Round Alexander the decisive manoeuvre was remembered and recorded. 'The whole art of war', wrote Napoleon, 'consists in a well-reasoned and circumspect defensive followed by a rapid and audacious attack'; Scyths and chariots had been circumspectly countered, and whatever was happening on the extreme left, which nobody described clearly, the mass attack on the right was being valiantly held by an outnumbered flank-guard, so that speed and audacity could begin to come into play. The hectic movements of the Persian left, first riding to one side to match

Alexander, then racing forwards to outflank him, had opened a gap where the left wing met the left centre; this, the site of Darius's own chariot, invited penetration. 'The second principle of strategy', wrote Clausewitz, master of its theory, 'is to concentrate force at the point where the decisive blows are to be struck, for success at this point will compensate for all defeats at secondary points.' Anticipating both Clausewitz and Napoleon, Alexander formed the Companion cavalry into their customary wedge and showed the nearest foot brigades the way to an offensive against a Persian centre, exposed, disordered and not too heavily his superior in immediate numbers. Like a skilled wing forward on the football field, his first moves had drawn the defence far off to the right; now, he halted, changed direction and plunged back into the centre, heading for the goal of the Great King himself and neatly avoiding the stationary elephants.

The Companions charged, came to rest among spearmen and then shoved and hustled; the Shield Bearers followed up with the three right-hand brigades of the Foot Companions, who marched at the double, 'thick and bristling with sarissas', and raising their cry of alalalalai.In fine Homeric style, Alexander is said to have thrown a spear at Darius, missed, and killed the charioteer beside him; certainly, Immortals and Royal Relations were much discomforted by this piercing attack, and as corpse piled upon corpse, Darius reversed his chariot and slipped south-cast through the covering dust-cloud to the safety of the Royal Road. Some 3,000 Companions and 8,000 infantry had indeed turned the battle by concentrating at a point of weakness. But secondary positions were still in danger, and the main prize, Darius, would not be easily detected or overtaken.

As history centres on Alexander, who is even said to have 'meant to settle the whole issue', all million men of it, 'by his own heroics', events elsewhere in the line are left more or less unexplained. On the right, as Darius fled, a massive force of Iranian cavalry had begun to charge down a flank-guard whom they vastly outnumbered, and yet the entry of the 600 or so mounted sarissa-bearers into the battle is said to have turned them promptly to flight; on the left, Parmenion can only have been exposed to every possible threat of encirclement by the units under Mazaeus, but the only result was an outflanking charge by some 3,000 enemy horsemen who rashly continued into the baggage-camp behind the lines, where they are said to have tried to free the prisoners and the Persian queen mother. 'Not a word fell from her lips; neither her colour nor her expression changed, as she sat immobile, so that onlookers were uncertain which course she preferred.' Before she could make up her mind her rescuers had vanished from the story, perhaps because they heard of Darius's flight, perhaps because the reserves had returned to harass them.

In the centre alone the situation was unmistakable. Alexander's headlong charge towards Darius had carried the right-hand units of Foot-Companions with him, but the left three files, struggling to keep up, had let their line go out of step and exposed a wide gap, as at Issus, in their centre, into which Persians and Indians had poured delightedly, following the daylight through the wall of sarissas. Had they turned against the Foot Companions' ill-armed flanks they could have done untold damage, but they too had scented the distant baggage camp, and so they careered into its midst, slaughtering its unarmed attendants in the hope, perhaps as ordered, of recovering the Great King's family. They had not reckoned with Alexander's line of reserves, whose role throughout is hard to understand. Whether or not they had split, like the front, and allowed the Indians through in the first place, they now patched themselves together enough to face about and fall on the plunderers from the rear. Thanks to Alexander's original precautions, the baggage was finally saved from its various attackers, and Darius's family remained under arrest.

As Alexander routed the Persian centre, he cannot have known that the rest of his line was either endangered or able, most fortunately, to rally its several weaknesses. He may have suspected something of the sort, but he could not possibly have seen it. Dust was swirling around him and it was a matter of dodging the scimitars and lunging at half-seen turbans in order to stay alive: his angled charge had cut in behind the elephants, and the braver foot soldiers had now set about them too, allegedly with bronze tridents designed for stabbing. Their skirmish can only have added to the confusion. The one certain target was Darius, and he was known to have retreated, so Alexander abandoned all secondary dangers and dashed with a group of horsemen in pursuit. If this seems as impetuous as the disastrous conduct of Prince Rupert at Edgehill, it is not to be disbelieved as too irresponsible: through dust and struggling Orientals, Alexander could not usefully have returned in time to aid his left or centre, even had he known this to be necessary. If history later had an excuse to be made, it was not that he set off in pursuit but that this pursuit of a vital prize was to prove a failure. A scapegoat was needed, and as so often, the blame was put down to Parmenion: as Alexander set off on his chase, accompanied by 2,000 cavalry, a messenger, it was said, arrived from Parmenion, begging him to help the left.

This messenger was beset with problems. Different histories time him differently, varying his message and Alexander's retort: some said he voiced a fear for the baggage, whereupon Alexander told Parmenion to forget the bags and fight the enemy, others said he asked for reinforcements, so that Alexander gnashed his teeth and felt obliged to return. It is extremely unlikely that any message ever reached Alexander through the press of a full-blooded battle; it was generally agreed among historians, presumably because Callisthenes first said so, that Parmenion had been slow and incompetent in the fight, and the talc of his 'messenger' could thus be put about by flatterers, in order to explain why Alexander had delayed and failed to catch Darius. His second-in-command, it was pleaded, had held him back, and by the time the excuse was published Parmenion had been killed on a fear of treachery. History, once more, could be rewritten to please Alexander and slander the general he had put to death.

If the pursuit failed, it was more because of the dust and the retreating masses of Persian cavalry; these were trying to break away and follow Darius at the same time as Alexander was trying to cut a path through their lines, and with pursuit and escape at issue the fighting between the two sides was particularly savage. Sixty Companions around Alexander were wounded, Hephaistion among them, before the Persians were finally cleared away; by then Darius was far distant, having crossed the Lesser Zab river. There he had exchanged his chariot for a horse, and ridden away to the Royal Road near Arbela, thirty miles from the battlefield and site of a choice of routes to the heart of his empire. Alexander followed belatedly. By the time he had reached the Zab's far bank the October darkness was beginning to fall and a swift arrest no longer seemed possible. The hones therefore, were allowed to rest, as the pace of the pursuit was already too much for them; not until midnight did they continue south-east to Arbela, where they arrived by Royal Road on the following morning. Inquiries revealed that Darius had long since passed through; he had also left the highway which could have brought him south-east to Babylon, and taken a shorter and less familiar hill route to Hamadan, meeting-point of the roads to his upper satrapies. His trail led through the little-known Kurdish mountains, over passes as high as 9,000 feet, and rather than risk being lost among their hostile nomads, Alexander contented himself with Arbela's handsome store of treasure and the prospect of a safe march south to the riches of Babylon. Darius's escape was a grave disappointment, but men nonetheless were calling him the new king of Asia.

Back on the battlefield, the enemy had soon lost their impulse after the flight of their royal commander. On the right, Bactrians and Scyths had ridden away, unnerved by the mounted sarissa-bearers: in the centre, the Foot Companions had repaired themselves, and on the left Parmenion had somehow repulsed an opposing mass of cavalry, despite their overwhelming numbers and positioning. One dissenting voice maintained that he and his Thessalian horsemen had indeed fought brilliantly, whereas others accused him of sloth and incompetence; the brilliance may be true, and news of Darius's retreat may also have helped him, as may the presence of Mazaeus, who could well have remembered his contacts with Hephaistion a mere month before at the Euphrates. Commander of the entire Persian right, he was not slow to ignore Darius and ride away to Babylon, where he surrendered within weeks and gained his reinstatement. He knew, most suspiciously, where his advantage lay.

In the rout, 'nearly 300,000 Persian dead were counted and many more were taken prisoner, including any elephants and chariots left intact; of those around Alexander, about a hundred were killed, but more than a thousand horses died of wounds or exhaustion during his pursuit'. These absurd figures are history's final comment on a battle which is confused where it is not downright flattery. Alexander's sudden charge from right to centre was evidently crucial, and in the best tradition of attacking generalship; at other points in his line the Persians' obsession with the contents of his baggage camp and their curious inability to turn their numbers to the proper advantage were blessings for which he could claim less credit. It is the mark of a great general to make his enemy seem insubstantial, and Alexander's planning, audacity and speed of decision, had far excelled the enemy command's: he had won magnificently, and he would never have to fight for Asia on any such scale again.

As he returned from his failed pursuit his own position did not yet seem so decisive. At Gaugamela Alexander had seized what a Persian would call his western empire: he had still to approach what Iranians called their homelands. East and south-east stretched the provinces of Medcs and Persians, Bactrians, Sogdians and mountain tribes, to whom Darius could retire from Hamadan and raise a second line of resistance; until Darius was captured, Alexander was not the king of Asia, and he knew it. In the first flush of victory it was still as the Greek avenger that he wished himself to be seen: he wrote to his Greek allies 'that all tyrannies had been abolished and that men were now governed by their own laws', a claim more true of Asia Minor than of mainland Greece, where juntas still flourished under his alliance. His message extended to details too: to the other end of the Mediterranean, he sent spoils of victory to a south Italian town, home, as those Companions who knew the West could remind him, of a Greek athlete who had come to fight a hundred and fifty years before for Greece against the sacrilegious Persian Xerxes.

Such concern for obscurities is partly a credit to his publicity, but also, surely, a sign that the theme of vengeance was taken seriously.

Not even the landscape was spared his commemorations. Behind the battlefield stood the hill of Tell Gomel, which the natives called 'hump of the camel'. For the site of a glorious victory that would never do: he renamed it Nikatorion, Mountain of Victory in his own Greek language, and long after the details of his battle had been obscured this name alone would survive. A name with old associations in the East, it would be turned into Syriac and live on as awana Niqator,the post-house of victory, name of a relay station on the highway whose ancestor had been the Persians' Royal Road. The victory indeed had been memorable, but it was not to be the last: a name, given in a moment of exultation, would persist for six hundred years and set a fashion for Pompey and other victorious Romans, but Darius had escaped, a fact which no alleged message from Parmenion could ever conceal. It would need a longer and far harder march before the new master of Asia could call himself its rightful king.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

On 2 October Alexander left Darius's camp at Arbela and marched south, keeping the river Tigris on his right and following the Royal Road, which still determined his route. He had lost all hope of catching Darius in the first flush of pursuit, and as before Gaugamela, he would be wise to wait again and see if the Great King would summon one last army to take a stand in open ground. Meanwhile supplies and the prospect of treasure turned him south to Babylon and the promise of well-earned rewards for his troops. He left the battlefield quickly, a decision which flatterers explained by the stench of the enemy dead and the fear of disease from them. The area was also renowned for poisonous vapours of asphalt and before long, he paused to examine them.

At Kirkuk, where the Road branched eastwards, he 'admired a chasm in the ground from which fire streamed continually as if from a spring and he marvelled at the nearby flood of naphtha, prolific enough to form a lake'. To show it off, the natives 'sprinkled the path which led to the royal quarters with a thin covering of the liquid, stood at the top and applied torches to the wet patches: darkness was already beginning to fall. With the speed of thought, the flames shot from one end of the street to the other and kept on burning.' For the first time, the Eternal Fires of Baba Gurgan had been shown to the Greeks, and at the suggestion of an Athenian who attended him in his bath, Alexander allowed a second experiment. At court, there was a boy 'absurdly plain to look at but with a pleasant singing voice'; in order to find out whether naphtha would bum as well as blaze, he volunteered to be soaked in the liquid and set alight. The flames, however, burnt him severely, and could only be dowsed by repeated buckets of water. The boy survived, shocked and scarred, a warning to those who believe that in matters of natural science, the Greeks preferred theory to experiment.

Leaving the Eternal Fires, Alexander sent a courier eastwards to Susa, the next palace on his obvious path, and himself turned off the Royal Road and took the other great highway of history to lead him south to Babylon. Near Tuz-Kharmatu, he noted the local source of bitumen and learnt that it had been used for the building of Babylon's walls; at Opis, he recrossed the Tigris and marched down the canals of its west bank, through farmland so thickly stocked with millet and barley that his army could eat as they pleased. Everywhere, they were greeted by date palms, the glory of Babylon's economy and a source of wood, beer, food and bedding; the Persians had made up a popular song about its uses, all 360 of them, so they said, one for each day of the Babylonian year.

The country he travelled had long served Persia with crops, new estates and a tribute which none of the rest of her empire could rival. It was two hundred years since Babylon had first fallen to the Persian king, and ever since her land had been bled of its marvellous fertility: Iranian tribesmen had left a life in desert and mountain to rob her of acres of farmland, waterways and city housing; only the native business documents can set such a social change in perspective. It was not that Iranians had found Babylonia more congenial than their homes, for the heat was appalling, and five hundred years later a Chinese visitor would still find their successors living in underground houses cooled by ice, a valid comment on what their forebears had suffered. Most had come because they had to; some were more fortunate, living away in the relative cool of the Persian court and running their western estates through native slaves and agents as a tax-free gift from their king, the others were government servants, judges, overseers, collectors of annual taxes, and they had to make homes wherever they worked. Nor were they always Iranians. Among them lived groups of the foreign soldiers whom the king settled on communes of land in return for taxes or military service; Indians, Arabians, Jews and former nomads, they had changed the face of whole areas of Babylon's countryside, until it was through the farms of foreigners and Persian favourites that Alexander was mostly marching on his way to the greatest city in the east.