Replacements are not an army. Our mob had been formed not into regiments but into “S.C.’s,” shipboard contingents, and did not, when we landed, even have our arms. The cavalry didn’t have its horses. The animals were following in other transports. There was a tent city waiting, and an escort of six hundred Syrian mercenaries, and fourteen hundred hired infantry of Lycia, with Macedonian officers, who were to take us up to Marathus and from there by way of Larissa to Thapsacus, where we would cross the Euphrates into Mesopotamian Syria and Kurdistan. The march to catch up with Alexander would take between three and four months.
As always in a new camp, the troops plunged at once into their favored pastimes—touring the site looking up friends, and poaching every item of kit they could lay hands on. You couldn’t set down a heel of bread without somebody snatching it, and a decent hat or a pair of road-slappers were sure goners. A man hung his purse next to his testicles and, after shaking hands with a stranger, checked to make sure both sacks were still where he had left them.
In Alexander’s fighting army, every trooper knew the mark he was to stand on. But here, a thousand miles to the rear, the show was all orphan stew. You ate when the cooks opened the tents and bunked where you could find a patch of dirt wide enough to hold your bones. You kept with your mates to keep the scroungers from picking you blind. My bunch was Lucas; Terres, called “Rags” for his dandy’s love of clothes; and Peithon, undersized, called “Flea.” We were all from Apollonia, all eighteen, and had known each other all our lives.
Lucas was our leader. He was a born operator and set out to keep our heads above the general ruck. We were supposed to get paid on landing at Tripolis (it’d been a month, marshaling and crossing), but if there was any shine with this mob, I never saw it. In fact we had to pay, ourselves. The slugs at the cook-tent wanted cash to get in. You had to pay to take a crap.
“We’ve got to find ourselves a bull,” pronounced Lucas. Meaning someone with rank to attach ourselves to.
We found him in a Color Sergeant named Tolmides. Tollo for short. He was a stubby fellow with great mustaches and a boar’s-tusk cap, a mate of Lucas’s father, and in charge here of a company of Lycian infantry. Lucas spotted him in the latrine line. “Hey, Tollo! Where’s a scuff take a free shit around here?”
Tollo came over, laughing. “By Hades’ balls, you little offscourings got all growed up, did you?” His rank was no joke though. He was a big onion. He got us out of camp. We chowed down with his Lycians out on the plain.
What, we asked, were the chances of getting paid?
About the same as crapping ivory.
When do we get assigned to regiments?
When you pay off the officers escorting you.
What about kit?
We would not be issued arms till Thapsacus or later, Tollo told us, and when we did we’d have to cough up for those too. “Don’t worry, the quartermaster’ll put it against your roll.” Meaning our pay records. We’d tick it down out of time served.
Lucas looked glum. “They didn’t tell us this back home.”
“If they did, you wouldn’t have come out,” said Tollo. And he laughed.
We glued ourselves to him. He and his Mack comrades had served as scouts in Forward Operations, running reconnaissance for Alexander in Areia and Afghanistan. They had been sent back to train us replacements on the march. They got double pay for this, and double that for escort duty.
“Don’t take to gloom, little brothers.” Tollo pointed east, into the Asiatic night. “Men drop like flies out there, from heat, sickness, or they just run queer.” And he tapped his skull. “You’ll make grade fast if you show strong stuff. Keep your sheet clean and do what you’re told. You’ll work fine.”
There were six other Macks in Tollo’s cadre, including Stephanos of Aegae, the celebrated war poet. He was a decorated hero and a genuine celebrity. Stephanos was thirty-five; he should have been a captain or at least a full lieutenant, but he stayed a Line Sergeant. He liked it that way. Here is one of the poems that had made him famous back home and a favorite, even, of the women.
A SOLDIER’S PACK
Experience has taught the soldier how to pack his pannier, with the stuff he needs most near the top, where he can get at it. In the outer pockets he stows his onions and garlic, sealed tight so they don’t stink up the weather kit and half-fleece on the other side. At the bottom, deep inside, he stashes those items that must at all costs be protected, against dust, against being dropped, against the elements. There, in the doeskin you gave me, I keep your letters, my darling wife.
The youngest of these Mack cadre was past thirty; several were fifty and more. They were the roughest planks we had ever seen. We were scared to death of them. Any one, by himself, could have manhandled the pack of us. We found ourselves running errands for them and shouldering their kit, without anyone ordering us, just so they wouldn’t bite our heads off. Lucas and I were slouching back into camp with firewood one night when we were called over by one of them, a Flag Sergeant whose real name no one dared ask and whom the troopers called simply “Flag,” the customary title of address for one of his rank.
“You two, learn something.”
We dropped our brush and scurried to him like schoolboys. Flag summoned one of his Lycians and had the fellow face about. He thrust the shaft of his half-pike (the shorter version of the sarissa used then in Asia) into my fist.
“Kill him,” he commanded.
I turned bright plum. Could he be serious?
“How do you finish a man who’s running from you?”
I didn’t know.
Flag tugged the Lycian around. “What if he turns about and faces you?”
I didn’t know.
“Take his place.”
“What?”
Suddenly I found myself in the Lycian’s spot. “Run,” Flag commanded. Before I could take one step, I found myself facedown in the dirt with the wind hammered out of me. I didn’t even know where Flag had hit me. I felt the butt of his half-pike upend me in one instant, then smash my skull in the next. I couldn’t move or breathe; I was helpless.
“Like this.” I could hear him instruct Lucas. “Sideways, so the blade doesn’t jam between the ribs.” And he stabbed me. Not a pinprick, but in so far I could feel the edge scrape the bone. I howled in pain.
Flag yanked me to my feet. Lucas’s face was white. “If the enemy faces you, lance him here. One push. Pull it straight out so it doesn’t jam.”
Then, to me: “When you hit a man, how hard do you do it?”
Before I could speak, Flag had swatted Lucas across the chest with the shaft of his half-pike. I have never heard such a blow. My mate crashed as if dead.
“Do that to the Afghan,” Flag said. “Before he does it to you.”
3.
The Macedonian infantry phalanx is based on a file of sixteen. Sixteen men, one behind the other. Two files is a section. This is commanded by a Line Sergeant. Four files is a platoon, led by a lieutenant and a Flag Sergeant. A square is four platoons, sixteen-by-sixteen, 256 men. A brigade is six squares, 1,536. There are six brigades in Alexander’s army. In depth of sixteen, the phalanx’s front is above six hundred yards.
The enlisted commander of each platoon is a Flag Sergeant, so named for the pennant he mounts on the peak of his two-handed pike, his sarissa. His post is up front. Second in rank to him is a Lance Sergeant, or file-closer. He is called a “back.” He takes the rear. In many ways his job is more important than the Flag’s (also called a “First” or a “Top”) because his will drives the file forward, and any man who thinks of dropping back has to face him.
Third in rank in each file is the ninth man, a Sergeant or Lance Corporal. Why the ninth? Because when the command is given to “double front,” the file of sixteen divides into two half-files of eight, called litters, and the rear eight hastens up alongside the front eight. The ninth man becomes the first in the new file. By this evolution, the brigade has gone from roughly a hundr
ed-man front, sixteen deep, to a two-hundred-man front, eight deep. Across the entire phalanx the front has expanded from six hundred to twelve hundred yards.
This configuration is how the Occupation Army trained at home, and how Alexander’s expeditionary force fought in the first three years of the Persian war, in its great conventional battles at the Granicus River, Issus, and Gaugamela.
In Afghanistan, we are now told, things will not be so simple. The place is all mountain and desert. You can’t use the phalanx there. The foe will not face it in pitched battle. Why should he? We would annihilate him if he did.
In the training at home with the eighteen-foot sarissa, a file had to be perfectly aligned front-to-back. Otherwise the formation would be tripping over its own feet. This was called advancing “on the axis.” The warrior virtue of being “on the axis” meant being sharp, obedient, never deviating. A good soldier was on the axis in everything he did.
Out east, we begin to see, there is no axis. The eighteen-foot sarissa has become the nine-foot half-pike; the phalanx exists on the parade ground only. Only two precepts remain: one, sacrifice everything in the cause of the main effort, and, two, never leave another Mack behind.
“Warfare out east,” our poet-sergeant Stephanos instructs us, “is of three types. In the plains, cavalry action. Against strongholds, siege warfare. In the mountains, mobile infantry.”
The fourth type of action was against villages. Our instructors didn’t tell us about that.
4.
Our force of replacements is supposed to march out from Tripolis three days after we land, but we wind up stuck there for twenty-two more. Waiting for the cavalry’s horses and our own arms. This is no joke, as our bunch still hasn’t been paid (no one has), and what little shine we have left is not enough to live on. We wind up stealing like Spartans. Everyone does. The escort troops will not let us into the city, so we scrounge, scavenge, pilfer, trade, and wager. Somehow it works. I wind up with most of my kit refurbished—and a decent pair of boots to replace the ones ruined in the sea. And Lucas and I connect with a pair of Companion cavalrymen rotating home to Apollonia, who know both my brothers and have news of them.
Elias has been wounded but is well; he is in hospital now at Phrada in southern Afghanistan. Philip (Elias is nine years older than I, Philip fourteen) has been promoted to Major. He is in India now, as an envoy with Forward Operations, negotiating alliances with the native potentates in advance of Alexander’s army’s push over the Hindu Kush into the Punjab. Such place names sound impossibly romantic to me. My brothers! What illustrious fellows! How will I live up to their achievements? Will I even recognize them when I see them?
The Companion cavalry, in which both my brothers serve, is the elite arm of Alexander’s fighting corps. To be accepted into a squadron is to be made for life. A man becomes in fact the king’s companion. He may dine with him, carouse with him, address him as “Alexander” (though, it is true, few dare.) The phalanx brigades share the name Companions (petzhetairoi, “Foot Companions”). But it’s not the same thing, as the king is a cavalryman and his closest mates are horsemen too.
In theory, each squadron of Companions is composed only of riders from its home district—Apollonia, Bottiaea, Torone, Methone, Olynthus, Amphipolis, and Anthemos being the squadrons taken by Alexander to Asia. (There are eight other squadrons, from other parts of Macedonia, but these remained home to garrison Greece and the tribal north.) But in practice, outstanding riders come from all over the kingdom seeking a berth. I have known men to marry or get themselves adopted into a local family, just to have a shot in the tryouts.
The trials take place over four days. The first two are compulsory exercises; the third is cross-country; the fourth is combat. A rider must show up with a string of seven horses. He is required to use no fewer than four during the ring work (to show he is not cheating by riding a smart animal), and one of those four must serve as his mount in either the steeplechase or the fighting tests. A good cavalry mount takes ten years to train and costs as much as a small farm. Only a rich man’s son can try, unless he is sponsored, as my brothers were, by another rich man, or if he has a father who has been decorated by the king.
Both my brothers were grooms as lads and rode as jockeys in the hippodrome. I cannot tell you how many nights they came home with cracked skulls and busted shins. Nothing could stop them. In the trials at Apollonia, when Elias was only ten, he slipped into the paddock while the horses were being saddled and leapt aboard not one but two champions, placing a foot on each bare back while clasping the reins of one horse in his left hand and the other in his right; he not only rode off at top speed without so much as a watch-my-kit, but jumped the horses over both walls, in and out, all the while standing on the horses’ backs as if he were nailed to them. The thrashing he received as punishment nearly carried him off, but it was worth it; he had made his name. He and Philip, five years older, could touch down off a horse’s back at the all-out and spring back aboard, yoked only by a wrist through the animal’s mane; they could “wrap around” (swing under a horse’s belly and back up the other side). It was nothing to either of them to dice a pear with the long lance one-handed at the stretching run, and their knowledge of veterinary medicine and what we call horsemastership (everything inside the barn) was the equal of any physician in the kingdom. Yet both failed to qualify, not once but four times—that’s how many superlative riders the realm held—before finally getting sent out in the expedition’s second year with four thousand reinforcements under Amyntas Andromenes. They crossed by sea to Gaza in Palestine and joined the king’s army in Egypt.
Our own belated contingent moves out from Tripolis, now, on the twenty-third day. The season is high summer. Every surface of armor must have a woven cover; otherwise the sun will turn it into a skillet. At home we have trained to march thirty miles a day with full kit and rations. Trekking now across Syria, fifteen miles feels like forty, and twenty like a hundred. The sun squats on our shoulders; we breathe dust instead of air. Our tongues are lolling like dogs’ on the tramp to Marathus.
I fall in beside Flag. He can see I’m suffering. “The Afghan,” he says, “will make fifty miles a day afoot and a hundred on horseback. He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t eat. Hack off his head and he’ll take two more swipes at you before he goes down.”
Reveille is three hours before dawn; march-out beats the sun by two. Lead elements of the column are in camp by midafternoon, with the stragglers and baggage train catching up by dark. An hour before noon a halt is called and the asses and mules are off-loaded; the beasts can go six to eight hours, but they have to get the weight off for two, otherwise they break down. No such luck for us. We get twenty minutes, then pack ’em up! At one stop on the third day, Lucas moves off to make water. Flag looks on, disapproving. “You shouldn’t have a drop in you.” If you can still draw piss, he says, you’re not trekking hard enough.
We have our weapons now. When we make camp early, we train. Cordon operations. Block and search. We have never heard of such things. High-lining. Sweep by flying columns. These are all new to us.
On treks over great distances, the day’s march is planned to take us from one inhabited area to another—a city or town that has been tasked to supply bread and fodder, or at least provide a market for the army. Now on selected days, for training, the column begins bypassing these. We chop from nowhere to nowhere, throw up a “hasty camp,” a circular ditch-and-berm, spiked with palisade stakes. No wheat-bread in these. We dine on “mooch”—barley gruel, whipped up out of our meal bags, which every man packs (holding ten days’ grain ration) and seasoned with whatever cresses we can scrounge and the odd pullet or goose liberated from a barnyard. Breakfast is wine, olive oil, and “hurry bread” (groats soaked overnight and half-baked on flat stones from the watch fire or directly over the flame on “paddles,” the iron flat-plates of the catapults). The feed we all dread is “scratch,” millet porridge, but even this is preferable to “cicada’s lun
ch,” meaning no grub at all. Tollo and Stephanos build in one starve-day in seven, to lean out our guts and get us used to what’s coming.
Flag has adopted me, after his fashion, or I should say I have fastened onto him like a barnacle. At Marathus an incident occurs. We have gotten paid finally. To celebrate, my mates and I hunt up a local shop for a barbering; when we get back to camp, we can’t find our purse. Lucas keeps this with him at all times; it holds our pooled stash. Now it’s gone. This is serious. No pay is coming until next month, and we can’t stand another siege of starvation. I go to Flag, tell him the last place we’d had our wallet is at the barber’s.
“Show me,” he says.
He enlists Tollo and a Mack corporal called Little Red. The barber’s dwelling and shop are the same, a mud-brick hut with a shade canopy out front and a cooking kitchen on the side. It’s suppertime; the wife won’t open the gate. She’s a snippy bitch and dishes out a smart dose of sauce.
Flag kicks the slats in. The shops in town all lie in the market district, a choleric rat-run called the Terik, “pigeon.” In moments every stall-keeper in the lane has collected, all gibbering in their tongue and ordering us to screw off. The barber’s shack is thick with urchins and grandfolks, with three or four brothers or cousins, young men, all armed and on their feet in a state of outrage. Flag is packing his hook, a wicked weapon used for unhorsing cavalry, with a short-sword on a shoulder sling; Tollo and Red wear their blades; Lucas and I do too but, God help us, we have no intention of using them. Flag makes straight for the barber. By signs and pidgin, he lets him know we want our money.
Get out! the fellow shouts back. Leave my home! I have taken nothing!
Flag seizes him by the gullet and jams him against the wall. Tollo and Little Red begin overturning furniture, what few sticks there are; they bowl over the cooking kettle, kicking the flat loaves across the floor. By now half the street is pressing tight about us, all bawling in indignation, and all proclaiming innocence. Lucas and I are certain we have made a mistake. We must’ve lost the money somewhere else! Leave these poor people alone!