Do you know that headland, Jason, called the Blacksmith’s Bellows? Its sound once heard may never be forgotten. The swifter vessels fetched the lee; those lumbering pots, as our own, were driven in and nearly dashed. The sole landing site was a splinter of gravel, walled on three sides by two-hundred-foot cliffs, and defended across its solitary channel of ingress by stone promontories exploding with white water and booming beneath the thunder of storm-pounded surf. Only after a struggle titanic in its exertions and sustained throughout the terrifying descent of darkness did our severed remnant, six ships, succeed in beaching upon that site called the Boilers, a strand so slender that the vessels’ prows (beaching stern-first being out of the question in such a tempest) were staring straight into the face of rock. Waves taller than a man crashed about their sternposts, seeking to suck them back into the sea. To augment the hospitality of the place, the foe had gotten above us, at the summit of a precipice too sheer to scale, and begun raining boulders and initiating rockslides. Two of six ships were holed at once, nor could the youths of our force be induced to respond to orders to preserve the others, but hunkered in clefts at the base of the fall, drenched and dread-stricken.
Command had broken down. Paches and the Athenian officers had been swept beyond the headland; it took an eternity to determine the ranking senior of our shredded squadron, a captain of Macedonian infantry it turned out, and he, overcome by the extremity, had retreated to a cave at the cliff base, from whose shelter he could not be drawn.
Upon the strand boulders plummeted like hail. With each ship holed, our extinction became more certain; the enemy would simply close from above and take us down with stone and shaft. Beside Hygeia, a horse transport had broached to. A number of the beasts thrashed in the surf, drowning; two who had made land had been struck by rockfalls and back-broken; their cries unstrung the rookie troops further. The vessel herself pitched among the breakers, secured only by bow and stern lines, each manned by twenty lads, frantic themselves and buffeted chest-deep in the maelstrom. Alcibiades and his cousin Euryptolemus had hurled themselves into this rescue. I found my brother Lion; we joined too. After monumental exertions the transport was at last beached. Without a word Alcibiades had become our commander. He strode off, seeking a senior officer to report to, ordering the rest of us to follow as soon as the horses had been secured ashore.
The gale continued to scour the landing beach. Boulders plummeted from above; concussions of thunder never ceased. My brother and I had just reached the brow of the strand, seeking the command post; we could see Alcibiades ahead, addressing the Macedonian captain. Suddenly this officer struck him with his staff. We dashed forward. Even amid the cacophony of storm and surf, the content of the confrontation was clear: Alcibiades demanding orders, the captain incapable of giving them. He wheeled upon the youth, twenty years his junior, whose family and reputation he knew, as we all. “Your kinsman Pericles is not here, young man, nor may you presume to dictate in his name!”
“I speak in my own and that of these who will perish, absent your deliverance,” Alcibiades rejoined. His gesture took in ships, gale, and the rain of rubble which continued to pelt from the enemy above. “Take action, sir, or by Heracles I will!”
Only two fifties remained unholed. Alcibiades struck for them. The captain was shouting, commanding him to stay put and threatening hell if he disobeyed. The youth bawled no defiance, simply strode on; and we, my brother and two score others, followed in his train as if drawn by fetters of adamant. At breakers’ brink he issued orders. No one could hear a word. Yet we seized oars and launched into the teeth, ten at each bank, without even stepping the steering oars, so worthless were they in that sea. How the ships got off without loss of life I cannot say. What preserved the party, beyond heaven’s clemency, can only have been the beaminess of her craft and the quantity of seas shipped as unintended ballast. Of four pulls at oars, only one found purchase. Gale-driven chop hammered the hull like a siege engine, while swells twice the vessels’ length made them race like runaways. Plummeting into a trough, the bows nosed under, sending seas cascading into the bilges; ascending from a crest, the gale struck upon the exposed keel, elevating the vessels vertical as vine stakes. At oars we were literally standing on the thwarts of our comrades aft.
Somehow the two fifties managed to pull a half mile to sea. The lads communicated like dogs, by cries rendered mute in the blast; yet one understood the object: to make the first northward landing, scale the face, and get behind the foe.
Now Alcibiades rowed, with such a will as to impel all to emulation; his orders, shouted man-to-man down the banks, were to run into shore any way possible, taking no care for the vessels but only to land ourselves. The crest that bore us in unspooled with such velocity as to fling all bodily from their benches. We plunged over the gunwales. I was knocked senseless by the fall, coming to myself among breakers, shield filling with the weight of the seas, which hauled me under with a violence unimaginable. My forearm, seated through the sleeve to the elbow, bound me as a shackle; only the rivets’ failure, wrenched from their sockets by the press of turbulence, loosed me to breach the surface. A boy drowned before my eyes, dragged under in the same way. On the strand our remnant collected, shattered with exhaustion and bereft, all, of shields and weapons. Both boats were splinters. Lads shook as if palsied, blue to the bone.
One turned to Alcibiades. Drenched and weaponless as he was, and quaking as convulsively as we others, yet he reveled in this. No other phrase may describe it. To the lads unnerved by the ships’ loss he responded that had the vessels not sunk of their own, he would have ordered them holed and scuttled. “Banish all thought of retreat, brothers. No avenue remains but to advance, and no alternative save victory or death.” He ordered count, and when three were discovered missing, drowned, he commanded our remainder to give meaning to their sacrifice. What we lacked accounted nothing beside the audacity of our stroke. “Want of weapons is no liability in this dark. Our sudden apparition in the enemy’s rear will be weapon enough. The foe will flee from the shock of our assault alone.”
Alcibiades drove us up the face. He was a horseman and knew in this wet that the enemy, being cavalry, would seek before all to get his mounts under cover. We were not lost, he repeated, however black the tempest, but must only follow the brink, employing heaven’s bolts as our beacon, till we discovered such a site. Of course he was right. A crag appeared. There they were. We fell upon the enemy’s grooms with stones and clubs and the shivered shafts of our oars. In moments our commander had us mounted and pounding along the precipice in dark as total as the tomb. At the crest the main of the foe fled, as Alcibiades had predicted. We chased a dozen into the fells, myself desperate to strip the shield from one. For the Spartan-trained, death was preferable to return from action, even victorious, empty-handed.
Here the first man fell beneath my blow. A plunge among rocks; I heard his skull crack on the stone in the dark. My brother dragged me off him, seeking to strip breastplate as well as shield. I was mad with the joy of my own survival and felt myself invincible, as so many young soldiers who in such states commit acts of barbarity. Lion hauled me back to the precipice. Our party had collected, masters of the site. We had won! Below, our troops cheered their deliverance. The face of the cliff had been roped, I saw; several from the strand had mounted and now stood before us. I recognized the Macedonian captain. He was berating Alcibiades, vehemently and with malice.
He declared the youth reckless and insubordinate, a disgrace to his country and the order of the Alliance. Three are dead by his defiance, two ships lost for his usurpation of command! Where are your shields and weapons? Do you know the penalty for their deficit? The captain’s eyes blazed. He would see Alcibiades hauled up on charges of mutiny, if not treason, and by Zeus jig upon his grave!
Three Macedonian warrant officers, the captain’s compatriots, reinforced him at arms. Alcibiades’ expression never altered, awaiting only the harangue’s termination.
??
?One must not make such a speech,” he declared, “with his back to the precipice.”
I will resist overdramatizing the moment, but report only that the three henchmen, considering their position, seized their commander and executed his precipitation.
The rest of us, who had just experienced for the first time in our young lives such a baptism of terror—and over such a sustained interval as we had never imagined—now discovered ourselves confronted with an even more extreme exigency. What would become of us? Surely those below must report Alcibiades’ action. We were accessories. Would we not be tried as murderers? Would our names be blackened, our families shamed and dishonored? Would we be returned to Athens in chains to await execution?
At once Alcibiades stepped to the three Macedonians, setting a hand on their shoulders to assure them he harbored no malign intent. Might they inform him, he inquired, of the name and clan of their fallen captain?
“You will prepare the following dispatch,” Alcibiades commanded. He proceeded to dictate the text of a commendation for valor. Each act of heroism which he had himself performed, he now credited to the captain. He recited this officer’s valor in the face of overwhelming peril; how he had, disregarding his own safety, put out into the storm, scaled the sheer face of stone to envelop and rout the enemy, preserving by his actions the ships and men of his company below. At the summit of triumph, as his sword slew the foe’s commander, cruel fortune overhauled him. He fell. “The fame of this action,” Alcibiades concluded, “shall endure, imperishable.”
This dispatch would be sent, Alcibiades declared further, to the captain’s father and presented personally by himself to Paches and the generals of Macedonia upon our squadron’s return. He turned then to us youths, including Lion and myself, looking on.
“Which of you, brothers, will set his hand beneath mine on this citation?”
Need I recount, none failed to assent.
As to our unofficial company of infantry, it succeeded, reunited with the brigade under Paches, in its mission over a month and more of fighting, during which Alcibiades at nineteen, though by no means officially in command, was in fact deferred to by all superiors and sanctioned such latitude of action and initiative as to render him effectively its captain. When this unit at last reached Potidaea, our original destination, and joined the line troops engaged in the siege, it was disbanded as nonchalantly as it had been formed, and Alcibiades, undecorated but unindicted, was repatriated to his regiment.
It was my brother’s observation regarding this incident that, though he, and I as well, served in subsequent seasons beside a number of the young men present at the precipice in that hour and had ample opportunity of converse, formal and informal, on this or any subject, never did one offer mention of this instance or confirm by word or allusion the actuality of its occurrence.
V
THE INDISPENSABLE MAN
At the siege of Potidaea two young men established themselves as indispensable: Alcibiades and my brother. By his bearing both in action and in counsel it had become patent that the former was
preeminent of hero’s fire,
without rival among the host.
Within all the corps he was acknowledged the most brilliant and audacious, possessed of the most abundant genius of war. At Athens his fields of enterprise had been limited by youth to sport and seduction. Campaign overturned this, granting him a sphere commensurate to his gifts. Overnight he came into his own. It was deemed by no few that he, though not yet twenty, could have been elevated to supreme command and not only prosecuted the siege with greater vigor and sagacity but brought it to a successful conclusion with far less loss of life.
As to my brother, he had made his name among the hard heads and raw knots of the corps. Experience teaches that however numerous the brigade or army, the work of war is performed by small units, and each must possess to be effective one man like Lion who is unacquainted with fear, who arises cheerful each morning despite all hardship, ready to shoulder another’s load with a laugh and turn his hand to all tasks, however mean or humble. A unit lacking a man like Lion will never endure, while one with such a mate may be beaten but never broken.
Our father’s letters caught up to us at Potidaea. We were summoned, Lion and I, to the tent of Paches’ adjutant, a captain of Aexone whose name I cannot recall. The officer read aloud two pleas of our father, confirming my brother’s age at sixteen years three months and pleading for his immediate discharge, with a pledge to pay all fines and fees of transport. “What have you to say, young man?” our captain demanded.
Lion straightened to his full height, such as it was, and swore by the waters of Styx that his years were not only twenty but twenty-three. Our father, he testified, though well-meaning, had come unhinged following the devastation of our district and now feared, understandably, the loss of his sons; thus this appeal from Athens, presented with such touching and plausible conviction. When the captain summoned witnesses from our home district who testified to the truth of the letter, Lion refused to buckle. It was not age that made a soldier, but passion and heart! Our commander cut him short. I have never seen one so inconsolable as Lion; the sight was almost comical of him slouching aboard the galley home.
Payout for my brother’s misdemeanor fell upon me, as it should, his elder. I was fined three months’ pay and banished from line duty, assigned command of a platoon of boys, foresters. We were issued not arms but axes and packed off with the mules and logging sledges.
You were at Potidaea, Jason. I remember you. You came in with Eurymedon in the terminal spring, the squadrons bearing the relief parties of the cavalry and the replacements for the assault troops carried off by the plague. You were lucky. You missed the winter.
Winter in our fathers’ time was the off-season. Who even dreamt of fighting in the snow and ice? Summer was the time of war; in Sparta men didn’t even have a word for summer; they called it strateiorion, campaigning season. But a siege cannot be prosecuted in sunshine only. Thus a new calendar for a new kind of war.
It was a porous siege. On the line the troops had more intercourse with the enemy than with their own countrymen. We sold food and firewood; the Potidaeans traded treasure. Gold first, then jewelry and linen. They sold their armor and their swords. From midwinter they were peddling their daughters.
By the gods, it was cold up there. Piss steamed on the air and turned to ice before it hit the dirt. To dress in armor made the skin peel in patches where it touched the freezing bronze. The glory of dying for one’s country lost whatever pale luster it had possessed, especially to croak of plague or pestilence or some perverse mischance, a blind-luck bowshot lobbed from a battlement, only to have the campaign decided in spring by treaty and everyone suddenly allies again. We camped there, frozen and miserable, while the city of the Potidaeans loomed at the neck of the promontory, frozen and miserable as we.
The three northern gates, those that gave out upon the landward side, stood barred only in daylight. With nightfall they became avenues of skimmers, scavengers, and scum. You could see their tracks in the snow, broad as boulevards. Our company was commanded by a bribe-commissioned captain named Gnossos. Here is what we did. For every eight trees logged, we turned over four to the army; the other four went to the foe. They paid our captain in women. Not whores but respectable wives and daughters of the city. They were ploughing us for firewood. I refused to permit my lads to take part in these orgies, in which it was not uncommon for one female to service a dozen men before returning through and under the walls to the city. Such degeneracy, countenanced by their superior, would debase what little warrior spirit these striplings possessed. In addition, overscrupulous as this may sound from a man of my subsequent deeds, I could not bear to witness the ravagement of person this commerce inflicted on the women themselves.
I was hauled up for this. Behind my back my bucks began calling me “the Spartan.” It was put about that I sided secretly with the foe and that my prudish intransigence was not only und
ermining the morale of youth but, defying as it did my commander’s ordinance, was at best insubordination and at worst treason. In a clash with my captain the word “procurer” escaped my lips. I was cashiered.
I went for aid to Alcibiades. The army had engaged the enemy in full strength that autumn, an attempted breakout in force requiring the mobilization of our entire corps; Alcibiades had distinguished himself in this action and in fact been awarded the prize of valor, judged the bravest of the six thousand upon the field. It took several months for the crown and suit of armor to be delivered. In fact he had just received the former this evening when I approached. He was celebrating with his tentmates.
Any encampment massed upon one site for a prolonged interval becomes, as you know, Jason, a city of its own. Its market becomes the agora, its training fields the gymnasium. The polis, battling boredom, throws up its own diversions and distractions, its characters and its clowns. There is a good part of town and a bad, a neighborhood one enters at his peril and a precinct of privilege and fame, which exercises its spell over all. Invariably one tent establishes itself for the brilliance of its occupants as the epicenter of the camp.
Alcibiades’ tent, Aspasia Three (the main streets of the seven fortified camps ringing the city had been named each after a famed courtesan of Athens), had become this nexus. This was in consequence not alone of his celebrity but of the wit and converse of his tentmates, who included in their number of sixteen your own master Socrates (renowned then less as a philosopher than a doughty and stalwart campaigner, forty years of age), the celebrated actor Alcaeus, Mantitheus the Olympic boxer, and Acumenus the physician. These fellows were the most fun. Everyone wanted to be with them. An invitation to dine at Aspasia Three was more highly prized than a decoration. For that reason I had avoided Alcibiades, not wishing to push myself uninvited upon him and also because I judged the status of our friendship to be cordial but remote.