Later when the city fell, our company held eighty-two captives of the lists, Quill’s and others, including six women and two boys. It was raining, in sheets behind a warm west wind, so you sweated amid the drenching. We herded the prisoners into stock pens. Another Mytilenean, not Quill but a confederate, appeared with our instructions. We were to put the detainees to death.
How, I ask, are such orders to be carried out? Not philosophically but practically. Who steps forth to propose the means? Not the best, I assure you. Incinerate them, cried one of our rear rank; seal them in the barn and torch it. Another wished to butcher them like sheep. I refused the order in its entirety.
Quill’s abettor confronted me. Who had bribed me? Did I know I was a traitor?
I was young; outrage overcame me. “How will I command these?” I exclaimed, indicating my men. “How may I call them to soldierly duty after they have committed such atrocities? They will be ruined!”
Quill appeared. These are the enemy, he cried, indicating the wretches in the sheepfold.
Kill them yourself, I told him.
He thrust the list in my face. “I’m putting your name on it!”
My own hot temper was all that saved me as, seizing his board and scribing the mark with my own hand, this action so maddened my antagonist as to make him assault me bodily, the ensuing uproar overthrowing momentarily the impetus to mass murder. Yet let me not style myself deliverer. The poor devils were massacred next day by another company and I, busted to private soldier, shipped off again to the North.
The years passed as if being lived by another. I glance back upon enlistments and discharges, pay vouchers and correspondence, bronzeheads extracted from my own flesh and cached as souvenirs at the bottom of my pack; I dig out trinkets and mementos, the names of men and women, lovers indeed, jotted upon the felt of my helmet cawl and scratched with a blade edge into the straps of my rucksack. I remember none.
The season transited as in a single night, that species of slumber from which one awakens at intervals, fitful and feverish, and can reclaim by morning nothing save the sour smell of his own tortured bedding. It seemed I came to myself again before Potidaea, besieging the place a second time seven years after the first. I cannot say now if it was dream or real.
For two winters after my wife’s death, I felt no call to passion. This was neither virtue nor grief, only despair. Then one night I entered the whores’ camp and never left. You understand the reckoning of accounts, my friend. Tote this up for me. How much in wages, and don’t fail to include mustering bonuses and dividends of discharge, may a soldier accrue who remains upon campaign, retiring not even in winter except to recover from wounds, for a decade entire? A tidy sum, I’d imagine. Enough to buy a handsome little farm, with stock and hands and even a comely wife.
I fucked away every farthing. Screwed it or drank it, and in the end could not credit even my own recall that I had once harbored aspirations for myself.
Peace came, the so-called Peace of Nicias, whereunder both sides, exhausted from years of strife, contracted to retire until they could recover breath, scratching in the interval lines beyond which each vowed not to trespass. I came home. Alcibiades was thirty now, elected to the chief executive of the state, the Board of Ten Generals, the same post his guardian Pericles had held. But his star had not yet gained preeminence. Nicias held sway, his elder and rival, who had negotiated peace with the Spartans, or been appointed by them to do so, to deprive Alcibiades, whose enterprise they feared, of the recognition and prestige. My friend employed me, at captain’s wages paid from his own purse, as a sort of private envoy to the Lacedaemonians, or those individual Spartans—Xenares, Endius, Mindarus—with whom he conspired to wreck the Peace. I am no diplomat. I missed the action. I needed it.
One comes to the mercenary’s calling in this way, as a criminal to crime. For war and crime are twin spawn of the same misbegotten litter. Why else does the magistrate present his perennial offer to errant youth: servitude or the army. Each inducts into the other, war and crime, and the more monstrous the felony, the deeper the criminal must plunge to reclaim himself, disremembering kin and country, forgetting even crime, so that in the end the only riddle the soldier kens is that most occult of all: why am I still living?
Peace for me was war under another name. I never stopped working. Absent license to soldier for my country, I hired out to others. At first only to allies, but when times got tight, well…one’s former foes proved the more eager employers. Thebes had got a taste for power, whipping Athens at Delium. War had brought into her fold Plataea, Thespiae, and half the towns of the Boeotian League; she saw no profit in buying into a Spartan peace. Corinth stood equally apart and aggrieved. The treaty had restored neither Anactorium nor Sollium; she had lost her influence in the northwest, not to mention Corcyra, whose revolt had started the war in the first place. Megara chafed to behold her port of Nisaea garrisoned by Athenian troops, and Elis and Mantinea, democracies, had lost all patience with life beneath the Spartan heel. In the north, Amphipolis and the Thraceward region defied the treaty. I worked for all of them. We all did.
Under the peace, states favored mercenaries over popularly drafted troops. Such lives lost did not haunt the politician; their acts could be disavowed when inconvenient; if they rebelled, you held their pay; and if they were killed, you didn’t pay them at all.
You have observed the mercenary’s life, Jason. Of a year’s campaign there totals what, ten days of actual fighting? Boil it down to moments when one stands within hazard’s jaws and the tally condenses to minutes. All a man need do is survive that and he’s earned another season. Indeed the mercenary holds more in common with the foe, to preserve their lives and livelihoods, than with his own officers, seeking glory. What is glory to the soldier for hire? He prefers survival.
The mercenary never calls himself by that name. If he owns armor and hires out as a heavy infantryman, he is a “shield.” Javelineers are “lances,” archers “bows.” A broker, called a pilophoros after his felt cap, will say, “I need one hundred shields and thirty bows.”
No shield for hire tramps alone. Peril of robbery makes him seek a mate; it’s easier to hire on as a pair or even a tetras. There are sites in each city where soldiers congregate seeking employment. In Argos a taverna named the Anthem, in Astacos a brothel called Knucklebones. In Heracleion are two hiring plazas; one beside the dry spring called Opountis, the other on the rise east of the Shrine of the Amazons, called by the locals Hyssacopolis, Pussy Town.
The countryside holds sites of custom as well. A chain of bivouacs called “coops” runs from Sounium to Pella. “Coop” serves as noun and verb. “I need a dozen shields.” “Try the Asopus, I saw a mob cooping there.” Some sites are little more than dry slopes beside streams; others—one called Tritaeia near Cleonae, another along the Peneus near Elis simply Potamou Campsis, Where the River Bends—are quite commodious, shaded copses with part-time markets, even the rude linen shelters called hourlies, where a soldier packing a woman may obtain an interval of privacy before vacating for the next pair.
Abandoned hunting lodges are favored sites for shields overnighting on the road. One recognizes these haunts from the surrounding slopes, logged down for firewood. An informal but remarkably efficient postal service covered the country then. Soldiers packed letters among their kit, parcels and “sticks” thrust into their fists by wives and lovers or the odd mate encountered on the tramp. Each arrival at a coop would be encircled eagerly while he ran through his packet. If a man heard an absent mate’s name called, he took the letter for him, often packing it half a year before at last completing delivery.
Hiring notices, called show rags, were posted at coops and brothels, even upon landmark shade trees or beside favored springs. Learning of work, an entire coop will tramp off, electing their officers on the march. Mercenary rank is less formal than that of a state army. A captain is called by the number of men he brings. He is an “eight” or a “sixteen.” Officers ar
e “grade-men” or “pennants,” after the service sashes they mount upon their spearpoints, as guidons in assembly and dressing the line. A good officer never lacks for men eager to serve under him, nor a good man for commanders keen to sign him on. You find a crew you can count on and stick with them.
One sees the same faces in the profession. They all make the rounds. I ran into Telamon twice, on a ferry out of Patrae and at a coop on the Alpheus, before signing on with him the first fight at Trachis. Few use their real names. Nicknames and war names abound. Macedonians, “macks,” make up the main of the soldiery, hazel-eyed and orange-haired. I never served with a unit that didn’t have a Big Red, a Little Red, and a gang in between.
No man unblooded or unvouched for is taken on for pay. He must serve free, and none shares food or fire till he has held his ground in a fight. Later on the rallying square, the grade-man approaches. “When did you last draw wages?” “Never yet, sir.” The officer takes his name and slips him a coin or two. “Start tomorrow.” That’s it. He’s in.
Discipline, too, is less ceremonious among the breed for hire. At Heraclea in Trachis, the first scrape under Telamon, one of our number deserted in the assault. Astonishingly this rogue was waiting in camp when we returned, wearing a shit-eater and crossing toward Telamon, spooling an alibi. Without breaking stride our captain ran him through with his nine-footer, with such force that the iron shot forth, two hands’ worth, from between the man’s shoulder blades. In the instant the fellow lingered, impaled upon Telamon’s shaft, our chief aired his edge and hacked him off at the neck. Still without a word he stripped corpse and kit, casting its contents to the whores and sutlers’ boys, leaving nothing but a naked and dishonored carcass. I chanced to be standing next to an Athenian shield we called Rabbit. He turned to me deadpan: “Point taken.”
The rhythm of the mercenary’s life is a narcotic, as the passion of the whoremonger or gambler, which careers the shield for hire, if he answers truly to that name, collaterally pursues. Its currents efface all that went before and all that will come after. First, and beyond all, fatigue. The infantryman breathes exhaustion night and day. Even in a gale at sea the soldier, returned from retching over the rail, drops to the planks and corks off with ease, beard buried in the bilges.
Second stands boredom and third hunger. The soldier is foot-weary. He treks, ever upon the march, advancing toward some object which draws near only to be superseded by another, equally bereft of meaning. The earth endures beneath his tread, and he himself stands ready to drop upon it, if not in death, then exhaustion. The soldier never sees the landscape, only the burdened back of the man trudging in column before him.
Fluids dominate the soldier’s life. Water, which he must have or die. Sweat, which drips from his brow and drains in runnels down his rib cage. Wine, which he requires at march’s end and battle’s commencement. Vomit and piss. Semen. He never runs out of that. The penultimate, blood, and beyond that, tears.
The soldier lives on dreams and never tires of reciting them. He yearns for sweetheart and home, yet returns to the front with joy and never narrates his time apart.
Spear and sword, the manuals tell us, are the weapons of the infantryman. This is erroneous. Pick and shovel are his province, hoe and mattock, lever and crowbar; these and the mortarman’s hod, the forester’s ax, and, beyond all, the quarryman’s basket, that ubiquitous artifact the rookie learns to cobble on-site of reeds or faggots. And get her to set aright, my fellow, tumpline upon the brow, bowl across the shoulders with no knot to gouge the flesh, for when she is laden with rubble and stone to the measure of half your weight, you must hump her. Up that ladder, see? To where the forms of timber await to receive the fill that will become the wall that will encircle the city, whose battlements we will scale and tear down and set up all over again.
The soldier is a farmer. He knows how to shape the earth. He is a carpenter; he erects ramparts and palisades. A miner, he digs trenches and tunnels; a mason, he chisels a road from a sheer face of stone. The soldier is a physician who performs surgery without anesthetic, a priest who inters the dead without psalm. He is a philosopher who plumbs the mysteries of existence, a linguist who pronounces “pussy” in a dozen tongues. He is an architect and a demolition man, a fire brigadier and an incendiary. He is a beast who dwells in the dirt, a worm, owning a mouth and an anus and aught but appetite in between.
The soldier looks upon horrors and affects to stand indifferent to them. He steps, oblivious, over corpses in the road and flops to wolf his gruel upon stones painted black with blood. He imbibes tales that would bleach the mane of Hades and tops them with his own, laughing, then turns about and donates his last obol to a displaced dame or urchin he will never see again except cursing him from a wall or rooftop, hurling down tiles and stones to cleave his skull.
Half a dozen times with the macks of our coop we trekked through the pass at Thermopylae. Tourists, we trooped the Wall and dug for Persian bronzeheads on the hillock where the Three Hundred made their immortal stand. What would they think, these knights of yore, to behold war as we fought it? Not Hellene against barbarian in defense of sacred soil, but Greek against Greek out of partisanship and zealotry. Not army to army, man to man, but party against party, father against son, and bring the kids and Mom to sling a stone or slice a throat. What would these heroes of old think of civil conflagration in the streets of Corcyra, when the democrats surrounded four hundred aristoi within the temple of Hera, lured them forth with sacred oaths, then slaughtered them before their infants’ eyes? Or the massacre of six hundred in the same city, when the demos, the people, walled their foes within a hostelry, tore off the roof, and rained death with brick and stone, that the immured wretches in despair slew themselves by driving into their throats the very arrows they were being shot down with and hanged themselves with the straps of the bedstands? What would they make of the fate later on of Melos or Scione, when the order came from Athens to slaughter all males and sell the women and children for slaves? How would they countenance their own countrymen’s massacre of the men of Hysiae, or their conduct in the siege of Plataea, when the sons of Leonidas put to their captives one query only—“What service have you performed for Sparta?”—then butchered them to the last man?
I had a woman in those years, of Samothrace originally, though when she was drunk she claimed to be from Troezen. Her name was Eunice, Fair Victory. She had been the camp wife of my mate, a captain-of-eight named Automedon who died, not of wounds, but a tooth of all things, infected. Eunice came into my bed that same night. “You should not be with whores.” Quick as that she became my woman.
In what ways was she different from my bride Phoebe? Do you care, Jason? I’ll tell you anyway.
As my dear bride was a blossom grown within the cloistered court, this dame Eunice was a shoot sprung upon the storm. This flower grew wild. She was the kind of woman you could leave with a comrade and she wouldn’t fuck him behind your back. You’d return and they’d be laughing together, she cooking him something, and when he took his leave, he’d tug you aside. “If you catch iron, I’ll look out for her.” The supreme compliment.
Eunice was wise. When she ploughed you, her ankles set alongside your ears and her fingers clamped you hard at the ribs. You felt her greed for you and your seed, and even though you knew she’d move on to the next man with as little ceremony as she’d crossed to you, you couldn’t complain. There was an integrity to it.
We were in Thrace one year under contract to Athens, raiding villages to support the fleet. The enterprise was preposterous; forty men would trek three days into the hills and come back with a single starving sheep. The wild tribes defended their flocks on horseback, with painted faces and magic symbols plastered on the flanks of their runt ponies. It was like warfare from an era antecedent to bronze, a thousand generations before Troy. To stumble back alive to camp, without even a fly for shelter, and roll atop one’s woman on the steppe…this was not all bad.
The soldier??
?s life is primordial; surrendered to it, he reverts to a state not just preliterate but prehistoric. That is its appeal.
I had slain my sister Meri.
My edge had opened her throat.
What remained for me but to wander, as far as war could bear me, to tramp upon the earth and bleed on it and dare it to enfold me beneath its mantle? Of course it didn’t. Why? Had I become so without worth that I would live forever?
In the second summer of the Peace our coop learned of work at good wages, rebuilding the walls of Argos and fortifying her port of Nauplia. This was Alcibiades’ doing; he had double-crossed his Spartan friend Endius, leading a legation to Athens seeking to prevent this Argive alliance, making him out a fraud and liar before the people who, in rage, sealed the pact not alone with Argos but Elis and Mantinea as well. Alcibiades was at Argos now, with four hundred carpenters and masons brought from Athens. Here was the fruit of Euryptolemus’ design that his cousin work his ambition abroad. By the force of his person and persuasion, in open assembly and private discourse with the leading men, Alcibiades had brought over to Athens the three great democracies of the Peloponnese, two of whom had been allies of Sparta.
Our coop gaped at the scale of construction. From the citadel of the Larissa, as far as vision could carry, the city circuit stood compassed by scaffolding and construction inclines, derricks and roller sledges, road cutters, timber mills, factors’ tents and teamsters’ trains, with overall such a multitude at labor that men shy of hods bore mortar on their bare backs, cupping it between their arms with fingers interlocked behind them. I located Euryptolemus, seeking a berth at wages for our coop. He clapped my shoulder, welcoming, and declared he could put us to far better use.