Now when we get there, not one has them.
Entering a village before the main advance, we plead with the elders for their own sake to scrounge up something, anything, for the army. That or flee. The young men of the villages have already made off with every item of value; they have gone to fight for Spitamenes. Only the old remain. They refuse to abandon their homes. What will happen to them?
“Nothing,” says Stephanos, “that hasn’t happened to them before.”
Afghanistan south of the Oxus is ribbed with rugged, ocher-colored mountains, separated by dusty barren ravine country. Each valley contains scores of forts-old clan strongholds, employed by the natives in tribal wars. Mack engineers take these over. Sites that will serve are reconfigured, garrisons installed. Those that won’t are leveled. Our bunch spends two days with an engineer company in one of the high valleys. Their captain shows us how they do it. I have never given much thought to forts. A good one, we learn, is linked by lines of sight to sister strongholds, so its garrison can go to their assistance and be aided in turn by theirs. The blockhouse’s siting must dominate the area, commanding all approaches. The captain shows us how his men lay out linked bastions, above and behind one another, so that if the foe overruns a lower post, he finds himself vulnerable to bombardment and counterattack from its mates above. The science is quite clever and needs nothing more than a few mules, a mason’s plumb, and a stonejack.
Our columns press north, subduing their sectors. There are no roads in this country; trails snake along dry wadis and channels carved in sandstone by the wind. Upon these trek refugees fleeing south. We pass women in columns, muffled to the eyes, balancing their belongings in bundles atop their heads. Their urchins and hounds trail in the dust; they cart their ancients in barrows or drag them on pole-litters behind emaciated asses. Last year the army would have rounded them up and sold them as slaves. This year we don’t even try. Who will buy them? Packed off five hundred miles, the Afghan returns. He is either stupid or stubborn. Narik ta? What difference does it make?
Cresting a ridge, we rein and look back. Smoke ascends from a score of razed settlements. We’ll try to talk the villagers ahead into saving themselves. They won’t listen, either. Their eyes tell you.
Shinar’s eyes are like the eyes of these villagers. When I held her on the floor in Daria’s kitchen, I saw the same look. You see it in the faces of Afghan matrons when we Macks roust them out at midnight, to bind their sons and drag them into the dark-a look of rage but mostly of resignation, of submission to that unknowable power that we call Necessity and they call God. It is a look more fitting to a beast than to a human being, and more proper to a stone than to either. To feel pity for these brutes is folly, for they loathe us in their bones. To seek to remedy their state is arrogance, for in their hearts they are, if not happy in the sense that we of the West understand, then at least at one with their fate. Who are we to instruct them otherwise?
Flag trots alongside me. “You’re thinking again.”
I laugh.
“About your girl, eh?” He has heard about Shinar’s abortion. Everyone has. “Why don’t you marry her?”
“Yes, we’ll make a fine pair.”
“Get yourself a ‘ticket home,’” Flag says. Meaning a crippling wound. “Pack her back to Macedon.”
We trot across a pan so devoid of all that sustains life that neither we nor our horses permit ourselves the luxury of hunger or thirst.
“I did ask her, you know?” I gesture across the waste. “Promised to take her away from all this. I meant it.”
Flag grins. “I always mean it too.”
“No,” I say. “I’m serious.”
He laughs. “I’m serious too.”
32
The army pushes north in five columns spread across 280 miles. Commanders are Hephaestion, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Coenus and Artabazus jointly, and Alexander himself. Areas in-between are “wolf country,” enemy territory, across which the foe moves with impunity. Brigade commanders dispatch patrols into these deserts. These operations are of three types-probes, penetrations, and reconnaissances-in-force. The first may be comprised of as few as two or three men, the second and third of up to hundreds. All aims are the same-to find and track the enemy, take prisoners, bring back intelligence of any kind that will permit our columns to hedge off and close with the foe.
Before the Big Push, Alexander calls the army together. The force assembles at Bactra City beneath the great fortress of Bal Teghrib, “Stone Mountain,” whose slopes hold a hundred thousand.
“Brothers, are you tired of this war?”
The corps erupts.
“I am!” Alexander cries. “By the rivers of hell, I am!”
Our lord likens Afghanistan to a great dusty floor. He intends to sweep it clean. We start here where we stand, in Bactra City, and drive north, subduing every village and camp, however remote, and reducing every stronghold as we go. Indeed, Alexander acknowledges, we will be bringing into submission the same country we vanquished in last year’s campaign. This time we will make it stick.
“Note this, you officers who will be dictating dispatches and situation reports. There is a phrase I wish never to read: pockets of resistance.”
Again the army roars.
“We shall leave no pockets of resistance. The unsubdued foe-man, woman, or child-shall be driven before us, north toward the Oxus, and beyond across the Jaxartes. Along the way we shall found a mighty string of forts. We will cut off the foe’s lines of retreat. Where he shelters, we will rout him out. We will make all Afghanistan between here and the Wild Lands hostile to him. He shall find no patch of green to graze his stock and no shade to get his men out of the sun. This will be our summer’s work, my friends. And when it is done we will not go into winter quarters. We will pursue the enemy into his sanctuaries. We will hunt him down and kill him. I do not intend to spend another winter in this sphere of hell, do you?”
The corps answers with a tumult of spearshafts clashing on shields.
“Spitamenes! He is the head of the hydra. Slay him and the serpent dies. Every act we take must have this object: Bring the Wolf to battle!”
Alexander underscores one final point: that in this campaign, columns and individual units will of necessity be dispersed across hundreds of miles and thus out of communication with higher command. Junior officers, and even sergeants and corporals must act on their own.
“Act for this then, men, and I shall never fault you: Find the Wolf! Attack him! Drive him toward our allied columns! Brothers, I pledge this night his weight in gold to that man who brings me Spitamenes-the living man or his head!”
Thunder breaks across the plain, as it does in that season. The army’s ovation joins the storm in riotous uproar.
I am sitting between Flag and Stephanos as Alexander finishes.
“Sounds easy, doesn’t it?” observes the poet.
Flag rises, scratching his buttocks. “Nothing to it.”
The columns roll out of Bactra City next morning. The king’s division takes the rightmost track, the ancient camel trace across the spurs of Paraetacae toward Cyropolis. Our column under Coenus parallels his advance, sixty miles west. West of ours comes Ptolemy’s brigade, then Perdiccas’s, and Hephaestion’s. It takes all day for the full force to get clear of the city and another five for each division to reach its assigned axis. The blank spaces between columns are so vast-two days’ ride at some points-that existing reconnaissance elements can’t cover them all. New companies must be formed.
Our section under Stephanos becomes one of these. This is good news. It means bonuses and hazard pay, and it gets us out from under column discipline. It’s also, by far, the most dangerous duty we’ve ever undertaken.
It is no small thing to set out into such country with five men or ten, guided by shikaris who are almost
