It was at this point, when all was lost, the machines burned and Memnon’s masterstroke was unveiled, that I arrived on the scene – in armour, thanks to Polystratus’s and Thais’s efforts. My shoulder was stiff and painful and I ached all over, but the sound of disaster is unmistakable. I ran for the fighting, with my grooms and a dozen friends at my back.
I found Alexander in the gloom. He was waiting for the hypaspitoi to form up. He was watching the fighting – listening, perhaps.
Alectus was forming men as fast as they piled out of their tents, and I put my grooms and any man I could lay hands on in the ranks with them and ran to Alexander’s side.
‘Good morning, Ptolemy,’ he said.
‘How bad is it?’ I asked.
‘Oh – terrible. But not insurmountable. Memnon has made a mistake. Very unlike him, but a good lesson to all of us.’ Alexander turned to me, and he was smiling. ‘Memnon is really very, very good. When this campaign started, he was a better general than I, but by the time we’re done, I’ll have learned what he has to teach. He does everything by misdirection. Brilliant. We Macedonians too often bludgeon. Memnon always cuts with the fine knife.’ He nodded.
I could hear the pezhetaeroi dying.
‘Memnon’s made a mistake?’ I asked.
‘He has. His raid burned our engines and his masterstroke killed our counter-attack to rescue them.’ Alexander was, as always once the fighting started, calm and detached. ‘Had he broken contact at that point, and got his force back behind the walls, we’d have lost here. And not just here. Memnon’s strategy is brilliant – to wear me out here and then take his fleet and go to Greece.’ Alexander watched the fires of the siege engines burning, his dreams of conquest going up in pitch-soaked flames and the fires reflected in his eyes and the gold of his helmet. Behind us, Alectus was roaring at stragglers.
Alexander pointed with his chin towards Parmenio’s tent on the left of the army. ‘What he cannot understand is that we are fighting for Greece, right here. If Memnon leaves us defeated here – we’re done. Most of you cannot imagine how vast the Great King’s empire is. Nor how many times we’ll have to defeat it.’
‘Ready, Lord King,’ Alectus reported.
Alexander pointed at the gates. ‘But Memnon elected to commit his troops to his victory, and even now, more and more of his precious Greek hoplites are pressing through the main gates on to a chaotic battlefield where it is as black as pitch. On to the killing ground.’ He raised his voice so that the men behind him could hear. Next to us, a battalion of old men was forming. They weren’t even all from the same taxeis – it was a formation of veterans. Philip’s veterans. Hundreds of them.
Alexander pitched his voice appropriately, as he was always able to do. ‘They have burned our engines, but they have now sent so many of the garrison outside the walls that we have it in our power to win the city on the battlefield. The pezhetaeroi have fought like young lions – have not broken. Now – you veterans of Philip – go and show them what you learned from Phokion and Charmides and on a hundred other battlefields. We are not in Asia to survive. We are in Asia to conquer.’
The veterans let out a growl like a cheer and went forward, led – in person – by Parmenio. It was odd, and more than a little ironic. The very best thing he could have done for his own plans would have been to stay in his tent. But he was not that man. He was Parmenio – the best general in Macedon – and he led his veterans to save the day because that’s what he did. Most men – and women – can plot and scheme evil, but when it comes to the day and the moment, they will be staunch to what they believe in. Thus Parmenio, in that hour, could not leave his men to die to serve his policy of humiliating the king.
He roared the king’s name, and his phalanx answered, and they went forward into the firelit darkness.
We went farther north, skirting the fire. Alexander was sure there’d be another sortie out of the gate facing the new works, and he led the hypaspitoi there. I had Kineas the Athenian on one side of me and Hephaestion on my other side, and we went into the ditch that surrounded the city and caught the Persian levies that Memnon had been using as a labour force, now given weapons and released to cause havoc. We caught them leaving the gate and we slaughtered them.
I take no joy in slaughter. I like a good fight, now and then – I like to win and I hate to lose, but I like the fight to be . . . interesting.
This was a butchery of peasants, and it went on too long.
And then we pressed forward into the dark, with Alexander’s golden lion helmet burning like a beacon in the light cast by the flames from the walls and the burning machines. He glowed with power, and we ran through the night, falling over logs and stones, cursing the darkness.
The fight at the main gate was locked in stalemate. The old men – Philip’s men – had saved the phalanx and steadied it, but they could not beat the hoplites, who, man for man, were as good or better. And darkness aids no man. Darkness robs the best swordsman of his skill and the rawest recruit of his wits. Dawn was coming up, somewhere far to the east – Athens was probably already lit by sun, and Pella was at least burning pink, but under the walls of Halicarnassus, it was still as black as new-poured pitch, lit only by fires.
We slammed into the Greeks. We didn’t really catch them by surprise – the Athenian captains had turned to face us – Ephialtes himself, I heard later, one of their best.
But our arrival had an effect nonetheless. The Persian levies were dead or broken, and their survivors were glutting the gates in terror, and now we threw in our last reserve – and Memnon, who also had an elite reserve, couldn’t get men through the gates blocked by his useless peasants.
Don’t think the irony was lost on any of us, lad. We were saved – Macedon was saved from defeat by Athens under the walls of a city in Asia by the cowardice of Persian levies.
The fighting was desperate. All fighting is, but this was made nightmarish by the darkness. Inside my helmet, I could see
But unlike most men, Kineas and I were in full armour. I had greaves and a heavy breastplate, a full helmet, an aspis and a heavy spear, and Kineas was armed the same way, and details – long ‘feathers’ covering our upper arms, a full yoke covering the back of my neck in bronze – were lifesavers, because none of us could see a blow coming. I don’t know how many times I was hit, but I know that the next day I threw my beautiful helmet into the sea – too dented and cut up to be saved. Only the thickness of my cap and my hair saved me from death – there were shearing blows that penetrated the thick bronze.
I don’t remember a single fight. There’s nothing to remember – no vision to cling to – just the relentless weight of the men behind me and the ringing blows on my shield and all too often on my helmet. I took a bad blow – something, probably a spear shaft, hit my spear hand and suddenly I had no weapon and was almost weeping from the pain.
Pyrrhus and Kineas covered me while the tears flowed out of my eyes unbidden and I flailed about on the bloody ground for a weapon. My sword was gone, my spear was gone, and by the time my hand closed on the shaft of a spear I was disoriented. But I got my feet under me and found myself under Pyrrhus’s shield, safe – I got a breath in me and got my spear and shield up, and I was alive.
That heartbeat of complete disorientation on the dark battlefield with death all around – it still visits my dreams, like falling from a great height. That’s terror.
And then the Greeks began to back away.
In fact, I suspect they’d been backing away for some time, and I was just too busy to notice. But now I was moving forward at a brisk pace – by the standards of infantry combat – tripping over bodies and without someone’s spear trying to poke out my eyes.
Memnon ordered the main gates closed while more than two hundred of his hoplites were still trapped in the darkness. It was the correct decision, but it doomed them to death, and they knew it, and the whole combat developed a ferocity that I have seldom seen equalled. It is not for nothing that strategoi speak of the ‘Golden Bridge’ – the easy path of retreat we offer to a defeated enemy in most circumstances. Trapped men with nothing to lose are ferocious.
Those Greeks were monsters, and many of us died.
Of course, they
