God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Alexander nor Parmenio was with the phalanx. And that day, my taxeis was not with the phalanx, either. As Craterus, Amyntas and Perdiccas rolled forward to combat the disorganised Tyrians, the hypaspitoi and all my taxeis boarded the Cypriot ships.

Alexander always improved any plan he was offered.

We went straight for the walls. The virtually undefended walls.

They’d been breached in four places, before our machines stopped firing and we marched away. And the Tyrians had done some repairs, but conditions inside the city after seven months of siege were quite desperate. Very little work was done. Everyone was hungry.

The end might have been anticlimactic, except that our thirst for revenge outweighed any sanity.

Alexander was at the top of the ladder this time, but the enemy machines fired only sporadically, and every Cypriot ship was packed with Macedonians – ninety ships, sprinting for any place they could get a lodgement on the walls.

We had a theatre-seat view of the back of the Tyrian army as it collapsed under the weight of our phalanx and the Hetaeroi. The people on the walls – what must they have felt, in those last hours and minutes, as their marines died – pointlessly – just a few stades away? As they saw the shiploads of Macedonians coming for them.

I hope they felt terror. I hope they despaired, and cursed their gods, and tore their beards and hair. They had killed every prisoner they took. They had defiled our ambassadors and murdered our people, and they, if any, were the original aggressors against Greece. And they had burned me with sand, infected me with shit and killed Isokles and my unborn child.

Alexander leaned down off the top of the ladder, and called to the men inside the tower: ‘No quarter. Kill everyone in the city, save those who take refuge in the Temple of Herakles.’

I was as bloodthirsty as he – despite the fact that I knew that in his mind we were in the depth of the wooden horse, and were about to sack Troy. It occurred to me to ask him if he was now Neoptolemus and not Achilles. If his presence didn’t change the scene.

I doubt that Alexander would even have laughed.

I said when I started to tell the story of Tyre that it needn’t have happened. That there was arrogance and foolishness on both sides.

And there was horror.

We had little to fear – the walls were virtually empty, the mighty machines didn’t, most of them, throw a single rock, and when Alexander sprang out of the tower on to the rubble of the breach, it was almost like walking on to the stage of an empty theatre. The only enemy soldiers were archers – they had been left behind by the marines, and they shot as fast and as accurately as they could.

But they could not hold even the towers, and we swept from wall to wall, using short scaling ladders to get down into the streets beyond or into the low towers on either hand.

Very quickly, the defence collapsed. I had seen some sieges by the time I reached Tyre. I knew the signs. The enemy no longer thought he could resist. Men fled – usually to their own homes, to die in the doorways of their own houses.

And die they did.

I would like to say that I remember nothing of it, but I remember it all too well. I was with beasts – I was a beast. I killed men, and I killed women, and I killed young children. I killed a goat that passed in front of me. I killed anything that was not a soldier of Macedon.

There were few women, because most of them and their children had gone to Carthage at the start of the siege. But those that there were went to the roofs and threw tiles down on us – no laughing matter, when a piece of terracotta the size of your fist hits you on the head.

Our engineers knocked a hole in the land wall of the city facing the mole, and even as we butchered our way through the streets, Diades connected the city to the land, opened the wall and led the victorious phalanx into the devastated city to finish off any rats trapped in their homes.

And at the end, when they knew that there would be no quarter, the population turned and fought like rats facing dogs. Such rats often give the dogs a bad bite or two before they die, and sometimes the bites infect. The simile is apt. The Macedonian army triumphed at Tyre, but the price was high, in blood, in pain, in spirit, and the results took years to play out.

But for Tyre, the price was higher. Because before the sun set, every man, woman and child in the city was dead. Every dog was dead, every donkey, every mule, every cat. We killed everything except the handful of lucky families who took refuge in the Temple of Melkart.

Alexander dragged them out and let them live – as slaves. Then he had the temple purified. And he made his sacrifice there, just eight months later than he had expected.

But what I remember best is walking out of the gap in the walls, climbing down Diades’ breach to the mole, and looking back in the red sunset – the purple-red that men called ‘Tyrian Red’ after the murex dye. A haze of dust and smoke sat like a toad atop the city, and fires burned throughout, and you could smell death everywhere.

But what I will never forget as long as I live is the sight of blood – red blood – leaking out of the foundation stones of the walls, and mixing with the seawater, so that sharks and other sea creatures began to beat themselves against the walls in the last light, as if Poseidon had turned on the town, or as if there was a portent to be read in the angry battering of the fish and the blood.

I stood there, full of rage and hate and the kind of sick guilt that a man can only gain when he sacks a city and behaves like a beast. My hands and arms dripped blood and my feet were sticky with it.

If I had wanted revenge, what I had was my nauseated fill of it.

And that was Tyre.

TWENTY-SIX

Gaza is just six days’ marching from Tyre, and stands on rock about twenty stades from the sea. We marched there four days after the fall of Tyre. Four days. That’s the rest we had, and two days of it were given over to a mass parade of the army and a set of games in honour of Herakles. My phalanx looked terrible at the review – exhausted men slumping, poor armour, threadbare chitons. Only a few of my decarchs – file leaders – had coerced their men into polishing their dented helmets. In fact, only about two-thirds of my remaining men had helmets. The rest had leather Boeotian caps. My only consolation was that the rest of the army – except the Hetaeroi – looked as bad or worse.

The approach to Gaza is sandy and the sea near the city is everywhere shallow. The city of Gaza is large, built upon a lofty mound around which a strong wall has been laid. It is the last city you meet, going from Phoenicia to Egypt. It is situated on the edge of the desert. When we arrived near the city on the first day, we encamped near the spot where the wall seemed to Diades most easy to assault. The engineer ordered his military engines to be constructed – those that we had with us. Most of our best and heaviest gear was still at Tyre, under repair, with Helios sending out still more parties for still more wood. But the Jews came to our aid – they had no love for the Persians, and now that we’d taken Tyre, we had a flood of support from Palestine.

As at Tyre, Alexander and Diades and all his engineers spent two days in careful examination of the city and all of its approaches, while we stripped the countryside like a host of armoured locusts for brushwood, for food and for manpower. Tyre had made us expert in what we needed, and it was all too clear to every footslogger that Gaza, even without the sea, was another tough nut and one for which digging and engineering were required in order to crack it.

The army was tired and surly, and we needed drafts from home to fill the places that disease, malnutrition and overwork had carved in our ranks. Recruits play an essential role in the long-term life of an army. They may be clueless, useless men who can’t start a fire or cook their own food or dig a decent latrine, but they bring a spirit of emulation that veterans lack – or rather, they restore a spirit of emulation and enterprise. The veterans have to work harder to show the recruits what fine men they are. The recruits band together to prove themselves worthy. We hadn’t had any recruits for a year, and I put out the word – and some gold, as a recruiting bonus.

The Persian commander in Gaza was Batis, and he rendered the siege very different from the siege at Tyre.