God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Parmenio! Is there one voice here shouting for you?’ He reared his horse, and my men roared his name, and the other phalanges took up the cry, so that I couldn’t hear what he said next, but Parmenio did, and his face grew red.

Alexander laughed. Then he turned his horse and rode over to me. And embraced me – one of perhaps five or six times I can remember when he embraced me.

‘I wish . . .’ he said. His hand slapped the back of my thorax. The soldiers roared his name.

That was the measure of the morning. Alexander needed a hug from a friend.

I never learned what he wished. But I count it as the second-to-last time I saw the man I loved.

He rode off to the left and we heard the volleys of cheers follow him, and then he rode back. His trumpeter sounded ‘All Officers’, and we rode out to him. He was in command of himself, and us, but by the time the sun was high in the sky, it was the war god who was among us, and not Alexander. Alexander was gone.

He didn’t even trouble to look around, or smile. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and he pointed at the Persians, ‘I intend to march directly to the fight – to form our front from a column, rather than forming it here and allowing gaps to develop. We will advance from the right on full frontages – I expect this to be done with no fuss. I’m leaving the Thracian Psiloi to cover the camp and I’m sending the Paeonians to screen us and raise some dust – Ariston, see to it that you do not use up your horses, and that you come back to the line.’

He looked around. ‘We will advance directly to contact. Unless something has changed, Darius will feel rushed by the speed of our advance and will attempt to encircle our flanks. We want him to encircle our flanks. I’m leaving Cleitus with the rear phalanx. He will reinforce our line and cover our rear – if necessary, he will face his phalanx to the rear and we will make a box, like Xenophon’s men in their retreat, except that we will attack – we will attack relentlessly. Whatever you do, if your men are advancing into the Persians and killing them, you are doing my will. We, not they, have the moral advantage. We have beaten them like a drum – they have never beaten us. We have a phalanx of bronze and they do not. Behind our phalanx is another! The phalanx will win the battle by pushing forward without pause.’ He looked around. ‘Do you understand?’

We did. It was, after all, something that we’d looked at a hundred times. And it would be executed using drills that the rawest new pezhetaeros had performed every day he had been in the ranks.

Aristander, dressed from head to foot in shining white wool and crowned in gold like the Great King himself, rode to the front of the army in Alexander’s chariot and offered sacrifice. The Persians were grilling in the sun, standing in their ranks, their army about two-thirds formed. Our men sat to watch the sacrifices, and grounded their spears.

Aristander was a greasy hypocrite, but he managed the sacrifices with sure-handed expertise. And that’s not nothing – try killing an animal with a knife while forty thousand pairs of eyes watch you. He didn’t flinch that morning, and he killed two rams and a bull – a great black bull. He held the bull’s heart above his head, and the blood ran down his arm, and the symbolism was obvious.

As one, forty thousand men rose to their feet and screamed their approval.

And then we marched.

It was daring, to manoeuvre in a column of regiments in the face of the enemy. Even more daring, Alexander made the first of several changes to his battle plan before the army had marched off from camp. He rode past me to Parmenio and told him something, and Parmenio immediately marched off in a parallel column led off by Craterus. And then Alexander rode to Cleitus, with the mercenaries, and he began to form a third column.

Columns are deceptive. The problem is that, like a xiphos, their deception is double-edged, because they can deceive their own strategos as effectively as they deceive the enemy.

The enemy really only sees the head of the column. Part of this is the problem of battlefield visibility. With cavalry raising dust, on a flat plain with no ridges or handy hills, the enemy strategos has a hard time seeing past the front five or six ranks. And unless he’s a magical combination of oracular wizard and mathematician, he cannot imagine how much space your column will eat when it turns into a line.

There’s the double-edged part. An inexperienced strategos can misjudge the width of his own line, which makes forming his line a disaster, as one end or the other collides with a river, a hill, rocky ground or some other obstacle and the whole line is disordered.

Multiple columns that have to fit together?

I’d never even seen it tried before.

Alexander rode back to me, his leopard skin already covered in dust. ‘You understand?’ he asked.

It’s good to be good at your job. ‘I understand that I’m now the linchpin in linking up with Craterus,’ I said. ‘We’ll form front by advancing obliquely?’

He gave me a curt nod – in terms of his present plan, what I asked must have seemed obvious and even impertinent.

‘I built a cairn on the plain to mark the point to which I should march,’ I said.

He turned and looked at me. Nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Well thought of. Leave the column the moment you see it and march on it, and the rest of the wing will conform to you.’

I mention this, because details such as this decide battles as surely as the sword arms of heroes.

We had twelve stades to march to the cairn, and they flew by. Time – I have heard a hundred philosophers say that time flows the same for all men. I saw Callisthenes, a year later, put a stick in the ground and mark off the quarters of the day, and time – the chariot of the sun – could be seen to pass in an orderly manner, from left to right, every quarter of the day the same length as every other.

That’s all very well, but the morning of the Battle of Gaugamela proved the opposite. Time crept by during the speeches and the sacrifices, and then we began to march, and I thought twelve stades would never pass, and then, five stades out, we could see the entire length of Darius’s line, and the army almost stopped marching. At five stades, the Persians were like a thick rope across the plain, a rope that lived and moved.

Most of us had never seen an elephant before. Darius had a dozen. Scythed chariots sparkled in the front rank of his centre. He had more cavalry over there than we had men in our entire army.

It took our breath away.

No one had ever seen such an army.

And despite the rate that a marching man may seem to accomplish on a normal day, that morning we seemed to hurtle at Darius’s line like a thunderbolt – a small, weak thunderbolt.

I managed to work up a good set of nerves about finding my cairn, and I left the column and rode out in the dust, alone. The Paeonians had already covered the ground and raised enough dust to mask our advance, and it took me some heart-pounding minutes to find the cursed rock pile with its gaudy spear.

Polystratus laughed at me.

I left him to watch the rocks and galloped back to the column. From two stades away, the column was nothing but a thin line of bronze and a haze of steel spear-tips in a dust cloud.

I rode back to my taxeis. ‘At my word, we will incline together to the left!’ I called out. I rode up and down my files until every man had heard me. Awkward sods on the left files began to incline and had to be swatted back into their spots with cries of, ‘Wait for it, you dickless fuck!’

I trotted back to the head of my part of the column. ‘Taxeis of Outer Macedon! To the left! INCLINE!’

I left Leosthenes in charge and rode back to the front until I could see Polystratus. Then I halted. Leosthenes knew his job – he guided the right front phylarch – another Philip – to moderate his incline step until he matched perfectly with my line and Polystratus and the cairn, after which he ordered them to face front and march forward.

Then I galloped. I put my head down and raced for the head of the right flank column. I found Hephaestion – Alexander was gone on another errand.

I pointed well behind him and to his left. ‘See my lads? They are on line.’

Hephaestion nodded. ‘Column! Halt and form front to the left! Look for Ptolemy’s taxeis to dress on!’

My men were marching forward all this time, so that they were already halfway from the rear of the right column to the front, a stade or more to our left. They were easily visible in their magnificent armour.

Hephaestion held out his hand. ‘This is it,’ he said.

I clasped his hand. ‘He’ll do it,’ I said.

Hephaestion nodded.