God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

FIVE

In spring, we marched.

In fact, it was still late winter, and there was snow everywhere, and our farm-boy recruits got to march through it in Iphactrian sandals that made the snow pack in under the soles of the feet – I was wearing them myself.

Camping an army in snow is dreadful. First, because everything is wet. Snow is water held close to the ground, ready to turn back to water the moment you are comfortable. In higher areas, it stays snow for a while and you are merely cold, but in spring – water, waiting to happen.

Second, because everything wet is cold. Even wood has to be warmed and dried before it will ignite.

There’s no casual forage for animals. The grass – old, tough and useless – is under the snow. Animals use energy getting at it.

And the process of freezing and thawing turns roads to mush. In late summer and early autumn, a good dirt road has a surface like builder’s concrete or better, and can shed water from a long rain. But in early spring, there is no surface, and every wheel rut is a potential spiked pit of death for carts or hooves. I was ready, this time – in fact, I was merely Antipater’s aide, and didn’t bear the full weight of the responsibility, although I’d done a great deal of the work. I had spare wheels in every other cart, my carts were the pick of the litter and not the runts and my draught animals would have been chosen as cavalry horses in most armies.

We had two thousand infantry, almost all recruits. We had all the former pages over sixteen years old, three full troops of fifty, each with three chargers and a fully armed groom. Most of us had three or four grooms, although only one was armed and armoured. Polystratus was mine.

We stopped in Thessaly and picked up two hundred young noblemen. We looked at them with some amusement as they flailed around being miserable, camping in the snow – they were as tough as nails, but this was outside their experience. A man can camp in the snow with his pater and a pair of retainers while hunting and still not have a clue how to keep clean and neat and warm in the midst of four thousand men.

At any rate, we crossed the high passes in temperatures that made all of us bond. I was widely envied for my foresight in bringing my own bed-warmer – Nike came. I was an officer – I could get away with it. And her talent for organisation – and her willingness to win Polystratus as an ally – made her perfect for the life. She had food ready when my duty was over – not just for me but for my mess. Don’t imagine she cooked it herself. She simply organised all the servants in our mess like a little military unit and had them rotate all the duties. She got them tents, too. Our little corner of the companions’ camp went up in no time, and had a central street, with our tents on one side and the servants’ tents on the other and the fires in between. Before we were out of the mountain passes, this had become the pattern for all the younger companions, and we all lived better for it, with our fires and our weapons closer to hand. Not all these ideas were Nike’s – some were mine, some Philip’s, some Alexander’s, some Polystratus’s. But we implemented them all on that march, and we had a better, tighter, more defensible camp with happier camp servants and warmer men as a result.

We marched down on to the coast road where Leonidas made his stand at the Gates of Fire, and Alexander stopped and made sacrifice there. Hephaestion made a great show of pouring an enormous and costly libation. The rest of us shared an ox, slaughtered it and feasted over the Spartan dead. Nearchus read the poem by Simonides.

We knew we were the invaders and not the defenders. But our hearts were with those Spartans standing at the wall.

Spring came after we passed the Gates of Fire – or rather, what was late winter in Thessaly was early spring in Greece, with jasmine blooming like yellow fire on the hills. The Thebans were holding some of the passes, and the Athenians the others – over by Delphi – and their mercenary army, ten thousand professional soldiers, held the coast road.

Two nights before we marched into Philip’s camp, he stormed the mercenaries’ positions. It was his first great victory in years – and one of his best. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it in detail from men who were. It was, in some ways, the pinnacle of his achievements – the storming of an impregnable position against superb soldiers, done in bad weather, through a mixture of bribery and audacity. He hit the mercenaries so hard that he drove them off their dry-stone walls in the first charge, and he’d moved a dismounted force of his own companions and a pack of Agrianian javelin men – the fruits of his latest barbarian marriage – across impossible terrain to close the pass behind the mercenaries, so that they could not rally against him, or seize another pass to hold. In fact, he virtually exterminated them.

We arrived within an hour of his return to his base camp from the bloody pursuit. He embraced his son – as the victor in a recent battle, he was all love – and he reviewed us the next morning, pronounced us fit to be royal companions and confirmed all of Antipater and Alexander’s promotions, including mine.

And then we were off like hounds from a leash – all the cavalry under Alexander, racing down the newly captured passes and into the plains of Boeotia, turning the flanks of the whole alliance and leaving them with nowhere to go but back, abandoning Delphi to us and all the mountain states. With no further fighting, we were in behind them.

Chares, the Athenian strategos, had received a great deal of wine-inspired criticism for his campaign, but in fact he did a brilliant job with the tools he had. The Athenians needed only to endure – their fleet was out on the seas, busy wrecking our commerce. And we could endure only so long, while Athens gathered momentum and threatened to do things like take Amphilopolis behind us.

So Chares held his line of mountains, and when he was turned out of them, he had a plan for that, too, and both armies – Thebans and Athenians – retired in good order. My first taste of combat with professional opponents was in late spring – all Boeotia was a garden and a farm, already tawny with grain, and we came cantering down the passes. Our greatest advantage besides sheer training was that every one of us had three remounts, and we could move for days, changing horses as we went. So we did.

The Thebans had little cavalry to speak of, but the Athenian Hippeis were good – not as good as we, but too good to trifle with. They bloodied our noses in our first skirmish – Philotas charged them as if they were Thracians, and they scattered down a Boeotian road, and Philotas pelted after them, and it was a trap – we lost six men.

But after that, we had their measure, and we’d unfold from our road column into a fighting line at the gallop, racing for the flanks the moment the Athenians were spotted, and after that we flushed their roadside ambushes the way a hunter flushes birds from hedgerows.

And so started the most glorious of summers. The sun was warm, Greece was beautiful and kind, the peasants and free farmers mostly welcomed us as liberators because Thebes is hard to love. We marched to the gates of Thebes and drove in their pickets, then turned and went for the passes to Athens – but Chares, as I say, was no fool, and he took ground at Chaeronea like a dozen strategoi before him.

And there our lightning offensive stopped. Chaeronea has been the scene of a dozen battles for a reason. And it is not for nothing we call that area ‘The dance floor of Ares’. It is flat, good going, for stades in every direction. The ground rose towards the Athenian position. They had an excellent view of our camp night and day, without even sending their horse out as scouts. Their backs were to the passes over Parnassus to Athens, and yet they had three roads into the countryside around Thebes, so that we were hard put to watch them all, and in fact, contingent after contingent joined their army without our being able to stop them.

We were in the saddle for days at a time.

I loved it. I had a great deal to learn, and I learned it – I fought skirmishes where I might have gathered information, I ignored heavensent opportunities to grab enemy supplies, or I grabbed supplies that didn’t matter . . .

I got to visit Plataea, and was received as a hero. They hate Thebes, even the shepherds. Probably even the sheep. Philip was already declaring his policy of dismembering the Theban League, and towns that had known independence, such as Plataea, were already ours.

The main army camped opposite the allies at Chaeronea, and Philip made peace offers. He meant them, too. He had the plain of Boeotia and that’s all he needed to negotiate – time was now on no one’s side, and as long as he could absorb the farm produce of the great plain, Thebes was the city that was in the most trouble.

But Thebes had delusions of grandeur, and so did Athens. They were perfect reflections of each other – living in past glories, even past glories where they’d been enemies. Philip told us one night at dinner that they were like