‘The men of Athens and Plataea ran from Marathon to Athens at night after fighting all day,’ I shouted.
Legends often start in small ways. And no one remembers, later, the moments of failure.
My hypaspitoi straggled into camp, and almost a third of my men – mostly, but not all, Agrianians – were among the last men into camp. I had to get my grooms together and use them as military police to collect up the slowest men. Forty men had to be dismissed – home to Agriania or back to the pezhetaeroi.
But none of my friends – or enemies – in the Hetaeroi really noticed that. What Hephaestion knew was that the hypaspitoi had caught up with the cavalry and he claimed we’d hooted at the horsemen and demanded to be allowed to run past. Horseshit. All I wanted to do was lie down and die, at that point. But that’s how a good legend starts.
I wanted to go and eat with my Hetaeroi, but I knew that wouldn’t work, so instead I put myself in a mess with Alectus and Philip Longsword, and we cooked our own food. Well – to be fair, all the phylarchs had slaves or servants, and we didn’t do a lot of cooking. But the work got done, and I do have some vague recollection of helping to collect firewood with two exhausted Macedonian peasants who were scared spitless to find their commander breaking downed branches with them. I had to teach the useless fucks how to break branches in the crotch of a living tree with a natural fork close to the ground. Apparently only lazy men know how to do this.
The next morning, I ordered the armour and aspides packed, and ordered the men to march in their chitons. And I collected the file closers . . .
You have never served in a phalanx. So let’s digress. A Macedonian phalanx is raised from a territory. In their prime, we had between six and nine taxeis, and each was raised in one of the provinces – three for the lower kingdoms, three for the upper kingdoms and three for the outer provinces, or close enough. Every taxeis had a parchment strength of two thousand, but in fact they usually numbered between eleven hundred and seventeen hundred sarissas. Every man was armed the same way – a long sarissa, a short sword or knife, a helmet. The front ranks were supposed to be well armoured, and sometimes they were – never in new levies, always in old veteran corps.
Veterans were supposed to rotate home after a set number of years or campaigns, and new drafts were supposed to come out to the army every spring when the taxeis reformed. All the phalangites – the men of the phalanx – were supposed to go home every autumn. Only the royal companions – the Hetaeroi – and the hypaspitoi stayed in service all year round.
Each taxeis was composed of files – eight men under Philip, and ten men under Alexander. At times we’d be as deep as sixteen or twenty, but that was generally for a specific purpose. Let’s stay with files of ten. A taxeis of two thousand men formed ten deep has two hundred files. Every file, at the normal order, has six feet of space in the battle line – six feet wide and as deep as required. That means that the frontage of a taxeis at normal order is twelve hundred feet. A little more than a stade.
But of course we almost never fight in ‘normal’ order, but contract to the synaspis, the shield-touching shield formation with ten pikes stacked over the front rank’s locked round shields. So that’s about three feet per man, two hundred files, six hundred feet width, or about half a stade. Still with me?
Every file has three officers – the file leader, who runs the group and leads it – literally – in combat and on the march. The file closer – the ‘last’ man; he’s the second-in-command, because if the phalanx faces to the rear he’s the front-rank man, and because he alone can prevent men from deserting or running away. And the mid- ranker. In many manoeuvres – especially Macedonian manoeuvres – men march by half-files, and suddenly the half- file leader is the leader of a short file. The half-file leader is the third-in-command. Finally, the most promising new man is the half-file closer – the fifth man back, who, if the file is split in two, will be the ‘last’ man in a file only five deep. See? It was never a real rank, but to be put in the fifth position was to be seen as the next to be promoted in the file.
But the hypaspitoi were more complicated. We were a little over a thousand men and only eight deep. Our eight-man files were clumsy, because no one had worked together. And the file isn’t just a tactical unit – a file of infantry builds shelters together, cooks together, eats together, goes to find whores together, kills innocent civilians together, steals cattle together, digs latrines together, uses them together, swims together. You get the picture.
My files had no cohesion. We’d forced a bunch of men together, and they were supposed to be elite, but mostly they were angry and unfed, because dysfunctional files meant no firewood, no shelter and no food.
Their other problem is that Alexander’s mixture of magnanimity and paranoia had resulted in his releasing
I see your question, young man – how could all these picked men not know how to function as soldiers? Why weren’t those woodsy mountaineers clever enough to get firewood and cook?
I’m sure that alone in the mountains, they’d have had their shelters rigged in no time. But when you march with ten thousand soldiers and as many slaves and grooms – twenty thousand men and some prostitutes and hangers-on – foraging is a skill. Getting firewood is a skill. Cooking – quickly and well, with minimal wood use and very few pots or utensils – is a skill. Men going into the mountains take a pot – wealthy men have a copper or bronze pot. Soldiers need time and expertise to collect such things – they need to pool money and resources to get a slave, to buy a pot for that slave to carry, to find, buy or steal food to put into that pot . . .
We hadn’t given my boys time to do any of that. There were twenty messes without a cauldron of any kind. I know – I walked around and looked.
But I saw something that suggested that there was hope. I saw one file cook and then hand its cauldron over to another file. They ate late, but they ate.
The army was fed by markets – our own army agora. When we were on home ground, scouts – the Prodromoi – would ride out and warn the farmers for stades around the projected evening camp, and they would bring their wares to the camp before the soldiers even arrived. They’d be set up when the soldiers marched in, and one or two men from every mess would go to the market and buy food – a little meat, some grain for bread, some oil, a little wine.
A lucky or skilful mess had a slave or two. That would ease the process greatly, because the slave didn’t have to be with the column. In friendly country, a really good slave – a trusted slave – would go out on his own, buy food in the countryside (where the prices were lower) and maybe even have the fire going when the men marched in. A slave who has reason to believe that expert service will bring freedom – which is a Thracian concept of slavery and something Macedonians practise well – will do all this every day for a year or two. But in the end, the file has to free him, of course, and then they need to pool their cash and buy another.
Or just take one in battle.
And let’s just add to this. A victorious Macedonian army accreted slaves – bed-warmers, foragers, cooks, baggage-humpers. And the duty of the footslogger gets easier and easier. He’s got a slave to carry his gear, a donkey, two cook pots per mess to make the food more interesting, more cash to buy better food, wine every night and a girl. Or a boy. Or both.
One defeat, and all that is gone. If you lose a fight with the Thracians, they take your camp and all your slaves, all your baggage animals, all your bed-warmers. Gone. And you are back to humping your own gear.
That’s the life of an infantryman. I’ve embarked on this long discourse so that you understand that, despite their status as ‘household’ troops, my hypaspitoi were pretty much at the bottom of the barrel as we marched out of Pella. We had very few slaves, insufficient cook gear, no tents, no baggage animals at all.
So when my men marched in their chitons, they still had to hump all their gear on their own shoulders, and that was painful. I was not happy to carry my own kit, and my decision to do it allowed Polystratus a long laugh at my expense.
‘I dreamed of this, when I was your slave,’ he said.
I grunted.
Day two was worse than day one. Luckily, I really don’t remember any of it.
But towards afternoon, I took my new palfrey – a nice little Thracian mare with no good blood but lots of heart – and rode up the column, saluted the king and then went north with the Prodromoi. We were in my land, and we’d be camping on my farms. I rode into Ichnai with Polystratus, embraced Heron and sent out my orders.
When the hypaspitoi marched into camp – and they weren’t any better off than they had been the day before – they found their fires already lit and their food in bronze cauldrons by their lit fires, ready to cook. Every mess had
