be a good lesson for the pezhetaeroi. Tell them to open ranks to let the wagons through – if they are too packed together, tell them to lie flat with their shields over them and let the wagons run over them.’ He shrugged. ‘Once they drop the wagons on us, it’s just an infantry fight.’
He turned to Philip Longsword. ‘Straight up the right-side ridge until you are well above the pass – then down into their flank.’ He turned to Cleitus. ‘Take the mercenary archers and march to the left of the hypaspitoi – get into the rocks – those white rocks there – and start shooting. You’ll have them at open shields. Then it’ll all be over but the marching.’
It wasn’t a complex plan. It was, in fact, an obvious plan.
The thing is, most armies couldn’t have done it. It required that the hypaspitoi climb a mountain in full armour, with spears, and then traverse a long ridge and then come down in the enemy rear, while archers climbed the same ridge, took cover and lofted arrows two hundred paces into the Thracians. While the rest of us went right up the path into the carts and didn’t just die.
But we knew each other. Alexander dismounted a hundred Hetaeroi, and I led them as the right anchor of the phalanx, which was going straight up the throat of the pass. When we assembled in the first light of dawn, the hypaspitoi were already gone, the last files of archers were just leaving camp and the Thracians were awake, alert and lining their rampart of wagons.
Alexander walked down the line of the front rank. We were only a thousand paces from the top of the pass.
He stopped and shook my hand. Then embraced me.
He went along the front rank and he hugged, embraced, shook hands – a hundred times or more.
While the Thracians jeered, and the hypaspitoi climbed.
And then, when he was satisfied that the army loved him, he waved and ran off to the right. He was going with the hypaspitoi. In person, this time. Not like on Mount Ossa.
I buckled my chinstrap and led my friends up the pass.
The thing about plans is that they are rarely like the eventuality. The idea that we could drop files and half- files to the rear – as a phalanx always did when faced with, say, a small stand of trees in the middle of a plain – was excellent. But the fact was that when the Thracians started rolling the carts on us, they came at us like a ball flung by a child – all angles, no predictable path.
I’d say we were at three hundred paces when they released the carts.
As I said, my Hetaeroi were on the right of the line. We were crammed into the last ‘open’ ground in the pass, and our end files were virtually crushed against the low cliff that gradually sloped in from our right, narrowing the pass and packing us tighter and tighter.
At five hundred paces, I had six files – almost half my strength – doubled in behind the left files to make space, and there was no place for us to climb above the pass, or I’d have gone.
My point is, we weren’t eight deep, we were sixteen deep, and all along the front, phylarchs and taxitoi doubled files to cut their frontage and keep room to manoeuvre.
And then the carts came.
There was no way we could drop files back, because the carts had no predictable path. They bounced, slammed into each other, stopped, exploded against rocks – or hurtled at us like fists from Olympus.
It was a brilliant stratagem.
I’d say we had five carts on our frontage. The fact that the pass was ‘v’-shaped – an inverted ‘v’ like a lambda – with the point at the top of the pass, the narrowest part, and the floor of the pass vaguely rounded out by a small watercourse, meant that all the carts tended to run towards the centre.
Of the five rolled at us, two collided and stopped on the slope above us, and two deviated off towards the pezhetaeroi and vanished.
And one came right at us.
‘Lie down!’ I roared. It seemed like an insane thing to do, with a ton of cart roaring and bouncing down at us, but Aristotle and Alexander agreed that the wheels should pass over us so fast we’d be uninjured. I got down and put my aspis, sloped slightly, over my head and upper back.
The front right wheel hit my aspis and went over it, then right over my butt and missed my right leg. The rear wheel kicked my aspis hard enough to slam it into my head – my helmeted head – and then ran off down the slope and over the file behind me.
I got to my feet.
Aristotle, damn him, was completely correct. Behind me, Nearchus got to his feet, and then Cleomenes and then Pyrrhus.
The cart that hit us stopped in the seventh file, because the shields slowed it so much. Two files had to roll it off young Calchus. But he sprang to his feet.
In the whole army, men were getting to their feet.
Which was good, because the Thracians were charging.
‘Close up!’ I roared.
I wanted my men at the closest order – the synapsis, where the shields overlapped. I might as well mention that all the Hetaeroi in the assault had aspides, albeit the smaller, rimless type Iphakrates invented.
The way to achieve that close order was to move the half-files forward into the gaps between files. But what I wanted to do was to get the full files – my right files, my very best men – to move forward through the left files – remember, the right files were all pushed to the rear by the narrowing of the pass. Right?
I could see Cleitus. He could see me. And this is where the trust part – and knowing each other like brothers – came into it.
I caught his eye and yelled, ‘Files forward! Synapsis!’ Took a breath. ‘Not half-files – the rear files! Now!’
Cleitus had it from the first syllable. He was bellowing at his phylarchs, and my front phylarchs were pushing to the right and left to make room, and the Thracians were one hundred and fifty paces away and coming down the slope at a dead run.
Changing formation in the face of the enemy is the very worst thing you can do. It requires rock-solid confidence and enormous quantities of practice. Great officers and file leaders. And no errors, because at this point, two men tripping over each other could spell doom.
But we were Macedonians.
The Thracians were about thirty paces away when the rear files locked their shields to the front-file phylarchs.
I was on the left, by choice – I wanted to be in contact with the centre. So my full-sized aspis – call me old- fashioned – locked up with Laodon, who was commanding his pezhetaeroi from the right file, which was more the norm.
‘Spears – DOWN!’ I ordered, and Laodon roared the same words, almost at the same moment, and our front ranks put their spears at the ready and the rear ranks pushed forward, locking up so that every man had his shield pushed into the back of the man ahead of him, his spear either point forward, overhand, ready to kill, or, in the rear ranks, erect, the point at the sky, safe until needed. The pezhetaeroi had sarissas, eighteen feet long, but we Hetaeroi had our cavalry spears, just eleven feet long.
No matter.
The Thracians hit us.
Ares, they were brave.
The front men, those who had run the fastest to reach us, were the bravest of the brave, men who sought to make a reputation for ferocity
A man leaped in front of me.
My spear took him in the air and slammed him to earth, and then it was a blur of bodies and edges and threats and parries. The sun was just rising, and cast a red light over everything, and the noise was everywhere, the full-throated roar of the brazen lungs of Areas, and men died, fell wounded, collapsed to earth all around me.
