Steven Pressfield: Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War

We were accessories. Would we not be tried as murderers? Would our names be blackened, our families shamed and dishonored?

Would we be returned to Athens in chains to await execution?

At once Alcibiades stepped to the three Macedonians, setting a hand on their shoulders to assure them he harbored no malign intent. Might they inform him, he inquired, of the name and clan of their fallen captain?

“You will prepare the following dispatch,” Alcibiades commanded. He proceeded to dictate the text of a commendation for valor. Each act of heroism which he had himself performed, he now credited to the captain. He recited this officer's valor in the face of overwhelming peril; how he had, disregarding his own safety, put out into the storm, scaled the sheer face of stone to envelop and rout the enemy, preserving by his actions the ships and men of his company below. At the summit of triumph, as his sword slew the foe's commander, cruel fortune overhauled him. He fell. “The fame of this action,” Alcibiades concluded, “shall endure, imperishable.”

This dispatch would be sent, Alcibiades declared further, to the captain's father and presented personally by himself to Paches and the generals of Macedonia upon our squadron's return. He turned then to us youths, including Lion and myself, looking on.

“Which of you, brothers, will set his hand beneath mine on this citation?”

Need I recount, none failed to assent.

As to our unofficial company of infantry, it succeeded, reunited with the brigade under Paches, in its mission over a month and more of fighting, during which Alcibiades at nineteen, though by no means officially in command, was in fact deferred to by all superiors and sanctioned such latitude of action and initiative as to render him effectively its captain. When this unit at last reached Potidaea, our original destination, and joined the line troops engaged in the siege, it was disbanded as nonchalantly as it had been formed, and Alcibiades, undecorated but unindicted, was repatriated to his regiment.

It was my brother's observation regarding this incident that, though he, and I as well, served in subsequent seasons beside a number of the young men present at the precipice in that hour and had ample opportunity of converse, formal and informal, on this or any subject, never did one offer mention of this instance or confirm by word or allusion the actuality of its occurrence.

At the siege of Potidaea two young men established themselves as indispensable: Alcibiades and my brother. By his bearing both in action and in counsel it had become patent that the former was preeminent of hero's fire, without rival among the host.

Within all the corps he was acknowledged the most brilliant and audacious, possessed of the most abundant genius of war. At Athens his fields of enterprise had been limited by youth to sport and seduction. Campaign overturned this, granting him a sphere commensurate to his gifts. Overnight he came into his own. It was deemed by no few that he, though not yet twenty, could have been elevated to supreme command and not only prosecuted the siege with greater vigor and sagacity but brought it to a successful conclusion with far less loss of life.

As to my brother, he had made his name among the hard heads and raw knots of the corps. Experience teaches that however numerous the brigade or army, the work of war is performed by small units, and each must possess to be effective one man like Lion who is unacquainted with fear, who arises cheerful each morning despite all hardship, ready to shoulder another's load with a laugh and turn his hand to all tasks, however mean or humble. A unit lacking a man like Lion will never endure, while one with such a mate may be beaten but never broken.

Our father's letters caught up to us at Potidaea. We were summoned, Lion and I, to the tent of Paches' adjutant, a captain of Aexone whose name I cannot recall. The officer read aloud two pleas of our father, confirming my brother's age at sixteen years three months and pleading for his immediate discharge, with a pledge to pay all fines and fees of transport. “What have you to say, young man?” our captain demanded.

Lion straightened to his full height, such as it was, and swore by the waters of Styx that his years were not only twenty but twenty-three. Our father, he testified, though well-meaning, had come unhinged following the devastation of our district and now feared, understandably, the loss of his sons; thus this appeal from Athens, presented with such touching and plausible conviction.

When the captain summoned witnesses from our home district who testified to the truth of the letter, Lion refused to buckle. It was not age that made a soldier, but passion and heart! Our commander cut him short. I have never seen one so inconsolable as Lion; the sight was almost comical of him slouching aboard the galley home.

Payout for my brother's misdemeanor fell upon me, as it should, his elder. I was fined three months' pay and banished from line duty, assigned command of a platoon of boys, foresters. We were issued not arms but axes and packed off with the mules and logging sledges.

You were at Potidaea, Jason. I remember you. You came in with Eurymedon in the terminal spring, the squadrons bearing the relief parties of the cavalry and the replacements for the assault troops carried off by the plague. You were lucky. You missed the winter.

Winter in our fathers' time was the off-season. Who even dreamt of fighting in the snow and ice? Summer was the time of war; in Sparta men didn't even have a word for summer; they called it strateiorion, campaigning season. But a siege cannot be prosecuted in sunshine only. Thus a new calendar for a new kind of war.

It was a porous siege. On the line the troops had more intercourse with the enemy than with their own countrymen. We sold food and firewood; the Potidaeans traded treasure. Gold first, then jewelry and linen. They sold their armor and their swords.

From midwinter they were peddling their daughters.

By the gods, it was cold up there. Piss steamed on the air and turned to ice before it hit the dirt. To dress in armor made the skin peel in patches where it touched the freezing bronze. The glory of dying for one's country lost whatever pale luster it had possessed, especially to croak of plague or pestilence or some perverse mischance, a blind-luck bows hot lobbed from a battlement, only to have the campaign decided in spring by treaty and everyone suddenly allies again. We camped there, frozen and miserable, while the city of the Potidaeans loomed at the neck of the promontory, frozen and miserable as we.

The three northern gates, those that gave out upon the landward side, stood barred only in daylight. With nightfall they became avenues of skimmers, scavengers, and scum. You could see their tracks in the snow, broad as boulevards. Our company was commanded by a bribe-commissioned captain named Gnossos.

Here is what we did. For every eight trees logged, we turned over four to the army; the other four went to the foe. They paid our captain in women. Not whores but respectable wives and daughters of the city. They were ploughing us for firewood. I refused to permit my lads to take part in these orgies, in which it was not uncommon for one female to service a dozen men before returning through and under the walls to the city. Such degeneracy, countenanced by their superior, would debase what little warrior spirit these striplings possessed. In addition, overscrupulous as this may sound from a man of my subsequent deeds, I could not bear to witness the ravagement of person this commerce inflicted on the women themselves.

I was hauled up for this. Behind my back my bucks began calling me “the Spartan.” It was put about that I sided secretly with the foe and that my prudish intransigence was not only undermining the morale of youth but, defying as it did my commander's ordinance, was at best insubordination and at worst treason. In a clash with my captain the word “procurer” escaped my lips. I was cashiered.