Steven Pressfield - The Afgan Campaign

The mercs pull out in column of wedges. They seem to know what they’re doing. They’re all lancers, with earflap cawls and pennants snapping on the ends of their twelve-footers. We’re trotting down a swale between tall barrows. It’s like passing between burial mounds. The battlefield, or what will become the battlefield, is just over the left-hand rise. We turn a corner and there it is.

Snow is dumping in sheaves now. Clear of the vale, the cold hits like a wall of ice. Where is the foe? The weather is deteriorating so fast we can’t see more than one wedge in front of us. With the wind and snow, we can’t hear a thing.

Where is Alexander?

Where’s Spitamenes?

In every other scrape I’ve been in, the dominant element has been confusion, succeeded by doubt and terror. Here it’s only confusion. I feel no fear at all. I keep scanning round for Lucas. Let him be all right and I’ll croak without a second thought.

Our wedges follow the mercs. The column swings right. The barrows are at our right shoulder now; we’re at the canter, paralleling them. To our left and down a long gale-scoured slope stretches a vast bowl filling up with snow. We pass company after company of light infantry advancing into this. They make no haste. They’re jabbering to each other, careless as fishwives in the market. Curtains of snow descend; you can see the troops but can’t hear them. The footing beneath my pony’s hooves is hard as stone and slick as marble.

Historians will demonstrate later that Spitamenes had no choice but to come, on this site at this hour, into the open. Alexander’s forts have compassed the Wolf, leaving him no safe patch to set down upon. The foe’s supplies have been cut off. Doubtless his hot-blood tribesmen provoke him in council. The Massagetae won’t stay the winter without some adventure after plunder. He’ll lose them and the Daans and Sacae if he doesn’t act with audacity. They’ll scatter and never rally round him as a leader again.

The Wolf has no choice but to attack. He knows Alexander wants him to. He knows our king has contrived events to give him no other option. And he knows that as soon as he does attack, Alexander will race north from his ready camp at Nautaca with every man and horse he’s got.

So be it.

A straight-up brawl at last.

Our merc cav come left in column. We follow. The mercenaries transit directly behind the light infantry, forming a second front rearward of the foot troops; then their leaders come about in that evolution called the Laconian countermarch, like racehorses round a turning pole or a team of oxen plowing a field. Dice hails me as we skipper through the blowing snow. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Just follow these bastards!” I’m as lost as he is.

Our mounted force draws up on the rim of the snow bowl, behind the broad front of infantry. We’re in the middle now, in column with our long axis flank-on to the fight; the merc cav rein on our right wing in the same formation. We can hear but not yet see the clash taking place half a mile downslope.

Alexander has sent forward in a hollow square eight hundred Lydian and Median cavalry with twelve hundred merc infantry (the same troops, we’ll learn later, that Lucas and I marched out from home with). These are the bait. Against them, Spitamenes has flung a crescent of Massagetae and Daan horsemen. The horns of the enemy’s charge have enveloped our fellows. The foe assaults the square of infantry by swarms, barbarian-style, ringing it with a great whooping mass of horsemen, who circle at the canter, keeping just out of spear and javelin range, while making rushes in groups upon our men, pulsing in and out, slinging volley after volley of arrows and darts.

Right and left, we can hear Mack trumpets. The infantry downslope of us step out now. They drop down the flank of the snow bowl at the double, their boots lifting great eddies of white. The foot troops’ front extends right and left out of sight. They make straight for the swarming circle of enemy horsemen. Stephanos wheels his gelding Parataxis, “Pitched Battle,” out front. He holds us back till the infantry has advanced about a hundred yards down the hill. Now we go. Behind the dirt-eaters, at the walk. On our right, the merc cav advance in the same manner. I still have no idea what the hell we’re supposed to do. Neither does Dice; neither does Boxer. We all strain toward Stephanos. He doesn’t know either.

This is my first real stand-up battle. Like everyone, I’ve heard a thousand accounts of such clashes, of trumpets and pennants and great thundering charges of massed troops and horses. But nothing prepares me for the scale or the sound or the mad irresistible sweep of the thing. The emotion of the animals is overwhelming. Like us, horses evacuate their innards when seized by fear and excitement. Everywhere you look, mounts are shitting and pissing; the stink cuts our nostrils; the frozen air steams with it. The ponies stamp and whinny; you can feel them slipping from their riders’ control. They are reverting to the law of the herd. So are we. Hooves fling divots of frozen sod. The earth bucks and shudders beneath us. The field puts up an inhuman, throbbing thrum.

I am a corporal; I command a litter of eight. Every sense screams to me, Grasp your orders! Take charge! This is impossible. We are caught, all of us, in the tide and current of the hour. When our horses go, we’ll go with them. Orders? Zeus himself could not make himself heard above this din, and even if he could, the momentum of the instant would overwhelm his mightiest cries. I understand more with my seat than with my senses. The infantry’s job, I see, is to screen the merc cav, to prevent the foe from discovering our advance. Out front the enemy pours squadron after squadron of tribal horsemen into his great galloping ring. He thinks to finish off our initial divisions, then turn on the advancing foot troops and pull the same stunt on them.

We’re halfway down the slope now. Battle sounds ascend from the bowl in a deafening cacophony. I see Stephanos gallop before our front; an officer of the merc cav rides beside him. This fellow trails a pennant rider, a youth no older than fourteen, at his shoulder. The boy bears aloft a great snaky “serpent” of crimson. Without a word every man understands.

Follow him.

Follow his flag.

The merc cav on our right are turning rightward now, by the flank. Into column again. The way we entered. They go from the walk to the trot. Our horses understand before we do. They want to canter. At once I get it. We all do.

“Understand, Dice?” I bawl into the sheeting snow.

He laughs, pointing his lance toward the merc cav. “Do what they do!”

Here we go. The last glimpse I get before our column spurs rightward is of the corps of pages galloping onto the slope above us, bearing the banner of the agema of the Companions, the former Royal Squadron, and the Lion Standard of Macedon. Alexander and the Companions. A thrill shoots from my pony’s hooves through the crown of my skull and right out the top.

This is the day.

The only way to counter Scythian tactics, the great wheeling circle of horse archers, is to block it from the side. Make it break down. Drive it against a river or a mountain or a precipice. Then infantry and cavalry can bring their weapons to bear. But here on the steppes of the Wild Lands, there are no rivers or mountains or precipices. That’s why Scythian tactics work so well.

What you must do-and what Alexander does now-is to use men and horses to make a river, a mountain, a precipice. That is our role now. Ours and the merc cav. At the gallop, the elite hired troopers of Phrygia and Cappadocia emerge from behind the horns of the screen of advancing infantry. One wing goes right, one goes left. In a great sweep they swing out and back. They hit the wheeling enemy on both extremities of his ring.