Steven Pressfield - The Afgan Campaign

Now the foe is pinned between infantry front and back and cavalry right and left. His circle shatters like a wheel against four stones. Our litter trails the columns of merc cav as they thunder onto the foe.

It would give me supreme pleasure to relate how the shock of our company’s rush broke the enemy and drove him before us in flight, not to mention how my lance personally dispatched this hero and that champion. In fact, the merc cav does everything before we even get there. Ours is probably the twentieth column to strike the foe. He is already reeling. We are just a wall. A hedge of pikes and horseflesh to pin Spitamenes’ hordes and crack his wheel into spokes and splinters.

Now Alexander and his Companions charge.

Our king leads eighteen hundred heavy cavalry in squadron column of wedges, two hundred men each. At the gallop, this force can cross a hundred yards in seven seconds. When it rips into the belly of the last of the circling foe, it shatters his momentum and turns his multitude into a milling, disordered mass.

The fight is over so fast it’s almost disappointing. By now the tribesmen’s bolts have been shot. His mounts are blown, the fever of his assault is exhausted. Now the sarissas of our light and heavy infantry and the lances of the merc cav turn upon him. In moments, twelve hundred of the foe are slain. Thousands fling down their arms. Spitamenes himself bolts the field.

Our company ranges about the belly of the bowl, snatching every loose horse we can lay hands on. The field is soup. The frozen turf has been punched through in every quarter. It’s all muck now. Everywhere the foe holds up empty hands. Their spent animals floundering in the slop, Bactrians and Sogdians drop their arms by the hundreds. Their erstwhile allies, the Sacae and Massagetae, seize the chance to raid their own mates’ baggage, lingering long enough to grab all the ponies and women they can before using the snow to screen their getaway into the Wild Lands.

With victory, the field has become a churning mill of horseflesh. War mounts in hundreds stamp the mud to lather. Our lads whoop and whistle, on fire to snatch a prize mount, or at least a plug yaboo they can turn over for a quick purse of silver. Where is Lucas? I spur through the roundup. Suddenly a flash of white strikes my eye.

Snow!

My pretty little mare that I lost on the Many Blessings!

Only a rider will believe it, that out of such a seething stampede of livestock, one’s glance can pick out an individual beast. But there she is. I whistle. Her ears turn. In an instant I have dismounted and crossed to her; I fling my arms round her neck. When she smells me, she knows me.

Emotion overwhelms me. I stroke my darling’s muzzle. I understand, even as my heart overflows with it, that my elation at her recovery is a surrogate for other losses, far keener and not yet made good. Beloved comrades for whom my heart cannot yet mourn; missing brothers for whom even now I seek. They all become one for me in the form of this dear animal, whom I believed I would never see again and who now, one horse out of five thousand, has miraculously been delivered into my arms.

I can hear men talking roundabout. Spitamenes, they’re saying, has gotten away. Our fastest riders pursue him. Where is Alexander? Seeing to the surrender of the Bactrians and Sogdians.

A Mack sergeant says he saw Spitamenes’ son. I come alert in the instant. “Where? When?”

“What, mate?”

“You said you saw him. Where?”

The sergeant is busy with his own captured horses. He and his mates turn away. I chase them, demanding to know if they saw or didn’t. The sergeant faces back, hot and chapped. “Take it easy, brother. I’m just telling what I heard…”

“Then you didn’t see him?”

“No, but many did.”

I’m furious. I demand to know how he dares pass such tales without substantiation. He repeats: Spitamenes and his son have fled. “They fucked off, the pair of them! Is that enough for you, mate?”

The sergeant’s comrades shove me back. Boxer and Little Red collar me. I feel like the top of my skull is coming off. If Spitamenes’ son is alive, then…

“Matthias!”

Dice’s voice booms above the din.

“Matthias, here!”

I turn to see him and two other mates rein in, coming from the battlefield. Despite the cold, they’re sweating. They’ve been looking all over for me, Dice declares. Their expressions are grave. Then I see the Headquarters lieutenant with them. I salute.

“You’re Matthias, son of Matthias, of Apollonia?”

I tell him I am.

His face looks grimmer, even, than the others’.

“You will come with me now,” he says.

In the staff tent stand an iron brazier, three trunks serving as chairs, and a campaign table. The lieutenant sets Lucas’s notebook on top. “Do you recognize this?”

It’s a worn leather roll with two rawhide ties. Into the grain of the flap is carved the device of an elk being slain by a griffin.

“Did you hear me, Corporal? Do you recognize it?”

Soldiers know how to make their hearts go dead. You drop out of yourself. Light changes; sound goes queer. It’s like you’re looking down a tunnel. You see nothing but what’s right in front of you and even that appears as if it’s being observed not by you but by some surrogate, some counterform of yourself that has been denatured and hollowed out, leaving only a shell numb as stone.

I am aware of the lieutenant placing onto the table Lucas’s helmet and dagger. He even produces the overcloak I gave Lucas as he rode off with Agathocles-and the sack of kishar and lentils.

“I’m sorry,” he says. And turning to his aide: “Get him something to drink.”

When the lieutenant leaves, Dice spits out the story.

The party of Agathocles, Lucas, and Costas, escorting Spitamenes’ son, was fallen upon by Bactrian tribesmen only two days after striking out from the capture site. The foe had carried the Macks, bound and blindfolded, to a camp called Chalk Bluffs, where a multitude of their kinsmen had assembled. The clansmen nailed our countrymen to boards, painted them with pitch, and set them alight. Further outrages were performed upon them while they still lived. Then they were beheaded. Their remains were dragged behind the foe’s ponies until they broke apart and fell away.

I ask Dice how he knows this.

“The villains made boast of it. In a post to Alexander.”

Our troops, Dice says, found the skulls in the enemy camp immediately after the battle, in captured wagons of the Bactrians, along with our fellows’ weapons and kit, which the foe had taken as trophies.

Night falls. Mack patrols fan across the steppe, seeking Spitamenes, who has become now, in the snow, one set of tracks among thousands. Alexander prepares the brigades to give chase as soon as the Wolf is discovered. Our section under Stephanos has been pulled out of the line. No one tells us why. I do not sleep. I will not eat. Only one object animates my purpose: to return to action as soon as possible and pay these fiends out for the abominations they have visited upon my friend.

But Headquarters has quarantined us. Our section has been segregated to a compound on the margins of the camp. Intelligence has set up two tents. That night they bring in our officers and chief sergeants-Stephanos, Flag, the two young lieutenants who were present when Spitamenes’ son was captured. What they’re asking, no one knows. When they’re finished, they direct our commanders to the opposite wing of the compound, so they can’t talk to us who haven’t been called yet.

My turn comes around midnight. A hailstorm has got up; pellets of ice rip through the camp, tearing up tents and windbreaks. The cold and din are indescribable.