Christian Cameron - God of War - The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

Athens and Thebes held few fears for us. Right or wrong, we were sure we could take them. But Athens and Thebes backed by internal rebellion inside Macedon and the Great King – especially if Parmenio was complicit . . .

‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. I was drinking wine with the king, Hephaestion and Langarus. ‘Parmenio isn’t waiting for us on the plain in front of Pella. He’s trapped in the Troad, and he can’t even get his army across the straits. The Great King has done us a favour.’

Alexander raised his cup in my direction, as if toasting to me. ‘Sometimes,’ the king said, ‘you and I share a thought. You are a deeper man than you appear, Farm Boy.’

Well, take that as a compliment if you want. Alexander had a way of being at his most offensive when it was his intention to compliment.

We marched next day, from deep in Illyria, almost due south. It was another brutal march, and there’s no great story to tell – but if you look at the Military Journal you can see that we averaged a hundred stades a day, in mountains.

That’s the stark fact. A hundred stades on mountain tracks – tracks pounded to slush, mud and rock after a hundred men went over them, tracks where no wagon wheel could go and where, sometimes, the cavalry had to go by a completely different route from the infantry. Most nights, we slept without fires in early-autumn conditions, wrapped in blankets, sleeping on rocks.

Sometimes the rocks held the heat of the day. There are some rocks that are quite comfortable. Ask any veteran.

There was no wood.

No grain for horses.

No wine, no oil, too little food and no fire to cook it.

And little things began to spiral into big things. Imagine the wear that our nailed sandals had taken. The thongs that bound them had probably all snapped and been replaced by the time we were south of Pellium, but in the mountains, the soles themselves began to give way. Men’s shoulder-bag straps broke. The porpakes on our aspides were bent, deformed, sometimes separating from the wood of the shields. Spear shafts all had a cast to them – every time a soldier leans his spear against a barn, it bends a little. Javelin heads rattled when you picked them up, because successive cold nights and warm days worked the rivets. The beautiful homespun wool of a good soldier’s chiton, made by his wife or his sisters, was threadbare and lacked warmth, or worn through to holes; his chlamys was filthy and brown and ragged like a beggar’s, and knife blades were dull – or snapped. There weren’t a thousand sharp razors left in the army, because men dumped their sharpening stones when they were tired. Swords were like iron clubs.

All of us were as skinny as children in a hill town and most of us had lice.

And we had won all our battles.

But we’d been living like this since before winter – and habituated as we were, men’s bodies were starting to break down. As an example – I began to pull muscles – in my sides – every day, just climbing and letting myself down the mountains. Just walking. I hadn’t had a massage in ten months.

But Alexander was at his best when he was desperate. He communicated to his men that this was a gamble, and that the throne and empire were at stake – and that he took their trust for granted and that he needed them. He went from mess group to mess group every evening, which was unlike him – he wasn’t aloof, he listened when common men talked, and he made them promises – promises of rest when Greece was returned to obedience. And promises of loot I didn’t think we could fulfil.

We rose in the dark and we didn’t get to sleep until darkness fell again. In between, we marched.

Some days, I could look back from where I was near the lead of the column – mostly single file – and down a mountain valley I could see our army stretching back ten stades or more, filling every trail.

Villages emptied ahead of us.

That was just as well, because when we found a village, we looted it down to picked bones, and the bones were broken to get at the marrow.

And that will give you an idea of what it cost to go a hundred stades a day across the mountains.

We came out of the mountains in northern Thessaly. We raced across the Thessalian plain fast enough to shock every man we came across, but slowly enough to feed our horses to bursting on the good Thessalian grain – and grass – every day for four days. Our men ate beef and goat and lamb and bread – ate sausage even as they marched. Thessaly was friendly and had magazines and the king – who had no money at all – had credit there. We ate our way south.

I led the cavalry patrol that seized the Gates of Fire. I knew the way, knew the passes, and I was there and in possession – with a powerful sense that I’d done all this before – and there was no opposition. The grumblers in every regiment began to suggest we were attacking nothing.

We marched over the mountains to Onchestus and no one troubled us with so much as a sling stone.

And then we marched down on to the plains of Boeotia, the dance floor of Ares, and the race was run. The Athenians had not marched to the aid of Thebes, and Thebes did not have a Persian army camped under its sheltering walls.

That night, Alexander received letters from Pella, and a report that our siege train and most of our heavy baggage – including tents – was just five days behind us. Antipater had moved quickly, spending money Alexander didn’t have. In a few days, we were going to have twenty-six thousand soldiers.

Alexander dispatched heralds to Thebes. He sent them excellent terms – already, his mind was full of Asia. Or perhaps it always had been, but the spectre of Persian gold at Athens and Thebes brought home to him that Asia was not just waiting for conquest – Persia might, indeed, strike back at him. At every campfire across the Thessalian plain, he’d explained to us that he would be easy on the Thebans if they would bend the knee quickly, because he wanted to get fresh troops across the Bosporus before winter.

In his messages, he announced that he understood that they had been misled – and assuming him dead, had acted appropriately. He simply pointed out that he was not dead. He offered to meet a delegation and affirm the ancient liberties of the Polis.

The next morning, we marched early. Once again, I had the Prodromoi and the Hetaeroi, with orders to choose a camp – carefully, and with due respect for Thebes.

Well, I had little respect for Thebes, but I knew what Alexander wanted. Despite which, I fanned the Prodromoi out fifteen stades either side of our approach road, and I put strong parties of Agrianians in a chain behind them and kept the Hetaeroi together as a strike force.

Just another routine day, marching through Greece.

Before noon, the Prodromoi officers were reporting near-combat contacts, and parties of Theban aristocratic horsemen who they flushed from cover – olive groves, mostly – with flanking moves and who rode away. Since they had restrictive rules of engagement – in effect, we’d been told not to engage unless the Thebans started it – the Prodromoi just manoeuvred them out of their ill-set ambushes and continued forward. But that sort of thing is exhausting and annoying work, and by late morning, I was being begged for permission to ‘make an example’.

I didn’t have to. The idiot Thebans did it for themselves. They came at us in mid-afternoon, four hundred cavalry emerging from behind the low hills north of the city to flush my Prodromoi back on the column.

The Prodromoi retreated in good order, very quickly, and broke contact. The Agrianians went to ground and the Thebans never, I think, knew they were there.

I had a long chain of reports, so that half an hour after the Theban attack started, I had all my Hetaeroi in two small wedges facing down a long field of barley, with a hundred Agrianians on each flank.