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

I was at Issus, but my Issus was utterly different from everyone else’s. I’ve heard Alexander’s tale of the day, and Philotas’s, and Parmenio’s and Kineas’s, and Niceas’s – by Ares, I’ve heard a hundred versions and heard most of them told fifty times! And never heard the same story.

Darius was, as Parmenio expected, waiting for us at the Pindarus river. He had brought his finest troops, mounted and foot – we hadn’t had to contend with them at Granicus. He also had almost twelve thousand Greek mercenaries. They were not the very best men – we had most of the best men in our army by then, or they lay dead. They were lower-class Greeks wearing the panoply, or Asians trained to look like Greeks. But they had Spartan and Athenian officers. Since everyone knows what happened at Issus, I won’t ruin my story if I say that those second-rate ‘Greeks’ almost wrecked our centre, and had they been Memnon’s men led by Memnon, I’d be dead. And so would everyone else from Macedon. Even as it was . . .

We went forward from camp in a column of files. We could see the Persian line by mid-morning, formed right across the beach where the beach and the farms of the plain were about twenty stades wide from the steep hills to the sea on our left. As the plain widened, the king kept ordering us to form to the right, and to double out into our battle formation. My taxeis was right in the middle of our line – the most junior position – and so we formed thirty-two deep by sixty wide early in the morning, when we were clear of the narrowest bottleneck; by the time we reached the Persian line, we were in normal order and just sixteen deep and one hundred and twenty wide.

Around noon, we were less than five stades from the Persians, and their line glittered with gold.

Alexander ordered us to halt and cook lunch. We had lost our baggage, remember – we’d lost all our slaves and all of our heavy equipment. What we hadn’t lost was our mess kettles, and old soldiers know that a hot meal matters, so most of my men, for instance, had gathered a dozen sticks before stepping off, and tied them inside their shields. We had food in minutes, our fires rising like sacrifices – or pyres.

The Persians didn’t even cross the river to scout us.

That made them seem cowardly. In retrospect, Darius had a polyglot army and he didn’t trust his commanders to cooperate, and now that I’ve had that experience, I feel for him, but at the time it made us confident.

Off to our right, in the low hills, there were a great many Persian light troops, and the whole front of their army was covered by more – I don’t want to guess how many ill-armed peasants the Great King had. It’s by counting this skirmisher cloud as soldiers that men come up with the ludicrous numbers the Persians supposedly had against us. I think he had fifteen thousand Psiloi, but there wasn’t a soldier among them, and they weren’t like our Thracians or our Agrianians, who could be counted on even when the fighting got stiff. These were peasants, and they had pointed sticks and light bows, slings, bags of rocks.

Still, there were an awful lot of them, and Alexander, who ate his sausage with me, was increasingly concerned about them and finally sent Cleitus with the Agrianians and a battalion of hypaspitoi to clear the ridge to our east. Alexander continued to eat. I was having a hard time eating.

It was not like Granicus. I had lots of time to look and see just how many Persians there were – a sea of them filling the beach. And to remember just how terrifying Granicus had been. This had never happened to me before, and is an essential part of being a veteran. Raw men fear what they do not know. Trained, experienced men fear what they do know. I knew it was going to be horrible. The Persians were not foolish, not effeminate. Win or lose, we were going to wade through our own guts to beat them.

After lunch, a lunch I wanted to vomit up but could not, I rode forward with Anander, Perdiccas and Craterus to have a look at the part of the plain where we’d be going. All along the line, Macedonian officers rode forward to scout the enemy lines.

What I saw chilled my heart.

Right in front of my position, the Great King’s bodyguard stood, with their six-foot spears tipped in long steel cutting heads, and instead of sharp iron or bronze saurouters, or butt-spikes, every spear had a solid silver apple at the base of the shaft, making them fearsome weapons. I had never faced one, but Kineas’s father had one on the wall of his andron, as I’ve mentioned, and I knew what a deadly weapon it could be.

And I assumed that the Great King’s bodyguards would be the best.

And worst of all, the banks of the Pindarus, right there where my lads would cross, were five feet high .

Craterus looked it over, turned to me and said, ‘Well, you’re fucked. Better hope I can do better on your flank.’

And Perdiccas wouldn’t meet my eye. No one would. We rode back to our battalions, all of the other officers treating me with the gentle regard friends pay to a dying man, or one condemned for a crime.

Here’s how it was, five stades out. We were on a plain. It was flat – but rose steadily from the sea on our left to the steep hills on our right, so that every unit in the line was slightly uphill of the unit to its left and downhill of the unit on its right. I had Coenus to my right and the hypaspitoi just visible beyond – and past them were the king and Philotas and all the Hetaeroi. That’s where the king’s mighty blow was going to fall.

On my left was Craterus, and beyond him Perdiccas – and beyond him, Parmenio with the rest of the army. The king started with the Thessalians but sent them quite early, round our rear to help Parmenio. I missed all of that. I was busy.

Each of us had a front of roughly one hundred and twenty files. Each of our leftmost men locked shields with the rightmost man of the next taxeis in one continuous phalanx, but we all knew that would go to shit the moment we hit the river, because the river turned twice and the banks were all different heights, and some parts of the riverbank were heavily brushy.

Alexander, now dry and magnificent in his gold and green patina’d antique armour and leopard-skin saddlecloth, his lion-head helmet, his purple Tyrian cloak, rode along the front – back and forth. Every man I know says he gave a different speech.

Opposite my men, he reined in and grinned at me, gave me a little mock salute and made his horse rear, and the men roared.

‘Asia!’ he yelled, pointing at the glitter of gold. ‘Ours for the taking! Now we avenge Greece. Now we make ourselves masters of the greatest empire on the wheel of the earth. Now we make all that they have, ours – by the spear. Our gods are with us. Poseidon crowned me in the dawn, and I feel Athena at my shoulder, and before the sun sets, we will drive this rabble like sacrificial animals into the sea. And avenge every indignity, every burned temple, and the betrayal of Xenophon and his ten thousand!’

That’s what I remember, anyway. And when he mentioned Xenophon, my lads – half of them Athenian street kids – cheered like madmen.

He swept off to the left, towards Parmenio, and we started forward, and the cheering followed him.

Four stades, then three. Then two. Now Alexander was coming back down the line from the left, his cloak flying behind him, the sun gilding his fair hair, and the phalanx roared for him, a wall of sound like our wall of shields. At a stade, we all halted at a gesture from the king – he held his hand out, and the army stopped .

It was magnificent, a word I use too often.

He rode off to the left, to the head of his cavalry, and the trumpets blared, and we went forward.