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

At that point, I dismounted. Being on a horse gives you a fine view of a battlefield, especially when everyone else is on foot. But Greeks and Macedonians expect their taxiarchs to lead from the front, not from the middle or the back. That’s just the way it is.

I took my aspis from Polystratus, and my favourite spear, about twice the height of a man, heavy as a tree, of old ash, tipped in heavy steel at one end, quite a long blade, and tipped in bronze at the other, quite a short saurouter. Every man to his own taste. My spear was a man’s height shorter than a sarissa. The sarissa is a recruit’s weapon, anyway.

Half a stade on. Twenty horse lengths, and we could see their line as clear as anything, and individual helmets, and the precipitous drop to the river bed. I wanted to panic, but I was too busy yelling for my lads to close up and trying to get my cheek-plates tied together. My hands were shaking too hard, and if I stopped walking, the line would leave me behind – or stop with me.

I remember every one of the last fifty paces before the Pindarus river. We had the worst ground to cover, into the face of the most dangerous men on the enemy side.

And then there was a mighty blare of trumpets from the Persians, and arrows flew from their Psiloi line. I assume that every man shot something, and fifteen thousand arrows were launched and fell in a hail as dense as the morning’s rain. I got six in my aspis.

The trumpets blared again, and another volley flew.

We’d shuddered to a stop under the barrage. I’d seen it before – men can be shot to a halt. We had a lot of men down. Some would rise again and many wouldn’t.

I remember saying ‘Fuck it’ aloud. I didn’t think of Thaïs, or Pella, or my farm, or any of that. What I thought was that I wanted to get it over with.

‘Follow me!’ I roared, and ran forward into the arrow storm.

I could tell you a lot of stories I heard from other men, but I’ll be honest – that’s all I remember of the Battle of Issus, until Perdiccas’s taxeis broke. Obviously we went forward into the river, but I don’t remember a moment of it. We went up the far bank. I know that the enemy guards officers made a stupid mistake and defended the riverbank from the very edge, as if it were a wall, and that meant that our spears went into their legs, at first, and they lost men, and we pushed them back. But when they learned to stand a horse length back from the bank, they started killing our front-rankers as soon as we got up the sandy bank.

As the fighting went on, that bank started to collapse. It was sand and gravel, fairly sharp cut in the early fighting, but after an hour it was a ramp of dead men and collapsed gravel, and I imagine somebody thought we’d fight our way up it in the end.

Not me. I was cut down twice, both times by those terrifying silver apples that could knock a man unconscious right through a good helmet. Both times, my men pulled me out of the fighting.

When I came to the second time, I was woozy and I vomited, over and over, and my head felt soft and spongy and there was a lot of blood in my hair.

My taxeis was standing in the river, and the Persians were standing on the far bank, jeering at us, and my men weren’t even pretending to push forward. Once in a while, a Persian officer would lean out with a bow and shoot one of my officers or file leaders. But that was better than trying the ramp of dead again.

Isokles was holding my shoulders, and Marsyas was holding my hair.

I drank a lot of wine from Polystratus’s canteen. As in, the whole canteen.

Hope you’re getting the picture.

Polystratus leaned in close. ‘Things are going to shit by the hypaspitoi,’ he said.

So I mounted his horse and rode about a hundred feet, my head pounding and my limbs uncertain.

It was like watching a dyke break when a river floods.

I don’t know where they came from, but there were thousands of Greek mercenaries, and they’d broken through, and they were coming into Perdiccas’s flank. And Perdiccas’s men had had enough. They were running. I couldn’t see the hypaspitoi. I didn’t know that Alexander was, even then, trying to kill Darius, or that he’d broken the enemy line. All I saw was dust and the collapse of our centre.

And let me tell one thing from where Perdiccas stood. He says he never knew how Greeks penetrated our line. His men were stuck in like mine, and unable to break through, just like mine, and suddenly they were struck in the flank by a battering ram of well-formed infantry. It was so bad that most of his front-rankers died . Virtually a generation of leadership in a veteran phalanx, dead in heartbeats. My namesake, Ptolemy son of Seleucus, died there. Parmenio’s bastard son Attalus died there. We lost good men at the rate of water draining from a pool.

I rode back to my taxeis – just a few horse lengths, and lost in the battle haze.

Thank the gods for the horse.

‘Back-step! March!’ I bellowed.

Back-stepping is when the hoplite backs from the enemy but with his face still looking the enemy in the eye. Only the best troops, like the best horses, can do it. But my lads were only too happy to leave the killing zone between the banks of the river. And we’d worn both banks to ramps. I’m sure it was bad enough, backing up the near bank, but they got it done.

When the right file leader (the one who should have been next to me) was at my left foot, I ordered ‘Halt!’

Isokles came running out of the haze of dust.

His was the rightmost company.

‘Form to the right,’ I said. ‘We’re about to be hit in the flank.’

I’d backed the taxeis far enough that he could simply wheel his thirty files to the right. Then Marsyas marched – the Spartan way – by files to the right and reformed his front – to Isokles’ left. Wrong place in the line, but we had practised this – and every other possible disaster. Thanks to Isokles.

‘Go to Parmenio and get a squadron of cavalry,’ I said to Polystratus. ‘I don’t care who they are. Tell him the whole centre is going to collapse and Perdiccas is already gone.’

And then the Greeks hit Isokles.

That’s all the time we had. Perhaps the time a man takes to make a speech in the Assembly. But all those brave men – Meleager son of Neoptolymus, Parmenio’s bastard; Ptolemy of Selucus and Leon son of Amyntas and all of them – they died to buy us those fleeting heartbeats, and we honoured their deaths by using the time as best we could.

The Greeks hit us, and Isokles’ men gave way ten paces. Marsyas’s men went back far enough that they disordered Pyrrhus’s company where they stood ready.

There were so many Greeks. I remember my heart falling as I realised that we had lost the battle.

I dismounted and ran to the rear of Pyrrhus’s right file.

‘About face!’ I roared. Maybe I squeaked it. But they brought their sarissas upright and faced about – a terrible muddle – fighting all around us, and Marsyas’s rear files being pushed in among us.

‘Follow me!’ I yelled. Pyrrhus was ten men away, and his men were not in any order at all, but the Greek formation was wider than ours by half as many again, and I was determined to fight the turning motion of the overlap with an attack of my own.

As it turned out, all of Pyrrhus’s men and all of Cleomenes’ assumed the order was for them, and the whole lot of them – more than five hundred men – followed me into the Greeks, leaving no one facing the Persian guards across the river.

Nor were we in any order at all. We were a mob.

But victory disorders as thoroughly as defeat, and the Greeks had been victorious twice, once against the hypaspitoi and again against the flank of Perdiccas, and they were spread over a stade of ground, and suddenly . . .