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

It was all man to man. Vicious, brutal and utterly devoid of tactics. Had these been Memnon’s men, we’d have been dead. Praise Ares, the only veterans of Memnon’s were in my ranks, at my back.

I remember crashing into a very young Greek, knocking him flat with my greater weight, and putting my spear into him. That never happens in a line fight. But here – it was every man for himself in the dust.

The sarissas were useless, and most of my veterans simply dropped them for their swords. The sarissa is a fine team weapon, but has no use at all man to man.

Then it was just fighting.

We lost.

They seemed to have an inexhaustible number of Greeks and Ionians. It was incredible – slow, almost nightmare-like. The initial shock of the open, confused fighting gave way to a gradual, almost glacial collapse into a line fight.

We lost, but we lost slowly. Cleomenes quite wisely sent his mounted messengers down the line to Craterus to tell him what was happening, and we lost ground, step by step, and the Greeks kept pushing our flanks and driving south, away from the river, trying to turn us.

We died.

Let me tell you how war works. I had, at the start of the day, about eight hundred veterans of Memnon’s and about nine hundred Macedonian recruits. At the end of the day, I had about seven hundred veterans of Memnon and about three hundred Macedonian recruits. The young die, and the old fight on.

Back and back we went.

Praise to Ares, some of Perdiccas’s men – and he himself – joined us on our southern flank. But every time we tried to stand, we were pushed back by numbers.

Over the next hour, we lost two hundred paces.

But now I’ll tell you what didn’t happen.

The Persian guards didn’t charge us in our exposed flank. I don’t know if they didn’t want to get their feet wet, or they didn’t know what was happening, or they were worried for their own king, who even then was being hunted like prey by Alexander – but they had it in their power to win the battle – one killing blow at us, and the centre was gone.

That man – the commander of Darius’s foot guards – lost Issus.

I was wounded – really wounded, a thrust from a spear that went through the top of my thorax and lodged in my breastbone – about the time that Craterus arrived with the rear files of his taxeis to try and steady mine. It still wasn’t enough. But his timing was good, because about twenty heartbeats after he slapped my shoulder and told me the king was coming, I was on my face in the blood and sand.

And that, for me, was the end of the Battle of Issus.

I suspect you know what happened, but here it is – Alexander launched his blow at the first roar of the trumpets, smashed through the line facing him and made straight for Darius, intending to kill him. Say what you will, it was a fine plan. It was a fine plan because it mostly worked.

Darius hadn’t planned on a fast battle, but on a long, slow slogging match. Darius made two mistakes – he didn’t keep a big cavalry reserve, and he assumed that we wouldn’t fight along the river front. What happened is that our failed phalanx attack still had the effect of locking all his drilled troops – his Greeks – in place while Alexander rode across his rear.

At some point, some bright Greek realised that Alexander’s charge had left the flank of the hypaspitoi hanging in the air, and the Greeks turned our flanks. Callisthenes did some very careful writing in the Military Journal to suggest that we’d lost so many officers – more than a hundred – in winning . We lost all those men – and their followers – in losing.

But Darius lost faster than we lost. I’ve heard Kineas’s version, and I’ve heard Amyntas’s version, and Parmenio didn’t really do all that well – in fact, it’s one of his poorest performances. Cleitus openly said – much later – that Parmenio left the king to get isolated behind the Persian lines and die, and kept his men together so he could retreat in good order.

I don’t buy that, either.

What really happened is that Alexander, let loose in the rear of the enemy, spread panic while chasing Darius – he got so close to the Great King that Darius’s left-hand dagger scored our king’s thigh.

The irony is that it all came down to culture.

In our culture, the king is king while he is winning. He’s worthless if he is losing. So our king attacked and kept attacking.

In the empire, they’ll do anything to protect the Great King, and when he is threatened, they hustle him out of danger. So while the battle teetered in the balance – when, in fact, those Greek mercenaries had it in the bag – Darius was dragged from the field by his cousins, and Polystratus reached Alexander. That’s right. Polystratus ignored me. He didn’t go to Parmenio. He went to Alexander, right through the gap in the Persian lines.

According to Polystratus, Alexander looked back at the dust cloud over the river, spat and said, ‘By Zeus my father, do I have to do everything myself ?’

But he came back, crashed into the rear of the Greeks and the day was ours.

I wasn’t there. I was halfway along the road to Hades.

It took me five days to recover enough to leave my beautiful Persian bed – we took their camp and got all our baggage back, although not our slaves, of course. Now we had all new slaves.

I missed all the fun. I missed Alexander meeting Darius’s wife and mother, which I gather was worth seeing – the older matron, perhaps the most dignified woman I’ve ever known, managed to assume that Hephaestion was the King of Macedon, and who wouldn’t? He was taller and handsomer and didn’t look like an insane street urchin, which our king always did, the day after a fight.

Give the old lady credit. Our army was mad with victory, and every woman in that camp got raped. Hideous, ugly – I’m no fan of rape – but that’s what happened. In Persia, a raped woman can be executed for adultery. That’s fair, eh? Lucky them. So when the king and Hephaestion and a dozen other men came into their tent, they assumed that they were for it – especially as the lot of them were as fair as any group of thirty women on the face of the world. Forgive Sisygambis her error. But I gather that it was fantastic theatre.

And Alexander kissed her gently and said, ‘Never fear. For he, too, is Alexander.’

Alexander visited the wounded, handed out the prizes as if we were the Greeks before Troy (and never doubt that under those blond curls, he thought that we were the Greeks before Troy) and praised everyone. Kineas was made bravest of the allies – he’d fallen across the river, deep in the Persian ranks, and lots of people saw this act of insane heroism. And he lived, the lucky bastard. And a dozen of us who fell holding the centre got garlands, as well. I got one. Perdiccas got one. My young Cleomenes got one.

We had a lot of dead. Alexander held a moving funeral, complete with oration, and we burned the corpses.

We were rich. Every man in the army got enough loot out of that fantastic camp to retire. We were done. Victors. We had done it, and beaten the Great King.

Alexander let us believe that for three days. I knew better immediately, of course – Thaïs was by my side (in later years, she said it was to keep me from the Persian girls) and she already had reports of Darius gathering troops in the eastern valleys. He was a tough fighter. And he was not beaten.

TWENTY-THREE

The greatest victory in Greek – or Macedonian – history earned us a week. Then we were off down the coast road, headed for Syria.

To say that Alexander was insufferable doesn’t do justice to his behaviour. He retold the story of his daring charge and his chase of King Darius, of their brief struggle hand to hand, of Darius’s attack with a dagger after his sword broke, of his own brilliance in overcoming the captain of Darius’s guard while simultaneously holding Darius himself at bay.