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

I knew what I had to do. This is what the pages train you for. This moment. But it hurts, and all that pain – boy, do you know that pain gets worse as you get older? The fear of pain – the expectation of pain?

At any rate, I stepped out of the file and ran back along the ranks to the very back of the hypaspistoi. I didn’t know the men by name or even by sight yet, but I guessed there were at least a dozen men already gone from the ranks. I also noticed that the pezhetaeroi behind us were marching in their chitons, with slaves carrying their helmets, small shields, pikes and armour.

I felt like an idiot. Cavalrymen generally wear their kit, and I was a cavalryman. Of course foot soldiers marched with slaves carrying their kit.

On the other hand . . .

There was Polystratus, riding and leading my Poseidon. He looked amused. I hated him.

‘Get your sorry arse back along the column and find my stragglers,’ I barked.

‘Yes, O master,’ he intoned. ‘You could ride and do it yourself.’

I made a rude sign at him, sighed and ran back up the column. ‘You tired? Anyone want to run with me?’ I bellowed, and men looked up from their misery.

‘I’m going to run the next five stades. And then I’m going to rest. You can walk the next five stades and then keep walking, or you can run with me.’ I repeated this over and over as I ran from the back of the column to the front.

At the front, I took my place in the lead file – a much more comfortable place to march, let me tell you, than the middle files, where the dust clogs your scarf and turns to a kind of mud with your breath.

In my head I started playing with tunes. I could play the lyre, badly, but I could sing well enough to be welcome at an Athenian symposium, and I knew a few songs. Nothing worked for me just then, so I grunted at my file leaders.

‘Ready to run?’ I asked.

Sullen stares of hate.

Command. So much fun.

‘On me,’ I said, and off I went at a fast trot.

Let’s be brief. We ran five stades. We caught up to the Hetaeroi cavalry in front. By then, we were strung out along three stades of dirt road, because a lot of my hypaspitoi were breaking down under the weight of the shields – ungainly brutes.

But we made it, and I led the files off the road into a broad field – a fallow farm field. I dropped the aspis off my shoulder and, without meaning to, fell to the ground. Then I got to my feet, by which time most of the hypaspitoi who were still with me were lying on their backs, staring at the sun in the sky.

‘Hypaspitoi!’ I shouted.

Groans. Silence.

‘The men of Athens and Plataea ran from Marathon to Athens at night after fighting all day,’ I shouted.

Legends often start in small ways. And no one remembers, later, the moments of failure.

My hypaspitoi straggled into camp, and almost a third of my men – mostly, but not all, Agrianians – were among the last men into camp. I had to get my grooms together and use them as military police to collect up the slowest men. Forty men had to be dismissed – home to Agriania or back to the pezhetaeroi.

But none of my friends – or enemies – in the Hetaeroi really noticed that. What Hephaestion knew was that the hypaspitoi had caught up with the cavalry and he claimed we’d hooted at the horsemen and demanded to be allowed to run past. Horseshit. All I wanted to do was lie down and die, at that point. But that’s how a good legend starts.

I wanted to go and eat with my Hetaeroi, but I knew that wouldn’t work, so instead I put myself in a mess with Alectus and Philip Longsword, and we cooked our own food. Well – to be fair, all the phylarchs had slaves or servants, and we didn’t do a lot of cooking. But the work got done, and I do have some vague recollection of helping to collect firewood with two exhausted Macedonian peasants who were scared spitless to find their commander breaking downed branches with them. I had to teach the useless fucks how to break branches in the crotch of a living tree with a natural fork close to the ground. Apparently only lazy men know how to do this.

The next morning, I ordered the armour and aspides packed, and ordered the men to march in their chitons. And I collected the file closers . . .

You have never served in a phalanx. So let’s digress. A Macedonian phalanx is raised from a territory. In their prime, we had between six and nine taxeis, and each was raised in one of the provinces – three for the lower kingdoms, three for the upper kingdoms and three for the outer provinces, or close enough. Every taxeis had a parchment strength of two thousand, but in fact they usually numbered between eleven hundred and seventeen hundred sarissas. Every man was armed the same way – a long sarissa, a short sword or knife, a helmet. The front ranks were supposed to be well armoured, and sometimes they were – never in new levies, always in old veteran corps.

Veterans were supposed to rotate home after a set number of years or campaigns, and new drafts were supposed to come out to the army every spring when the taxeis reformed. All the phalangites – the men of the phalanx – were supposed to go home every autumn. Only the royal companions – the Hetaeroi – and the hypaspitoi stayed in service all year round.

Each taxeis was composed of files – eight men under Philip, and ten men under Alexander. At times we’d be as deep as sixteen or twenty, but that was generally for a specific purpose. Let’s stay with files of ten. A taxeis of two thousand men formed ten deep has two hundred files. Every file, at the normal order, has six feet of space in the battle line – six feet wide and as deep as required. That means that the frontage of a taxeis at normal order is twelve hundred feet. A little more than a stade.

But of course we almost never fight in ‘normal’ order, but contract to the synaspis, the shield-touching shield formation with ten pikes stacked over the front rank’s locked round shields. So that’s about three feet per man, two hundred files, six hundred feet width, or about half a stade. Still with me?

Every file has three officers – the file leader, who runs the group and leads it – literally – in combat and on the march. The file closer – the ‘last’ man; he’s the second-in-command, because if the phalanx faces to the rear he’s the front-rank man, and because he alone can prevent men from deserting or running away. And the mid-ranker. In many manoeuvres – especially Macedonian manoeuvres – men march by half-files, and suddenly the half-file leader is the leader of a short file. The half-file leader is the third-in-command. Finally, the most promising new man is the half-file closer – the fifth man back, who, if the file is split in two, will be the ‘last’ man in a file only five deep. See? It was never a real rank, but to be put in the fifth position was to be seen as the next to be promoted in the file.

But the hypaspitoi were more complicated. We were a little over a thousand men and only eight deep. Our eight-man files were clumsy, because no one had worked together. And the file isn’t just a tactical unit – a file of infantry builds shelters together, cooks together, eats together, goes to find whores together, kills innocent civilians together, steals cattle together, digs latrines together, uses them together, swims together. You get the picture.

My files had no cohesion. We’d forced a bunch of men together, and they were supposed to be elite, but mostly they were angry and unfed, because dysfunctional files meant no firewood, no shelter and no food.

Their other problem is that Alexander’s mixture of magnanimity and paranoia had resulted in his releasing all the old hypaspitoi. If it had been me, I’d have released a third each campaign. My beloved king left me with precisely one veteran – Philip Longsword. If I had even a hundred – just one veteran per file – I’d have had someone to teach all the Agrianians how to live as soldiers.