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

I took a shattering blow to the head.

That’s what happens when you push forward too hard, or when men leave you. I never saw the blow, and it hit me hard enough to break my nose inside my helmet and leave me barely conscious, and another blow, from a spear, cut across the top of my bicep and by the will of Athena went in the front of my thorax instead of under my sword arm – so I got a nasty and very graphic cut across my pectoral muscle instead of a death wound under my arm.

Really, it should have been the end of me, and I stumbled.

A shield was pressed into my back. It steadied me – both physically and in spirit. Someone was there. It meant everything.

A shield slapped against the lower-left rim of my aspis. Someone was in the rank with me.

My eyes wouldn’t focus and I took a scraping blow along my helmet, and Cleomenes called, ‘Step back.’

It occurred to me that I’d been hearing that for a long time.

I nodded, rotated on my hips so that my body was inclined away from my opponent and shot my sword forward to cover my step. Cleomenes stepped up on my left, and I felt his shield wrap around my left as he muscled into place and his spear shot forward. And I was in the second rank, with blood running out from under my helmet and into my mouth. There was a lot of blood, a lot of pain.

On the other hand, I was alive.

I knelt and breathed. Spat blood.

Took a drink from my canteen in the third rank. Someone had pushed past me.

I found that I was kneeling by Nearchus. He was breathing, and had a lot of blood on his face, so I poured wine and water over his face and he spluttered. I ran my hand over his arm – his sword arm looked bad, with a long shallow cut – and he coughed again and gave a short scream just as I found where his arm was broken.

I got my chlamys out from under my aspis and wrapped his arm as tightly as I dared while he was out of it, and then the whole phalanx was moving. I was better – taking care of someone else is the sovereign remedy for pain – and I got my feet under me and pushed forward.

‘Let me through – front rank!’ I called. I’d fallen all the way back to the sixth or seventh rank. I pushed forward, replacing men who hadn’t fought yet and were – understandably – annoyed.

Some of Laodon’s men were in our ranks. I pushed past two pezhetaeroi to get to Cleomenes, who knocked a Thracian off his feet with a pretty move. I put my sword in the man’s throat to save Cleomenes the step, but that man must have been the last Thracian in the ‘zone’, the area where men fight. The rest were drawn up a few paces above us on the slope, throwing spears. When men settle down to throwing spears, the hard fighting is over.

We had held them.

‘Exchange!’ I croaked at Cleomenes. He shouted a war cry at the Thracians, and then peeked back at me, grinned and nodded, and we did the same dance we’d done earlier, in reverse – he pivoted back, I stepped up, and I was in his place.

Laodon was nowhere to be seen, and Pyrrhus was in the rank next to me, where there should have been a pezhetaeroi. In fact, I could see my own men for four or five files. This sort of thing happens in a hard fight, and with no disrespect to the phalangites of the pezhetaeroi, they weren’t trained men like the graduates of the royal pages. And my boys were. And they were eager – for a lot of the ‘new’ Hetaeroi, this was their first battle – certainly the first big fight on foot, where the heroes walked the earth.

Despite my pain and my wounds, I could feel their eagerness.

We were supposed to hold the Thracians here, so that the hypaspitoi could get around their flanks. If I attacked the Thracians, I’d be pushing them back up the slope, and making Alexander’s job harder.

Just then, while I thought about this and while Cleomenes, behind me, pushed against me aggressively and shouted, ‘Forward, take us forward’, and all the Hetaeroi started to take up the cry . . .

The archers got into position, and the shafts began to fall. I couldn’t even see the archers – but they had got past the flank of the Thracians, and their arrows fell on to unshielded backs. The Thracians began to look over their shoulders.

‘Take us forward!’ roared the whole right end of the battle line. It sounded to me as if the left end was still engaged, but I could see nothing over there.

There was no one to ask, either.

Cleitus told me later that I was grinning like a maniac. That’s not what I remember, but perhaps! At any rate, I stood straight and pointed my sword.

‘Silence!’ I roared.

The cries stopped as if cut off with a knife.

‘Forward!’ I called, and I took a step forward, and we fell up that hill like an avalanche. The Thracians stood, and we crashed into them, shield to shield, packed like sardines in a barrel, and then we were pushing – the rear-rank men pushing with their legs, the front-rankers trying to keep a shoulder firmly inside the aspis, so that the pressure from the rear ranks didn’t flatten them out and crush them – I’d heard of the othismos but I’d never been in it. We pushed, and they tried to stand, but we practised this and they did not, and in seconds we were pressing them back, and then they were stumbling and the pushing was over – we were cutting and thrusting with spear and sword, and they were tripping, falling, collapsing – and running. They didn’t have the cohesion to hold us. Dozens must have died there – men in my rear ranks killed the ones who tripped and fell with their saurouters.

I got an arrow in my aspis – the long iron head came right through the face and scratched my hand. One of our own.

I lowered my aspis slightly, and there was no one there.

I looked left, and the centre of our line was below me on the slope, fifty paces behind. Our left flank was even farther back.

And straight ahead, I saw Alexander leap down from the rocks – now lower and closer – into the rear of the fleeing Thracians, with Alectus and Philip Longsword on either side.

We’d won. Right there. So my new duty was to save as many of our infantry as possible. It looked to me as if the pezhetaeroi on our left were getting the worst of it.

In a flash, I had an idea, even as the hypaspitoi came pouring down from the top of the pass into the rear of the fleeing Thracians.

I pushed back into the middle ranks.

‘Forward! Phalanx forward! Half-files – halt and stand fast!’ I yelled.

That sent the pezhetaeroi and the Hetaeroi forward on the right – but men from the fifth to the eighth rank stood fast. My men were facing no resistance – they didn’t need deep files behind them to help ‘hold’ the enemy.

Then training told – long training in the snow. The half-file leaders – noble and commoner – stood fast, and as the front ranks peeled away, I had about sixty files of four men each left behind with enough space . . .

‘Half-phalanx will form from the right files to the left!’ I called. This was like rolling a carpet – the rightmost files – four files, to be exact – marched forward and wheeled smartly to the left , passing across the front of the new-formed half-phalanx, and every set of four files then wheeled up and joined the column as they passed, until my whole body was marching across the rear of the front files, into the gap opened by our rapid advance, and into the rear of the Thracians facing the centre and right of our army.

I do not claim that this was a brilliant manoeuvre. I merely claim that there was no other army on earth that could have done it.

Once we were clear of our own front files, we formed front – that is, the column formed a new phalanx at right angles to the old phalanx. The Thracians collapsed. It was almost instant, the moment we were formed, as if every Thracian saw the danger at the same moment – and perhaps they did, but an army has a remarkable level of non-verbal communication. They can ‘feel’ all together. It’s like the pressure of your buddy’s shield in your back – when it is gone, you ‘feel’ wrong.