God of War: The Epic Story of Alexander the Great

TWENTY-TWO

I should tell you about the manoeuvrings before Issus, but I’ll have to keep it to a few sentences, because suddenly I was a taxiarch and not a cavalry officer. I wasn’t scouting, or running a temporary battle group just behind the scouting line – I was in the cloud of dust, plodding along the road with my men and their baggage carts. It’s a different view of war, I can tell you.

Of course, I had served on foot before, but the responsibility for two thousand pezhetaeroi was enormous and complicated, with everything from internal promotion to daily food, muster lists for the Military Journal (oh! how that boot was suddenly on the other foot!) and reports to Craterus on the progress of training.

In a way, I was lucky in that I had no predecessor. I’ve found that when you inherit a unit, either the man before you was a god, and you are constantly compared to him, or he was a fool, and you are constantly compared to him. Often both at the same time. Men do not really like to be disciplined – men detest taking orders. It’s easiest to focus that discontent on the man in charge, unless he has enormous talent, great wealth, good looks, charisma or birth. Best to have all of them, like Alexander, or Kineas.

Or me. I didn’t have the looks – but I had money, even by Asian standards, and a fair reputation, and I was getting a new taxeis, just raised from recruits and ‘mercenaries’ who were considered close enough to being Macedonians – Thessalians, Amphilopilans, men of the Chersonese. I was their first commander.

I spent my first day in command wandering around the army, looking for officers. I had Isokles, and he was first-rate, although as an Athenian he was widely distrusted. I had Polystratus, although I left him mounted. Marsyas was bored as a file leader in the Hetaeroi and an apprentice on the Journal – I made him a wing commander in the taxeis. Pyrrhus followed me as a matter of course, and Cleomenes was back from his wounds and bored as a trooper, and I gave him the other wing.

In fact, I ended up with more battalion officers than anyone else. I liked to subdivide, and I liked to have the ability to break my units up. So I had four companies – Isokles, Pyrrhus, Cleomenes and Marsyas – each a little shy of five hundred men. Every company commander had a tail of mounted men as messengers and a hyperetes with a trumpet.

Isokles had some excellent notions of drill. One was that his men should drill every day, the way we had in the hypaspitoi. He became our drill master. He was a professional who had fought everywhere, and he knew tricks I’d never seen – like reversing your deployment in camp so that when your column of files reached the battlefield, they could deploy left to right instead of right to left. I admit it’s an esoteric trick, but it had never occurred to me that I could reverse the order of my deployment just by ‘about-facing’ my men in camp and leading with the back of the column. I never won any battles with it, but there’s a habit to thinking outside the accepted drills – and that applies even to something as apparently rigid as the close-order drill of the phalanx.

By the fourth day after the games, we drilled well. Our recruits were above average in height and in strength, because the fringe districts where they’d been recruited were new ground to the recruiting officers. And our Athenian former mercenaries (every one of whom could now swear by Athena he’d been born in Amphilopolis, a former Athenian colony, and thus evade the prohibition on foreigners in the ranks) were excellent soldiers with as much experience as Philip’s veterans – some of it gained fighting them.

The truth was that the king was running short on troops. Our Asian campaign was killing men at a great rate – as I’ve said before, dysentery killed more than enemy action, but not a day passed in my taxeis that someone didn’t break an arm, a leg, fall off a wall, fall into a well, get sick, desert, run mad, get trampled by a horse – Zeus, the list goes on for ever. And the original nine recruiting districts couldn’t keep up, even if Hermes had been willing to pick up every new recruit at the door of his farm and fly him to his new duty station in the phalanx. Even if transport had been available, even if our rear areas were safe, even if we had rear areas – we were using men faster than Macedon could supply them, and on top of that Antipater had his own troubles with Athens and now with Sparta.

More and more non-Macedonians were put in the phalanx. Or rather, the definition of what made a man a ‘Macedonian’ became more and more flexible.

But I digress. We drilled hard every day – marched fifty stades, made camp, cooked and drilled. The army was rolling east. Somewhere far ahead of us, Parmenio was watching the mountain passes. We could just see the mountains on the fourth day of march, and we knew that Darius and seventy thousand men – probably more, by now – were just over the mountains.

It was interesting to go from Viceroy of Caria – ultimate power, with lip-service to Ada – to unemployed ‘friend of the king’, in which capacity I got to watch every decision made – to pezhetaeroi commander, with a view of the world limited to my baggage carts, my drill field and the cloud of dust in which I lived. That dust – the dust raised by marching feet – was the symbol of our lives in the infantry, because we couldn’t see out of it. Unless it rained, we ate dust, slept in dust, marched in dust . . .

I think I’ve made my point. Horsemen eat dust too – but they can ride out of it.

We marched east to the Amanus mountains and then south to Issus. Parmenio took a Persian cavalry patrol, and the officer knew all the details of Darius’s campaign plan – and confirmed the rumour we’d heard from the peasants that Darius would come across the southern pass, which was the kind of slow, conservative move that we expected from Darius, who always seemed, like all Persians, to act to best protect his own communications.

Let me just pause here to note that when I gained high command, I always acted to preserve my communications. Some forms of conservative behaviour just make sense. A starving army is no army at all.

At Epiphaneia, the coast of the sea turns sharply south and the terrain starts to change, from the austerity of Cilicia to the relative richness of Syria. Just a day’s march south of Epiphaneia, the king ordered all of us to leave our baggage and our sick at Issus, a very pleasant small town on its own river. That night, in Issus, there was a general officers’ meeting, and for the first time I attended as a general officer, as opposed to a king’s friend.

Parmenio argued that we should camp on the green plains around Issus and wait for Darius to cross the passes.

He talked for too long. I could see Alexander’s attention wandering, and I’ll just mention here that one of the things that stood between them was that neither of them could really speak to the other in his own language. Parmenio spoke to Alexander as a man speaks to a boy, which robbed even his best arguments of worth. Alexander, on the other hand, always spoke of glory, of religious duty, of omens – he phrased his strategies, which were often as brilliant as Parmenio’s, in the heroic terms of the Iliad. That’s how Alexander saw the world – through the Iliad. Parmenio had, I swear, never even read the Iliad. No, I mean it.

The result should have been lethal to us. I can only suppose that the internal divisions and miscommunications of the Persians were worse.

At any rate, Parmenio argued for putting the army between the passes, sitting and waiting for Darius to make his move. With our backs to the sea and our supplies intact, we had the rest of the fighting weather to wait – all autumn, if Darius hesitated. We had the wages to pay the troops, and we were holding his terrain. In effect, from a moral standpoint, Darius had to come to us.

Like most of Parmenio’s suggestions, it was sound, unexceptional and virtually guaranteed success.

Parmenio further argued, in a monotonous voice that put many officers to sleep, that on the narrow plains this side of the mountain, our flanks – both of them – would be secure, and the Persians’ numbers wouldn’t matter.

But somehow, in his summing up, Parmenio managed to offend Alexander. I watched it happen. He said that our army could not hope to triumph against the Persians in the open field.

Really, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Alexander reacted like a horse given too much bit.

He leaped to his feet. ‘If we cross the mountains, Darius will be forced to fight, and his army will be at the disadvantage of knowing themselves the lesser men. Our boldness will disconcert them and make up for any disparity in numbers. We know from the prisoners that Darius was going by the southerly, Syrian Gates. Let us go to the Gates and force our way through before he seizes them, and the whole plain of the Euphrates is before us.’

Like all of Alexander’s visions, it was bold to the point of madness. The young men were fired by it and the old men shook their heads. His voice rose with emotion, the more so as he was not yet fully recovered and his hands still shook when he got excited.

Parmenio shook his head. ‘Lord, this is folly.’

That was waving a red flag. Sometimes I thought that Parmenio did this on purpose, to drive Alexander to recklessness and defeat, but none of the old man’s other behaviours tended that way. Perhaps he couldn’t help himself. I’ve seen parents make the same error with a wayward child. In fact, I’ve made it myself.

Parmenio was shouted down, and we marched before light in the morning, headed south for the Syrian Gates. We were outnumbered two to one, but this, we all knew, was the battle for Asia.

If anyone worried because the king’s eyes glittered or his hands shook, they kept that to themselves.

The rains started two days south of Issus, and they battered us like a living embodiment of Poseidon pouring himself on the land, and men offered sacrifices – the sea was so angry, over to our right, and we passed very slowly through the Pillar of Jonah. Men were lost to the waves, and baggage animals. We had to march virtually single file, and when the water rose too high, we just had to wait. You don’t know it? Well, there’s a point south of Issus where the coast road has to go down the cliffs and across the beach. Just for a few stades – and the beach is wide and easy – unless Poseidon is angry. When we crossed, it was as narrow as a cart track in the mountains, and the penalty for slipping was drowning.

Then we marched farther along the coast, taking Myriandros. There, at Parmenio’s insistence, we sent Philotas with six hundred cavalry into the passes to make sure we could get across before Darius did. That much caution the king accepted.

I was summoned to the command tent in the morning, at which time I was standing on a wagon bed holding my morning orders group. I had just managed to get all of my phylarchs to laugh at a fairly weak witticism when Black Cleitus appeared behind me, spoke to Polystratus and literally ran off.

That caught my attention. I turned to Polystratus, who was mounted.

Polystratus was laconic. ‘Trouble,’ he said.

Such was my trust in Alexander that I assumed it was trouble between Parmenio and Alexander, or medical trouble. I left Isokles to command the troops and I jumped on Medea (a new Medea, a beautiful Arab palfrey with a small head and a wonderful stride), and cantered across the camp to Alexander’s pavilion. At the palisade gate, there were forty men – disfigured men, most of them blinded, many with other wounds. Prisoners? I passed them, thinking on the fates.

No one was talking when I entered. But every officer in the army was there. Parmenio’s face was white and red – blotches of red. That meant rage.

Alexander was smiling.

No one was saying anything.

Craterus was my brigadier, so I went and stood with him and Perdiccas, and he gave me a nod.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

Perdiccas caught my eye and I followed him out of the tent.

‘Darius tricked us. He’s already behind us – has retaken Issus and all our baggage. He . . . blinded most of our sick and wounded, except a few he left with one eye.’ Perdiccas shrugged.

‘Ares,’ I breathed. Now Darius had us. He was on our communications. He’d outmarched us.

Darius, the slow, conservative Persian.

I followed Perdiccas back inside.

Parmenio was busy apportioning blame. ‘I told you!’ he shouted as I entered. ‘Darius will pick a river – the one with the steepest sides – and he’ll entrench on the other side, and we will have to fight through him. We’re going to have to attack an entrenched army that is double our size.’

Alexander’s smile never wavered. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory. And now Darius is committed to fight. He won’t be allowed to slip away.’

Parmenio was about to go on with his (perfectly accurate) rant, but Alexander’s comment brought him up short.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Parmenio asked. ‘This is not a play. This is not a game. If we fail to break Darius, we are done. We will have lost.’ He was so angry that spittle flew from his mouth.

Alexander’s smile was like the grin of a satyr. ‘Then we’d best win, hadn’t we?’ he said, and his confidence was both infectious and offensive, all at the same time.

Two more days of rain, and we came back to the Pillar of Jonah. Darius could have held it against us for ever, but that wasn’t his style. He wanted a field battle as much as Alexander did. So we began to pass it, led by the Agrianians and the Thracians and Paeonians, who went through as fast as men could swim and run, and then spread out on the far side to give us some cover.

That night, we camped on the heights north of the Pillars, and we could see Darius’s fires like a carpet of fireflies. The weather was mild in the evening, but around midnight the rains returned, drowning out Alexander’s attempt to make a burned offering on an ancient altar in the hills.

I doubt my men were dry, but here’s the value of an old sweat like Isokles – he’d spent time training the new men to build shelters. Recruits build shelters that trap water and soak their cloaks – and then fall down at the first touch of wind. Veterans tend to build tiny, snug shelters that will last out a hurricane and have room for five men as long as the men don’t mind lying atop each other. Warm men can sleep, even if they are damp. Our men built some remarkable shelters that night – I remember them – my favourite of which (remember we were camped on a steep hillside) was a shallow cave with stakes driven deep into the sandy soil at the back – and then the file’s shields carefully laid across the stakes to form a roof of solid wood and hide. With some cloaks and some stolen cloth to pad it out, it was as dry as a bone and warm in there. I know, because that’s where I ate breakfast in the morning. With the rain still pouring down.

I had some old friends to breakfast, because we’d made camp late and were all camped together on the ridge – pezhetaeroi and Agrianians and hypaspitoi and Hetaeroi, too. So Bubores and Astibus shared my hot wine and honey, my barley with local yogurt – and those were a general officer’s provisions, gathered by expert foragers like Ochrid. We were in trouble, and everyone knew it.

Later, I gathered that the yogurt cost me a gold daric. The cost of a good donkey, at home.

Bubores was delighted by the provender, and deeply troubled. Astibus was less concerned, but he kept looking at the rain as he chewed his three-day-old bread, and both of them were damp and less than lively company.

Polystratus made room for Strakos, who pushed in under the shields like a dancer, carefully avoiding putting undue pressure on the supports or shaking water off the shields.

‘What news?’ Polystratus asked the Angelos.

Strakos laughed. ‘Darius has a huge army, and it is still raining,’ he said. He got his cloak off and threw it out into the rain.

Bubores looked at me from under his eyebrows. ‘It’s the wrath of the gods,’ he said quietly.

Astibus rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t start that crap again,’ he said. ‘It’s bad weather, and it is just as bad for the Persians.’

Bubores shrugged. ‘I know what I know,’ he muttered.

‘What do you know?’ I asked. Bubores had a reputation in Aegema as a seer and a bit of an astrologer – self-taught, but still respected.

He rocked back on his heels. He could sit on his heels more comfortably than any man I’d ever seen. ‘There’s a blood offence against the gods,’ he said firmly. ‘It must be expiated.’

This wasn’t just bad morale. This was a serious accusation. Ignoring this kind of thing is what got Parmenio into trouble. ‘Have you spoken to the king?’ I asked.

Bubores shrugged. ‘It is the king’s to answer,’ he said in his deep voice.

Astibus slapped his shoulder. ‘You and your dark premonitions! At Halicarnassus, you said—’

‘It’s the rain,’ Strakos said. ‘The Thracians are openly mutinous. Last night I heard a group of them preparing to desert to Darius.’

Polystratus nodded. ‘There’s men among the Paeonian cavalry who are suggesting the same.’

Polystratus handed me a cup of hot wine, and I drank it – rich with honey, the nectar of the gods. I passed it around. It was my job to tell them that this was all nonsense, and we’d be triumphant in the end, and I was just framing my reply when Cleomenes pointed to the beach below us.

‘Look at him,’ Cleomenes said, awe in his voice.

Alexander had ordered that his four-horse chariot be hitched on the beach. The horses were restless in the rain and thunder – but even in the rain, they gleamed with gold and animal magnificence. Alexander was practically at our feet – as I say, we were eating our barley in a dry cave on a steep hillside in the first light. The rain lashed us, the wind blew straight out to sea from the land, and the king’s pavilion was directly below mine.

Alexander emerged from it naked except for a wreath of gold. He had a good body – his legs were a little short for perfection, and his shoulders were a little narrow, but he was always in top shape, every ridge on his abdomen perfectly defined, and he never minded being seen naked. Now he leaped into his chariot and whipped his horses along the beach, and as he drove them along the front of the army, men stood up, despite the rain, and cheered him.

By the gods, he was the king.

He looked like a god, and the rain didn’t change that. Had he driven in a sodden purple cloak, he’d have looked like a fool, but naked he looked like Poseidon’s son, or Zeus’s, as much a creature of the weather as the horses.

I will never forget the sight. He was a god. What more can I say?

From the far end of the beach – the end closest to the Persians, about twenty-five stades away – he turned the chariot and drove it back along the army at a dead gallop, the wheels throwing sand, the horse’s hooves shaking the earth, so that we could feel his passage upon our ridge. His hair blew out behind him despite the rain.

And then he turned the chariot – right into the sea.

He drove his chariot, horses and all, until the horses were swimming. The weight of their harness dragged them down. They panicked when they were too deep to save themselves – there was a steep drop just off the beach, and the whole chariot, car, team, gold and all, vanished into the dark line of water just off the beach.

The whole beach was stunned into silence. We sat there. Thirty thousand men. Men coughed, and it disturbed the silence. That’s how quiet we were.

The rain stopped.

And just beyond the line where the dark water met the light water, a blond head, dark with wet and crowned with bright green kelp, surfaced.

The sun broke through the clouds.

I was there. The sun came out, and turned his hair to a fiery gold as he walked up the beach.

It was the greatest, most perfect sacrifice I have ever seen, and Poseidon gave us his favour immediately. I think of it every time I make sacrifice. Impiety is for the foolish, lad. I was there.

The army stood as one man, as if it was drill, and bellowed our cheers to Apollo Helios and to Zeus, and to Alexander, son of the gods, crowned by Poseidon.

Bubores was beaming like the sun, pumping his fist in the air, with Astibus pounding him on the back, and even Strakos, who never betrayed emotion, was grinning from ear to ear.

And then, in the light of the warm sun, we donned our sodden equipment and we marched towards Darius.

We marched out of the defile where we’d camped in a column of files. Alexander’s plan was as simple as one of Parmenio’s, with the difference that Alexander played with his plans constantly, so that a string of messengers altered our dispositions all the time.

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.

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 . . .

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.