The Afgan Campaign

8

I am too ashamed to take chow that night. Tollo has to order me. I strip my clothes but can’t wash them. “Burn ’em,” says Flag.

Our outfit is on the trot two hours before dawn, Lucas and I mounted on yaboos, with our pack-asses with the trailers following on. Chase-riders of our outfit have kept up all night with those Afghans who got away. They guide us by stations. The enemy’s numbers are about fifty, half horseback and half on foot; we are above two hundred, all mounted, leaving aside those wounded and others left behind to hold the village and to raze three more settlements down-valley.

We ride four days. The word for that country is tora balan, “black stones.” Waterless badlands creased by serried basalt ridges. It’s like riding down the streets of a city. You proceed by canyons pinched between ridges, whose courses may be blind or dry or both. Ten times a day we backtrack out of dead ends. Our party has Afghan guides, but they’re worthless except to find water and forage, and the only reason they do this is so they themselves don’t starve. Our mounts wear down after the second day. The pursuit looks more like a death march. At night we collapse like corpses.

I haven’t slept since the village. When I close my eyes I hear women screaming and see the old man pitch headless into my lap.

I have resolved to murder no innocents. I can tell this to no one, not even Lucas. I try but he will not hear it.

“Did you kill anyone in the village?” I ask as we settle the first night, apart from the others, into our bedrolls. He did not. I ask what he will do.

“What do you mean?”

“Next time. What will you do?”

My friend kicks his groundcloth open.

“What will I do? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Exactly what you’ll do. I’ll do what they tell me to. I’ll do what Flag and Tollo tell me to!”

He hears the anger in his voice and looks away, ashamed.

“Don’t bring this up anymore, Matthias. I don’t want to hear it. Whatever you’re thinking, keep it to yourself!”

And he pulls his ground cover over him and turns his back.

I am thinking that we are like criminals. When a new man is initiated into the confederacy of murderers, his seniors make him commit the same crime they have. Now he is as guilty as they. He cannot turn on them. He is one of them.

I tell this to Flag. “You’re still thinking,” he says.

The sixth noon we top a rise and there they are-a ragged column of shoeless, dismounted fugitives. About two dozen, tracking single-file along the base of a black stone ridge. Afghans look different from Macks at a distance. A column of ours would bristle with spearshafts and lanceheads. The Afghan fights with bow and sling, and with three knives-small, medium, and large-which he carries along with his mooch in a belt-sash called a gitwa.

The Afghans get away. When we rush them, they climb like goats, slinging boulders down behind them and setting off slides, which start out as pea-rollers and build into avalanches by the time they drive us onto our bellies in the scree. A rock the size of an army kettle screams past my ear, hurtling like a sling bullet. Horses can’t climb that shingle; we have to chase on foot. We don’t come within a hundred feet of the foe. He tops the crest and turns into smoke.

We chase him two more days, on foot now, leading our exhausted ponies. Our guides have vanished. We’re lost. Everything turns now on finding water; if we spot a trickle at noon, we don’t dare chase too far, for fear of finding no more and not making it back by night. Making camp beside a mudhole the sixth evening, Flag sends me and all the other rookies searching for a spring. I’m by myself, tramping down a dry canyon. I come round a corner. Ten feet away, an Afghan squats in the dust, taking a shit.

My first impulse is to apologize. It occurs to me, with ridiculous blandness, that this is the enemy. He’s staring at me, as frozen with astonishment as I am. I want to shout for my mates. Nothing comes. Terror has stricken me mute.

The Afghan is on his feet now. He’s about thirty, with black eyes set in a beard as dense as a curry brush. I’m paralyzed. I think: Maybe I can scare him. I lunge two steps, thrusting my half-pike. Fear fills his eyes. He gulps one breath and hurls himself at me. Before I can think, he has catapulted past my spearpoint; he seizes the shaft in both fists. He pulls. I pull. We’re having a tug-of-war.

The fellow is shouting now. It occurs to me that he must have been standing sentry. There’s probably an Afghan camp a hundred feet round the corner.

Now I’m screaming. Flag! Tollo! The Afghan releases my spear-shaft and flings himself on me. He seems to have forgotten he has weapons. His fingers claw at my eye sockets, his teeth sink into my shoulder. We tumble together in the dust, which is fine as powder and hot as ashes in the sun. I am not frightened now. I am embarrassed. The idea that I will die in this ludicrous manner propels me to prodigies. I lurch free. Both hands are empty. I feel naked and blind with rage at my own stupidity. The Afghan has found his dagger. I grab a rock the size of a boot. The man thrusts at me; I feel his blade tangle in my cloak as I smash the stone with all my strength into his face. I can hear his teeth shatter. He reels and falls. I drop on him with my full weight, breastbone to breastbone.

I beat his brains out with the stone. It takes no time. I feel the skull crack and the hot soup gush over my fingers. Voices cry above me. Three men of the Afghans sprint into view just as Tollo, Rags, and two mercs whose names I don’t know race up from behind me.

Fear, men say, is the most primal emotion. I don’t believe it. Shame is. My feeling as Tollo bolts past after the foe is one of joy and relief, that my senior sergeant has seen me take down my man, however clumsily, and profound release that my humiliation from the village has been at least partly effaced.

More of our fellows pound past. I join the pack. Flag and Lucas sprint ahead. I experience elation, not so much to have slain a man as to have survived him trying to slay me. I race down the canyon. In a shaft of sunlight squats the Afghan camp. Our fellows fall on the foe like wolves. I plunge into the melee. I want frantically to kill again, as quickly as possible and as many of the enemy as I can, not out of lust for blood, but because I can feel the return of my own terror, looming moments away like a wave. I must perform some act of valor before it crashes over me. I dash past a hollow in the canyon wall; two mercs have pinned a lone Afghan but hang back at full shafts’-length, poking at him with their lanceheads. My appearance tips the tide. Three-on-one, we spit the poor fellow like a fish on a spear. He thrashes, impaled, struggling to twist free of our shafts buried in his guts. “Kill him!” all three of us are shouting preposterously. We drive the man back against the canyon wall till we can feel our spearheads, through his belly, scraping stone. His eyes are so human! He is a man, not an animal. The sight of his agony wrenches my heart. A thrust from the first merc finishes him; he drops, dead weight. My mates dance over him, a jig less of triumph than of release from fear. I shout something and haul my comrades into the pursuit. To my astonishment they follow me.

The day ends with a horse chase, in which Stephanos and six of our mercs run down the last fugitives. They bring back four prisoners. Our kill is seventeen. We suffer one dead (the lead merc who bolted past me alongside Tollo) and three wounded, one of them my mate Boxer, breaking his ankle in a fall. Night descends. Our fellows make prizes of the dead men’s weapons. They wolf a meal of the enemy’s mooch and toast their backs around blazes of his firewood. Two Afghans have fallen by my hand this day. Later, I will see their faces in my dreams. Later, remorse will torment me. Later, but now. Now I am happy. I feel pride as I abrade my forearms with Afghan dust, chafing off the blood of men who would have killed me and my comrades if they could. Sleep finds me guiltless and unrepentant. I have never been happier in my life.