The Afgan Campaign

11

Alexander enters from the wing and mounts to the stage with a single athletic bound. A sigh expels from the company. There he is!

Twenty-six days’ trek has taken us to Phrada, southern Afghanistan. On our right, the column skirts the Dasht-i-Margo, the Desert of Death. To the left ascend the foothills of the Paropamisus (“that over which the eagle cannot fly”) and, beyond, the shoulders of the Hindu Kush. We can see the peaks a hundred miles off, already mantled with snow. Here, on the military highway, the grit underfoot is blistering. The night crawls with adders and scorpions.

It is autumn. The Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days has begun. For four days in Phrada, our companies-those Macks who will be integrated into the regular corps-are assembled at dawn to be addressed by our king. For four days Alexander doesn’t show. We stand down each time, to hunker wretchedly in the furnace-blast of the gale.

What makes Afghanistan so miserable is there’s no shelter. The wind howls out of the mountains with not a twig to break its rush. Terrain is spectacular, but its beauty, if you can call it that, is stern and unforgiving. No trees intercept the rain, which descends, when it does, in volumes unimaginable. In the hot season you bind covers round every surface of metal exposed to the sun. To touch them unprotected blisters you to the bone. Now comes the wind.

To trek in such a gale is like marching in a tunnel. The universe contracts to the cylinder between your muffled eyes and the rucksack of the man in front of you. Where are we? As usual, nobody tells us. On a downgrade somewhere east of Lake Seistan, a colorful-looking fellow overhauls the column, driving a two-mule wagon. “Halloo, the highway!” he bawls, trying to use his downhill momentum to work through the jam. We are jostled onto the shoulder. The tourist is a chronicler, one of the cohort of freeloading correspondents who have attached themselves to Alexander’s party, pledging to record for posterity all exploits of the expedition. Soldiers love and hate these half-obol Homers, whom they perceive as spectating from safety upon that stage where they, the troops, bleed real blood. Still they are here with us, these ink-mice, eating the same dust and shaking the same serpents out of their boots. Besides, they know the news.

“Hey, wax-scratcher!” Tollo hails the fellow. “What’s the story!”

The chronicler brightens, hearing our sergeant’s brogue. “Are you Macks?” The column is all Achaeans and Lycians. “What are you doing back here?”

“You tell us, you’re the one in the know.”

“Where are you from?”

This is the question all correspondents ask soldiers. It makes suckers of us, as it must every other mob of witless scuffs. We shout out our hometowns, as if we believe our new crony will record them in his dispatches and make us famous.

The correspondent’s name is Costas. He has the dandy’s look of an actor or musician; the kind of good-looking, glib fellow who has never plowed a row in his life. Like many of his colleagues, he affects a soldierly aspect; he wears a military cloak and a desert cap with a floppy brim. “Why don’t you write a book about us? ” Rags calls to him. “We’re the real army.”

“I would,” the chronicler laughs. “But who’d read it?”

The column pushes south to Phrada. Finally, on the fifth dawn, our king’s standard appears. Royal pages and knights of the Life Guard shuttle us again into a stockade in the lee of a scarp, a site that had been a ring for horse auctions. The gale relents. Alexander enters.

It is as if the sun has been lowered in on a rope. All gloom is dispelled; the daylight, which had been flat and featureless, turns golden bright. I have not expected our lord to be so handsome. He wears a plain cavalry cloak with no insignia of rank or kingship. He is taller than I had expected. I think: This must have been what it was like to behold Perseus or Bellerophon, or Achilles himself. Citations erupt and will not cease despite the king’s extended arms and his calls for silence. He grins. He looks impossibly young. His athletic bearing augments the impression of boyishness, and his clean-shaven good looks enlarge the sense of youth and vigor.

“Gentlemen!” We read his lips, though no sound can be heard above the clamor. “My friends, please…”

When the uproar abates, Alexander welcomes us, informing us that we are no longer replacements. We are soldiers of the expeditionary force. We shall commence drawing combat pay from the date of our arrival at Artacoana, and all expenses of the out-march will be reimbursed. We will be assigned to regiments. I witness for the first time that faculty of the king’s, which has been so much remarked upon, that is, his knowledge of men’s names and faces. He scans the foremost ranks, greeting fellows by name and patronymic and remarking with an easy jest upon older brothers or fathers who have served with the corps from its inception and exhorting them, the newcomers, to live up to their elders’ fame. “Believe me, brothers, there is still plenty of glory to be won-and plenty of loot!”

The hall erupts again. Alexander speaks briefly of the current campaign and lays out his design for the operations to come. The fight, he says, will soon be over. All that remains is the pursuit of an enemy who is already on the run and the killing or capturing of commanders who are already beaten. We will be out of here by fall, he pledges, and on to India, whose riches and plunder will dwarf even the vast treasure of Persia. “That said,” Alexander adds, “no foe, however primitive, should be taken lightly, and we shall not commit that error here.”

At once his expression becomes grave. He strides to the prow of the platform, which had been the auctioneer’s stand, and steps out onto its cornice, as if to get as close as possible to his neophyte troopers.

“My friends, brief as your sojourn in the Afghan kingdoms has been, you cannot have failed to notice that we are fighting, here, a different kind of war. You may feel, some of you, that this is not what you signed up for. These are not the fields of glory of which you dreamed. Understand: The actions we take in this campaign are as legitimate as those enacted in any other. This is not conventional warfare. It is unconventional. And we must fight it in an unconventional way.

“Here the foe will not meet us in pitched battle, as other armies we have dueled in the past, save under conditions of his own choosing. His word to us is worthless. He routinely violates truces; he betrays the peace. When we defeat him, he will not accept our dominion. He comes back again and again. He hates us with a passion whose depth is exceeded only by his patience and his capacity for suffering. His boys and old men, even his women, fight us as combatants. They do not do this openly, however, but instead present themselves as innocents, even as victims, seeking our aid. When we show compassion, they strike with stealth. You have all seen what they do to us when they take us alive.

“Please note, my friends, that I have made good and generous offers to the native peoples. I intend them no harm. I would make them our allies and friends. I abhor this kind of fighting. If an alternative existed, I would seize it at once. But the foe will not have it. We have seen his methods. We have no choice but to adapt to them.”

The king speaks of will-our own and the enemy’s. The foe, he declares, has no chance of overcoming us in the field. But if he can sap our resolution by his doggedness, his relentlessness; if he can appall us by his acts of barbarity, he can, if not defeat us, then prevent us from defeating him. Our will must master the enemy’s. Our resolve must outlast his.

“The types of operations we are now compelled to wage; methods of pursuit, of capture and interrogation; the treatment of so-called noncombatants; all actions we take in this theater-these are war too. And you are the warriors who must perform these acts. That said, I am not insensitive to the fact that numbers of you have fathers and brothers who have sought and found glory in an entirely different kind of war, and that you may not have the stomach for this sterner, less illustrious type. It is not my object to compel you. Nor will I force a voice vote here on the spot, for I know that, with the influence of your comrades upon you, many will cry out with enthusiasm for any course I suggest, and this will intimidate others and carry them, like one of these swift Afghan rivers, along a course they do not in their hearts wish to follow.

“Therefore let this assembly conclude. Let the evening and the morrow pass. Take time, each of you, to consult his own heart, to confer with his mates. Decide what you want to do. Do you, then, speak in private with your sergeants and warrant officers. If you believe you cannot participate in this war, either the corps will find other ways to use you, in supply, support, or garrison service, or, if you so desire, you may join one of the columns returning home, with no hard feelings and full pay for time in service, including the trek to Macedon. Full pay and bonuses for those who remain.”

At this, the assembly explodes. Alexander again calls for silence.

“But if you elect to remain, my friends, know what I demand of you: that you commit yourselves wholeheartedly to this undertaking. No grumbling. No holding back. Fight alongside your officers and comrades; fight alongside your king. Know that it is my object to bring into subjection all lands formerly held by the throne of Persia. That means India. It means Afghanistan. Make no mistake, this country is vital to our cause. It constitutes the gateway to the Punjab, the indispensable highway between West and East; it must be subdued before we can move on.

“More important perhaps, the Bactrian plain has been for centuries the invasion route for Scythian nomads. These barbarians have ravaged this country again and again, sweeping down out of the Wild Lands to the north and fleeing back into them. Along this frontier, two hundred years ago, Cyrus the Great erected a wall of forts to keep out these savages. Here he himself fell, cut down by the horse tribesmen we call Massagetae. He failed. We shall not. We will pursue the barbarian into his sanctuaries and strike such terror that he will beg for peace. This country must be secured. That is what you are here to do, and that is what we shall do. When the job is done, we will cross the Hindu Kush into India, where I hope to find and to deliver into your hands not only wealth beyond even that which we now possess, but a more honorable form of enemy and a nobler kind of war.

“But before India comes Afghanistan.

“That’s it, my friends. Get some meat in your bellies. Find a place to rest your bones. I know the trials of this theater are not what you expected. But you are proud sons of a celebrated nation. As your fathers and brothers have overcome every force of man or nature, so shall you, never fear. Rest today. Tomorrow you will join your regiments.”