The Afgan Campaign

15

The army winters at Bagram, a garrison town built centuries past by Cyrus the Great, in the temperate high valley at the foot of the central massif. Two rivers, the Kophen (or Kabul) and the Panjshir, water a broad, peak-rimmed plain.

The place is paradise for the moment. It possesses abundant cantonments for the army, dry fodder for the animals, and flat ground to train on. The northern passes, we are told, lie already under twenty feet of snow. The accumulation will reach sixty by midwinter. Not even Alexander can figure a way across into Bactria. As Ash predicted, we will not get at Bessus and Spitamenes till spring.

Mule and camel trains continue to work up from Kandahar, bringing armor, weapons, grain, and horses for the coming assault. My brother Elias’s woman has come up with one of the columns. Her name is Daria. Her beauty makes her something of a celebrity, at least among the Macks. The Afghans abhor her-and every other native daughter who has taken up with the invader. She and Elias take apartments in the old section of Kapisa, a pleasant lane under winter mulberry trees and wild plums. They establish a salon. I am able to place Biscuits in her service. A weight off my mind.

The army trains and begins construction of another garrison town. This one will be called Alexandria-under-the-Caucasus.

We see the king all the time now. Every day he makes the rounds of the regiments in training, accompanied by only a couple of couriers and a page or two as bodyguards. He dismounts and instructs the men personally. The troops adore him.

We live in sixteen-man tents with packed-straw floors. The women do the cooking and the service work. Even Lucas has a girl now, the long-legged Ghilla. I am the last of our litter to hold myself apart, though, I confess, I have taken on occasion to visiting the day-raters. Am I faithless to my betrothed? I am drinking more than I used to. You have to, for the cold and the boredom.

Ash has stayed on. The army pays for foddering his stock. He will cross the mountains with us in the spring. The women, he has dismissed. Why feed them, he says, when they can find work in the new town or else catch on as “chickens,” the lowest rung of camp wives.

To my wonder, I have become quite close to the old villain. He has mates everywhere. As rookies, Lucas and I are assigned every drudge detail; we never finish before dark. We wind up taking chow more with the Afghans attached to the army than with our own Macks. In normal times, Ash explains, his tribe, the Dadicai, would be feuding fiercely with at least two or three others. Now, under invasion, they are all the best of mates-Pactyans, including the Apyratai and Hygenni; Thyraoi and Thamanai; Maioni, Sattagyadai, a hundred others. I ask Ash how he can accept employment from Alexander if he hates us so much. “In the end we will drive you out, Meckie.”

And he laughs and passes me another chupattie.

Lucas is still suffering terribly over his killing of the foe on the high line. He experiences shame at his inability to finish the fellow off and feels blameworthy, at the same time, that he did not aid him to save his life. The Afghan’s eyes haunt Lucas’s sleep, reproving. Worse, he confesses, is the visceral memory, which will not leave him, of planting his spear in another man’s guts. I try to make him feel less alone, reckoning his anguish from my own gloryless experience of murder: the sense of horrible pleasure in the instant, succeeded at once by an excruciating remorse, disgust, and chagrin, with yourself and the whole human race, and the sense that you are changed forever, and far, far for the worst. But nothing I can say helps; I’m his peer, as callow as he is. He needs to hear it from someone senior, someone who knows. It is Tollo, of all people, who eases Lucas’s woe.

“Piercing the melon, that’s the toughest.”

He means killing a man with a thrust through the belly, also known as “spilling the groceries.” We’re at work one day on the new city, breaking midday for a feed. “Every buck trooper balks at it. They wave their pike in both hands, like housemaids batting at a rat with a broom. To bury your blade in a living man’s guts-that takes courage. And the feeling never leaves you.”

This is helping Lucas. Tollo sees it.

“The disciplined trooper,” Tollo says, “strikes with both feet planted, eyes on the foe, shoulders square. Trust your weapon and stand fast. You did it right on the high line, Lucas. I saw you. I was proud of you.”

My friend flushes. Tollo grins.

“Think you’re a soldier now?” And he cuffs Lucas affectionately. “But you’re no longer a boy!”

We drill and continue construction of the garrison town. I have never been in training in a force commanded by Alexander. We get more days off than any corps I have heard of. No curfew, no bed check. The whole army knocks off every day from noon till two hours after. Wine is plentiful and cheap. Troopers are exempted from duty to take part in hunts (in fact, training is often replaced by hunting) and are given time off to train at the gymnasiums, which are the first structures the engineers erect, even before chapels and mess halls. Women are permitted throughout the camp, unlike the Old Corps under Philip and Alexander’s original expeditionary force; they may sleep in cantonments with their officer lovers (and in the tents of us scuffs) and may accompany the column in the field. Such are the perquisites of serving in a corps commanded by Alexander. Now to the hard part.

All units in training are in formation under arms at two hours before dawn. No day’s trek is shorter than thirty miles and many are above forty. The pace eats twenty miles before noon, nor are these one-day jaunts, but five and often ten. No mooch but what you carry; run out and you starve. God help the man who develops blisters or worms. In training at home, the sergeants drove you. Here it is the men themselves. Alexander issues no orders. He simply acts. He treks beside the men, on foot, with weapons and armor, and no buck in the army can keep up with him. He trains in all weathers, day and night. An officer who distinguishes himself shall dine in the king’s tent, at the shoulders of great Craterus and Hephaestion. Corporal punishment does not exist in Alexander’s army. Our lord brings us to heel by threat of exclusion from the corps and from his own favor, alongside which fate death itself has no meaning. One disapproving glance from Alexander will plummet the stock of the most decorated vet, while a smile or a word of praise elevates the meanest to renown.

The men are in love with Alexander. This is no overstatement. The troops are aware of his movements, moment by moment, as pack dogs are of the stud wolf. The corps gravitates to his apparition and feeds upon sight of him, as the lover on that of his darling. If any mishap should befall him, the army senses it, even at a remove of miles, and reacts with alarm and distress, which are not allayed until they see their lord again and satisfy themselves that he is whole.

The corps will endure anything for its commander. The most tedious drills are borne without an oath or a grumble. Exercises for which no purpose can be discerned are enacted with a will. At orders from headquarters, we strike camp, stripping the five-mile site to bare dirt. Fresh orders arrive: We unpack and set it up all over again. Building the city, the troops chop frozen sod all day, booze and fornicate all night. They are lean as leopards and as eager for action.

The king has half a hundred Forward Operations units at work in the mountains. My brother Elias and his comrades form one of them. These are elite outfits, composed entirely of Companions, the tallest and handsomest, mounted on the most spectacular stock. Their job is to negotiate with the tribes. They carry gifts of honor-golden cups, Damascene swords-and are authorized to speak and deal in Alexander’s name. They have guides of the Panjshiri, Salangai, and Khawak Pactyans, the tribesmen who inhabit the high valleys and passes that the army must take in spring. Will the clans resist our passage? Their numbers are said to be between 125,000 and 175,000, including the khels and sub- khels of valleys and side-valleys. No invader, including Cyrus the Great, has ever made them yield.

Our training is clearly to take on these trotters. Every battalion has its high-line artillery, to take possession of the commanding heights, and its companies of missile troops. We train in snow boots and fleece bundlers. Engineers and pioneers keep the track out of Kapisa clear, all the way to the head of the Panjshir.

We see the foe constantly. Hundreds winter here, with their families, in the Kabul Valley. Thousands more have descended to milder elevations roundabout. Their sword shops line the lanes in Bagram City. All are mounted and all are armed to the teeth.

Many find employment with the army. We have several in our unofficial mess. I come to know two, Kakuk and Hazar, brothers, about my age. The first word they teach me, indicating themselves, is tashar, meaning wild young bucks. Both are fine fellows, handsome as lions, the former with blond hair, the latter of black, both with great bushy beards of which they are vainer than gamecocks. They care nothing for pay and routinely spree a month’s wages in an evening. They consort with us for the novelty and the adventure. Their kit is the felt Bactrian cap with earflaps, heavy woolen trousers bloused into lambskin boots, vest, waistcoat, and pettu. The sashes round their waists are tribal colors; in them they tuck their lunch, medicine, and their three iron-edged man-killers-short, medium, and long. They are curious as cats. They cannot hear enough about my home country. Each custom I relate sends them spooling into gales of hilarity. More genial companions could not be imagined, though it is plain they will carve our livers, or their fellow Afghans’, over the most trivial matter of honor, and that, when the army marches out in spring, violating the integrity of their territory, they will hurl themselves upon us with all the violence they possess. The pride of the Panjshiris, I learn, is their great valley, which is to them home and heaven. Will Alexander serve up the toll to march through under badraga, official escort? Cyrus did. Or will our king attempt to force his passage? He has never bowed yet to extortion. As with Ash, the brothers, Kakuk and Hazar, see no contradiction between working for Alexander and looking forward to eviscerating him.

It is impossible to dislike these fellows. I find myself envying their proud, free life. Labor is unknown to them. Their ponies graze on sweet grass in summer, dry fodder when the passes close. Their wives and sisters weave their garments, prepare their dal and ghee. Families shelter in stone houses, ownership of which they recite back twenty generations, whose only removable parts are the wooden doors and roofs (in case of evacuation due to feuds). Every kin-group holds two residences, summer and winter. If a rival clan raids, the khels drive them out through superior local knowledge. Should an alien power enter in force, as Cyrus in the past or Alexander now, the tribes withdraw to loftier fastnesses, sending to wider spheres of kinsmen until they assemble the necessary numbers; then they strike.

Nangwali is the Afghan warrior code. Its tenets are nang, honor; badal, revenge; and melmastia, hospitality. Tor, “black,” covers all matters concerning the virtue of women. An affront to a sister or wife’s honor can be made spin, “white,” by no means short of death. Blood feuds, the brothers tell me, start over zar, zan, and zamin: money, women, and land.

In cases of badal, vengeance is taken by father or son. In tor, it’s the husband, except in the case of unmarried women; then all males of the family may not rest until justice has been exacted. The code of nangwali forbids theft, rape, adultery, and false witness; it prosecutes cowardice, abandonment of parents or children, and usury. The code prescribes rites for births and death, armistices, reparations, prayer, almsgiving, and all other passages of life. Poverty is no crime. Reverence for elders is the cardinal virtue, succeeded by patience, humility, silence, and obedience. Statues for hygiene are strict, the brothers swear, though if any were adhered to within my vision, I must have missed it. The view of life is that of a noble resignation to fate. God determines all, the Afghan believes. One can do nothing except be a man and bear up.

As for my guardianship of the girl Biscuits, this will bring trouble, my friends declare. The maid has at least one living brother, a captain of horse serving now with Spitamenes. Kakuk and Hazar know the man, champion of a rival tribe. If I come upon him I must strike without hesitation. In matters of tor, blood is everything. A dead man can always be paid for.

One morning I wake to find Kakuk and Hazar gone. Every other Panjshiri in camp has skipped too. Spring approaches. The buds are on the mulberries. Scouts report tribesmen in the hundreds slipping back into the high valleys, by routes known only to themselves. I quiz Flag for the latest. “The passes,” he says, “are still under twenty feet of snow. Nothing without wings is getting over for at least another month.”

But Ash tells a different tale. The contractors of the pack train are balking, he reports. They won’t take their stock up into the Panjshir, not if the clans are given time to get home and become organized into armies.

That night Alexander calls another pack-up. We strike tents and load up the train, as we have done in a dozen previous drills.

This time it’s no exercise. Two hours before dawn, lead elements of the army are on the march, with the king at the fore, up the track into the Panjshir.