The Afgan Campaign

16

Kabul’s elevation is seven thousand feet. By the second day the column is at nine. The summit, at the Khawak Pass, will be twelve thousand. The date is Artemisius 6. Early. Very early.

The sun burns hot this high, so strong in fact the first day that we strip our winter cloaks and trek bathed in sweat. The string is one mule per man; half the beasts bear nothing but fodder, each man’s pannier is the better part mooch. Even cavalry mounts are loaded; they carry their own snow boots, blankets, and wrappers. The army packs no heavy baggage and few dependents. These will follow at a safer time. The women porters trek with us. Alexander has doubled their wages; the overage will be paid to them, not their handlers. Biscuits hikes with me, Ghilla with Lucas.

The column marches in four sections. The vanguard breaks the trail. These are army engineers. Their division leads three thousands camels, laden with timber posts and beams, cables, ropes, planking, and fittings; they will fabricate bridges to span the torrents and gorges in spate. The van drives sheep and oxen as well, not only to drag timbers for the construction but to beat down the trail-and to be slaughtered for meat. To protect the fore elements, the engineers have archers, slingers, and javelineers, mercenary cavalry of Lydia, Armenia, and Media, with hired Afghans of the west, mountain troops who hate the Panjshiri, and our own Mack pioneers. The latter are miscreants of the army, stripped of the privilege of bearing arms, and handed axes and mattocks instead. The poor scuffs are clearing tracks through twenty- and thirty-foot-high drifts. Alexander and the elite units come next, the agema of the Companions, the Royal Guardsmen, battalions of Perdiccas’s and Craterus’s crack brigades, with Agrianian javelineers, Cretan archers, and other specialized mountain companies, including combat engineers with stone-throwers and bolt-hurlers. These divisions will take the foe in strength, here in the Panjshir if the tribesmen contest our passage, and on the plains of Bactria beyond, when the king overhauls Bessus’s and Spitamenes’ cavalry. Next the central phalanx brigades, including ours, Hephaestion’s and Ptolemy’s, and the nondetached battalions of Perdiccas and Craterus; then the heavy sections; then the light brigades of Erygius, Attalus, Gorgias, Meleager, and Polyperchon, along with mercenary and Iranian cavalry. The baggage, such as there is, comes between them and the rear guard, composed of other foreign contingents and native light troops. The total is nearly fifty thousand.

Up we go. Winter has broken with a vengeance; spring torrents thunder down the gorges, the color of mud. The summit is supposed to take thirteen days. The track runs straight through the Panjshir. Seventy miles. Scores of tributary valleys branch from this central axis. Each donates its plunging cataract, glacier-spawned, and each descends with deafening fury. No non-Panjshiri has ever been back in these fastnesses.

“When we reach the summit,” Rags relays the army bucketwash, “we’ll be at twelve thousand feet. The Khawak Pass starts here. Forty-seven miles long.”

The first storm strikes on the third day. Hail first, then snow, then hail again. Stones the size of sling bullets make us break out shields and helmets, beneath which we hunker, on our knees against any outcrop we can find, while the mules and horses bunch in mute misery till the drubbing ceases. The trail has gone to ice. Every rope and line is encased in the stuff; the slopes glisten, sheer and treacherous. A frigid wind whips in the wake of the storm. We are drenched, every one, and shivering like colts. “Up, lads! Keep moving!”

The column has entered the Panjshir proper. The valley is beautiful, far broader than I had imagined, and not, despite its elevation, particularly “mountainous.” Great terraces are carved, our guides tell us, beneath the snow; in fall the natives harvest rice, barley, cucumbers, lentils, and broad beans from hillsides that now dazzle blindingly. Whole orchards hide beneath the snowpack-mulberries and pears, pistachios, wild plums, and more apricots, we are told, than can be loaded onto mules and driven to market.

We make camp early in the middle of a second storm. We can’t spread fodder for the animals; hail and sleet drench it instantly. We feed them using nosebags, themselves frozen, lashed to frozen halters. There’s no wood, so no fires. Chow is cold kishar, goat meat, and curds gone to ice. I choke down a frost-ball onion. “Day three,” grins Flag. “Only ten more to the summit.”

We bonze in a huddle, women too, using the tethered beasts as windbreaks. Twice in the night we hear attacks resound at a distance up the column. We’re too wretched even to budge. I’m squeezed between Biscuits and Lucas when I feel a rhythmic thrusting somewhere south of my soles. “Tollo, you swine!” Laughter follows.

“Just trying to keep from freezing, mate.”

No one sleeps that night or the next. Each soul prays for sunrise, which comes late because the peaks block the sun’s warmth till midmorning. By noon men have stripped naked, despite the cold, except for their boots. We trek, spreading our sodden gear atop the pack rigs, letting the gale whip it dry.

“You’re not really wet,” pronounces Tollo, “till the crease of your ass is soaked.”

“It’s soaked!”

“Then may the gods bless you.”

Stephanos cheers the men by predicting victory in Bactria. We’ll catch Bessus and Spitamenes, he swears, with their bollocks in the breeze. Why? “Because they’re men of intelligence. It’s beyond their imagination to believe that anyone in their right salt-sucking mind would cross these mountains at this season.”

Day five. We trek, two miles high now. Storms strike morning and evening, dumping snow and hail, then dispelling to vapor, followed by fierce sun. Now comes the melt. The whole mountain weeps. A thousand rills and runnels come flushing from the rock, racing together into tributary torrents, then plunging as cataracts to the river below. The stone has been splintered over millennia; it’s all scree and shingle, poised to slide. Step wrong and you’re in the books, as soldiers say. It’s the same all the way to Khawak, so we hear, only up there it gets worse. At that elevation, nearing three miles high, rivers become glaciers, rimmed by slatey, unstable moraines, the only avenues of passage. The ice fields themselves are untrekkable, wide as half a mile, crazed with fissures, cracks, and crevasses, and upshot with great jumbled towers of ice.

The fifth noon the male porters revolt. About a hundred serve our division; they dump their loads and refuse to climb farther. They want more pay. Stephanos is our section commander. What can he do, massacre them? He capitulates, paying out of his own purse (the porters refuse army chits).

All night hail and snow pound the camp; in the morning it takes hours to shake the rebels out of their dens. Now the muleteers revolt too. Ash is one of their leaders. They are not warriors! They did not sign up for such an ordeal!

Ash wants his mules back. They all do. Stephanos and the other officers spend half the morning negotiating. The column is breaking apart. Forward elements push on without us. Gaps open. Behind us, other revolts must be in progress because no section is pressing us from the rear. By noon Stephanos succeeds in quelling the insurrection. The sun has returned; optimism rekindles. But within an hour purple clouds descend, temperature plummets, deluges of sleet and hail thunder down. The gale is so fierce a man can’t advance a pace into it; even the mules spill and tumble on the treacherous underfoot. We make camp three hours before dark, simply because it’s impossible to go on.

I search for Ash. He has vanished. So have the other muleteers. They have abandoned their stock, their livelihood, preferring to take their chances, alone and afoot, on the trail back down.

Darkness descends. Our bones rattle with the cold. The women endure it, uncomplaining. At night Biscuits sleeps barefoot, with her foot-wraps round her chest to dry, burying her soles for warmth against another girl’s belly, for whom, beneath her own pettu, she performs the same favor. She has me protect my hands under the tucks of her arms. We learn to site our sleeping hole out of the narrow gorges, where gales howl. It’s better in the wide parts of the trail, or in the lee of an outcrop if you can find one before your mates do. Nights are unbearable, no matter what you do.

“Only eight more wake-ups,” says Flag.

Dawn: Stephanos has the Macks fall in under arms. We roust the male porters from their snowholes. Before they can issue the next ultimatum, Stephanos publishes his own: Get out! Hell take you-and your loads. At spearpoint, we drive the mob back down the trail. They want food. Indeed, answers Stephanos, I’m sure you do. We want our fleeces and shelters, they cry. “Come and take them,” replies Stephanos, quoting Leonidas.

The porters yield. Stephanos harangues them. Press on to the Khawak! Downhill from there! Bonuses for all in Bactria!

We make a good day, and another after that. Where is the summit? We have lost touch with the column in front and behind. Our shikaris are useless; they don’t know the mountain. Each storm buries the trail deeper. Sun is worse. Its heat spawns avalanches. None have threatened our section yet. But their great falls, plunging ahead, wipe out the trail. It takes hours to break a new one and when we emerge on the far side, only prayer reassures us we have not lost our way.

The seventh day, fodder runs out for the mules and horses. We ourselves have been on half rations since the fourth dawn. My belly echoes like a hollow tank. Each step has become agony. “Tollo,” I say, laboring beside him. “Should we be getting worried?”

“Put your faith,” he says, “in the benevolent gods.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in the gods.”

“I don’t.”

We hear no more talk of mutiny. Porters trek tight beside us. We will live or die together.

This is the way peril overhauls you. One hand’s-breadth at a time. Suddenly you’re in it. I glance to Lucas. Even in his pinpointers, bundled like a bear, I read his apprehension. The issue is no longer war. It has become survival.

Night seven: Two rangers stagger into camp, sent back from the section before us to guide us on. A village! Just three miles ahead! The natives’ bunkers, beneath the snow, hold food and fodder. We survive another interminable siege of darkness, succored by hope.

All next day the section treks in a stiff gale. This is good; it means we’re near the summit. Around noon we spot fresh graves. Our own countrymen, from the sections ahead. With shame we welcome the sight. It means we’re still on the trail. Mountain sickness adds to our woes. No one can eat; you can’t keep anything down. We are weak and disoriented. The simplest chore becomes monumental. You recall, say, a chunk of jerked meat in your kit. Now try and get it. To wring one mitt off your fist takes the count of fifty. By then you’ve forgotten what you took it off for. Two fellows put up their pinpointers and forget to tug them down; they go snow-blind. They must be roped and led.

We put our heads down and march. Each man recedes into his own cylinder of pain. You see your own feet and hear the crunch of your tread. Where are our guides? The rangers told us that men have been posted along the trail to wait for us and steer us in. Lucas works up beside me as we trek. “Something’s wrong.” He indicates the sun. “We’re heading northeast.”

“Where should we be heading?”

“I don’t know. But not there.”

The trail twines in so many directions, turning up switchbacks and across shoulders and ridgelines. Who can tell anything?

Traversing such a wilderness, you find yourself naming landmarks. A knife-edge crest: “The Clothesline.” “Two Towers.” “The Ice House.” Where is the village? Can there really be mooch ahead? Will we have a fire?

Postnoon. We trek a ridge of slate and shingle. A glacial moraine, gouged by the great frozen river that has cut this basin. Glare is fierce; gaps open in the column again and again. The event becomes normal, prompting no alarm. We’re blind anyway.

Suddenly a commotion ahead. The village? A line of our countrymen churns past us in the opposite direction.

Wrong way, brothers.

We’ve lost the trail.

Gone up the wrong valley.

“Brilliant work, mates!”

“What genius is in charge of this bung-fuck?”

Men and animals beat past us, heading back down the way we came. I grab Lucas. “This is serious.”

No one has panicked yet. But we feel chaos coming. We turn back down the track. The column becomes even more dislocated, as some litters countermarch, cutting into the line hastening back down the moraine. Bad luck never arrives in isolation. Now: a fresh storm. The heavens go purple; gales howl; the cold hits us like a wall of ice.

Men are shoving and heaving. Troops push past in mounting terror. The mules and horses have caught fright too. “Halt in place!” Stephanos bawls, striding the length of the column. “Brothers, get ahold of yourselves!” He calls mates by name, summoning them to order. It works. March integrity is restored.

The women are the strongest. Not one dumps her load or makes a move to bolt. Biscuits and Ghilla stay tight to me and Lucas. “Ka’neesha?” I shout into the gale. Are you all right? They nod, muffled from sole to crown. The column starts again. Three hours till darkness. No orders have been passed, but every man understands: We must regain the trail and find the village. No one will survive a night in this storm.

Down we go. Past the Ice House. Past the Two Towers.

Now the Clothesline. An exposed backbone crest, five hundred paces end to end. A plume of snow blasts laterally, driven by the gale. We must trek in the lee, meaning blind in the blow-off. “Rope up! No exceptions!”

The column traverses the spine by steps cut from the ice during our earlier crossing. Use your half-pike. Plunge it, butt-spike-first, into the slope; give it the count of two to set; then haul yourself forward. Two steps, then plant again and belay your mate behind you. Everyone together. Amazingly, we make it.

“The trail!”

Joy flashes the length of the column. Our guides cry from ahead. Shelter! Shelter by nightfall! In jubilation we pound each other’s bundled shoulders and backs. Head count! The column forms up to start again.

“Where’s Tollo?”

It’s Flag, checking the roster.

“I saw him,” Little Red points back, “just before we crossed.”

“Where is he now?”

No one knows.

Flag works back along the column. Pulling off mufflers and pinpointers. Examining every face.

“Was he roped? Who saw him rope up?”

The column has gotten off the pitch now. Out of the gale. A face of the mountain protects us. We feel almost warm.

Behind us the Clothesline howls in the open.

Flag comes back. He hasn’t found Tollo. “Go on!” he commands, driving us forward in the direction of the village.

“What about you, Flag?”

“Get moving!”

Lucas and I hold up. We can see Flag and Red go at each other. We can’t hear much. Red points down the ice face.

“…if Tollo’s down there, he’s bought his ticket!”

Flag turns away. We can see him hauling rope and a hatchet from the pack of a mule. Red rejoins the column, moving on. The mass shuffles forward, toward the village. Lucas and I look at each other.

“I’ll stay,” he says.

I look in his eyes. He’s worse off than me. He’ll freeze in an hour.

“No.” I’m an idiot. “You go on.”

A push gets Lucas started.

“Save me something warm.”