The Afgan Campaign

18

What saves our lives are Tollo’s fleece and military cloak. With these we roof the shallow kennel that Biscuits has chopped out of the ice. I am struggling, she tells me later, to drag Tollo in with us. It takes Flag pummeling me with both elbows (he can no longer feel his hands) before I understand our Color Sergeant is dead.

“He was croaked at the bottom,” Flag declares.

I’m furious. Why didn’t Flag tell me? He has made us break our backs. But I am in awe of him too. My God, what a soldier! What a friend.

“Strip the corpse!” Biscuits shouts over the wind. Without Tollo’s kit, the three of us cannot survive the night.

Never! I cry. And leave him naked?

The absurdity hits me. Flag too. We start laughing. We can’t stop.

It takes ten minutes to beat Tollo’s garments apart from his frozen flesh. Flag and I remain convulsed. Flag takes the boar’s-tusk cap. This prompts another round of hilarity. Tears freeze round our eyes; ice mats our beards.

Poor Tollo lies naked. Blue with frost. Slippery. We have to moor him like a dinghy, to a half-pike planted in the ice, to keep him from plunging again over the side. We are ashamed of our hysteria but we can’t stop.

We endure the endless night in our ice-hole, Biscuits and I, with Flag between us. His feet ride against my belly; she clamps his hands under her arms. In the morning, we are rescued by advance elements of the column coming up from behind. They prize us from our tomb, rigid as the dead. Incredibly, the day turns warm. By noon, when we reunite with Knuckles and Little Red, sent back in search of us by Stephanos, the sun blazes so fiercely that we have to strip our cloaks. We tie them atop the oxhide sledge on which we haul Tollo’s corpse.

The descent to the plains takes nine more days. It is on this stretch, the northern (sunless) flanks of the Hindu Kush, that the army’s suffering approaches its apogee. We transit the Khawak Pass for six days. It seems we will never get out. Twenty-two miles to the summit, twenty-four more to the Foothill Trail. Flag has vowed to pack Tollo all the way down to the plains; he will not see his mate interred in some icebound den, to be dishonored in spring by wolves or Afghans. But we have no strength to haul his weight. Scores of others labor like we do, sledging the corpses of comrades lost to the cold. In the end we plant Tollo beneath a rock cairn with thirty others. Big rocks, that predators and barbarians can’t shoulder aside.

Each day starts in deep shadow. The sun is up but the peaks block it. Bellies are empty; legs feel like lead. The column packs out. By noon, heaven’s heat is assaulting the peaks above. Now come the avalanches. It is spring. The high melt loosens the snow-mass clinging to the face. Again and again slides bury the trail. It takes forever to dig through. The first day in the pass we make three miles. The third, less than one. The native tiris, underground bunkers where the locals hide their winter stores, cannot be located, even by our guides paid fortunes. The worst is that so much of what we have jettisoned in our extremity is food. Nothing left. We gnaw wax and wood; we eat our spare shoes. The army has trained, in Kabul, to too much leanness; there’s no grease on our bones. And so many are ill equipped in clothing and footgear. Beside the trail, men lie down and do not get up, close their eyes and never open them again.

With hunger, column discipline breaks down. The infuriating hurry-up-and-stop rhythm, common to any line of men strung out one behind the other, becomes lethal as snowslides break the column into sections cut off from one another. Whoever has even a patch of food finds himself under siege from mates starving. A jar of honey goes for six months’ wages. Sesame oil to rub ourselves down against the cold (olive oil is all gone) fetches an empress’s ransom. This was Biscuits’ cargo, but she has dumped it on the Clothesline to help haul Tollo. The order comes to slaughter the pack animals, one per company. No wood to make a fire; we gag the meat down raw.

On the sixth day Alexander appears. Incredibly, our king has trekked back, miles from the column’s head, accompanied by Hephaestion and some pages of his suite. Yes, the troops have cursed his name. Watching comrades perish, no few have condemned our lord for his recklessness to dare this wilderness so early in the season. Now at sight of him, they are struck through with shame. Here before us, in his plain cavalryman’s cloak, stands our sovereign, who could be dining in the warmth of the lowlands by now but has chosen instead to come back to us and bear our sufferings at our side. He does not ride. He walks. He has no food. None for us, none for himself. When the column halts for camp, our lord digs roots of silphium from beneath the snow with the blade of his own pike and on this fodder for goats makes his supper. Seeing a man down, Alexander lifts him with his own hands. Troops at the column’s head, he tells us, will in three days’ time be plucking pears from orchards on Bactria’s sun-warmed plains. Take heart, mates! Bear up! The sufferings we endure now, bitter as they may be, will be made good in the currency of comrades’ lives spared when we descend in the enemy’s rear, where he does not expect us and has prepared no defenses.

The foe will fly, Alexander pledges, struck through with terror by our appearance in strength from these cruel passes, which feat was believed impossible at this season until we did it.