The Afgan Campaign

19

The Bactrian plain, to which the army descends now with joy, is an oasis of green and plenty. The men’s spirits revive at the sight of orchards of pear and plum, and terraced fields of rice and barley. The Bactrians are civilized; they have towns, not villages. In other words, something to lose. Forty places surrender in eleven days. The corps strides in warm sun, on good roads, into Afghanistan’s breadbasket.

Alexander’s gamble has paid off. Bessus and Spitamenes flee north, to put the Oxus River between themselves and their Macedonian pursuers. Signs of the enemy’s hasty decampment are everywhere. The foe has attempted to scorch the country, but the local planters (whose property Bessus and Spitamenes would send up in smoke) have by mighty exertions rescued their goods. They double- and triple-charge us, but we don’t care; we’re so happy to be warm and alive.

At Drapsaca, army engineers erect a vast tent hospital to treat the thousands of cases of frostbite and exposure. The army’s kit is rags; half the corps treks barefoot. Our animals are skin and bones. Still Alexander and the elite brigades make ready to push on. Stephanos calls our mob together. We are free, he says, to enter the hospital. “But if you do, you can kiss your career good-bye. Alexander pursues the enemy now, and he’ll remember the name of every man who marches with him.”

Flag has two black fingers and one gone toe. He chops them off himself with a maul and a sawyer’s wedge. Hundreds do likewise throughout the corps, or have mates do it for them. Men would sooner die than enter the medics’ tent.

The army crosses the Stone Desert in an ordeal of heat and thirst. Three hundred more perish, and seven hundred horses. Alexander reaches the Oxus two days behind the foe. The river is twelve hundred yards wide. Bessus and Spitamenes have crossed, burning their boats behind them. The Mack army pitches camp and starts building bridges and rafts.

Our women are still with us. The ordeals of mountain and desert have transformed them. They have earned our respect and their own. They fear now only the halt, when the corps may decide it no longer needs them. Biscuits paints my sore-pocked soles with vinegar and binds them with moleskin. Ghilla sets bones. Another girl, Jenin, sets up as the outfit’s source for nazz and pank. The women have become indispensable. Even Flag defends them.

Our sergeant has changed, too, since the mountains. Tollo’s death has hit him hard. Grief makes Flag more human. I hear him use the word “son,” addressing Lucas. At Drapsaca, he is awarded a Silver Lion, his fourth. The citation comes with half a talent of silver. Flag pays for the burial of the four women lost in the mountains and arranges a clean abortion, in-hospital by an army doctor, for a fifth. He refits all our kit. What’s left he sends home to Tollo’s kin.

I have come to know this man whom, before, I regarded more with awe and fear than respect. I see the whole of him now. He is a soldier in the noblest sense of the word. Tough, selfless, long-suffering. “Here, this is for you.” He tugs me aside at the town of Taloqan, setting Tollo’s boar’s-tusk cap in my fist.

I can’t wear it.

I don’t deserve it.

But at Flag’s insistence I tuck it inside my pack. “Ghosts are good luck,” he says. He calls our half section together. The second litter will have a new Number One: me.

Can he be joking?

“You’re promoted to Corporal, Matthias. Congratulations.”

From that day, I attend all command briefings. It feels ridiculous. I can’t make myself give orders to Rags or Knuckles or Lucas. “Learn how,” Flag commands. He includes me now in his private thoughts and deliberations. Every noise he gets from up the chain, he shares with me. I can walk up to Stephanos now and address him as if he were a friend. Indeed, he becomes short with me if I don’t.

Flag passes Tollo’s boots and cloak to Biscuits, with ten drachmas (a year’s wages for a porter) from our fallen comrade’s purse. She has earned it. “What gift,” he inquires of her in the squad’s name, “would you like from us?” Name it, our fellows agree, and we will grant it if we can.

“I would like you all,” she declares, “to stop calling me Biscuits.”