The Afgan Campaign

22

Every man in the Jaxartes camp is ordered to pack seven days’ rations. Advance units are dispatched in darkness to the nearest of the Seven Forts. Their orders are to cordon the sites, permitting no man of the foe to escape to bring warning to the others. Additional divisions are sent at first light to ring the farthermost forts. Alexander sends for the siege train. This and the other heavy baggage still have not reached the Jaxartes. Miraculously the column has escaped Spitamenes’ marauders; otherwise it would have been massacred too. Two squadrons of fast cavalry are dispatched to locate these troops and turn them toward the Seven Forts. Rams, bolt catapults, and stone-throwers are never transported assembled. They’re too heavy. Only the iron fittings are conveyed, with the shafts and ratchet wheels of the windlasses, and the torsion bands made of human hair. Wooden members of the artillery are cut and fabricated on-site of local timber. It is a marvel how quickly the engineers can trim up the pieces and get the engines assembled and ready to fire. These will raze the walls of the Seven Forts. All except the largest, Cyropolis, are of mud-brick. They will crack like candy.

Word is passed as the army marshals to move out from the Jaxartes camp: For the first time Alexander permits the troops to take women and children captives under their own hand and sell them for their own profit.

The king addresses our brigade alongside the stock pens as the sky begins to lighten. A drizzle has got up, making the troops, whose hair and clothing are matted with dust from the night’s packing-out, look like men made of mud. Horses stand hobbled, nosebags on; mules bawl as their stockmen wrangle them into trains.

“My friends, no few of you have comrades and friends in the garrisons of the Seven Forts. Give up all hope of finding them alive. The Desert Wolf has no reason to restrain his own savagery or that of his troops. Now answer me, brothers, and speak the truth. Can you govern your hearts in the attack? Can you fight as soldiers and not as wild beasts? If you can’t, say so now and I will leave you here. Make no mistake, I intend that no man of the enemy shall escape our vengeance. But we will do this as an army, not as a rabble. Can you control yourselves? Can I count on you?”

Adana falls in a morning. Alexander does not direct affairs from afar. He goes up a ladder with the first assault. Inside the city, even lads and old men are put to the sword. By midday the troops have crossed the six miles to the second fort, Gaza, already ringed by Polyperchon’s brigade. Our company under Flag and Stephanos is dismounted; we leave the horses on the cordon and go in to take the place by storm.

Inside the gates the fighting is house-to-house. The defenders punch passageways through the party walls; as our fellows clear one room, the foe skips to the next, loosing a cascade of bricks and rubble behind him. If we press too close, he darts round and strikes from the rear. He has learned to shoot through windows and to sling arrows and darts from heights.

You clear houses as a team-a penetration element, an assault element, a security element. One or two troopers break down the door. Their mates burst through in armor, blades first, wheeling to cover both walls. Afghan houses are all the same: a court that branches to two hallways with rooms off each; sometimes a second story, with a stairway and a roof. The assault team pours through the initial breach, then clears the house room by room. If there are two doors, the team goes through both. But the foe is ready for this. He has rigged roof-beams to crash upon us and floors to give way beneath our tread. His women and children duel us from rooftops, slinging tiles and stones.

If we attack from the roof and a man gets wounded, it’s hell to get him back out. Break in from the ground and you’re fighting uphill in pitch black. Interior rooms are windowless. Bursting in is like plunging into a closet. Dust chokes everything; the foe lurks behind screens and crouches within trap-holes. In one house, Dice takes a spear square in the bollocks. Getting him out costs Little Red his ear and a machate dart-a cane arrow with a particularly wicked type of warhead-up under his jaw. We have to cut the head off with iron pliers and pull the thing out point-first, a whisker from his carotid. The foe is a master at playing dead. You pass a corpse in a dark hall and it suddenly springs to life, vaulting at you with daggers in both fists. The enemy slings naphtha in crocks with rag fuses; when they shatter against a wall they paint with flame any luckless scuff the juice splashes on.

There is only one answer to such resistance and that is to leave nothing living. Wounded are slain where they lie. Prisoners are herded into impounds, to be murdered later with their wrists bound behind them and their own pettus bagged over their heads. Mack troops cauterize a district the way a surgeon sears corrupted flesh. Entire quarters are left sterile, razed to ash. You know a position has been neutralized, our colonel Bullock declares, when nothing remains to support a flame.

In five days the army takes all seven cities. I hear fifteen thousand for numbers of enemy slain. Flag says a captain of the king’s staff told him twenty. Alexander himself is gravely wounded, at dawn at Cyropolis, by a blow from a great stone. He recovers by noon, enough at least to show himself and signal the corps not to slacken its assault.

By the sixth day the entire region has been reduced to powder. I have not moved my bowels except in terror the whole time. My eyes are sockets. Dried blood cakes the cracks in my hands and lips. Every inch of flesh is lacerated, abraded, contused. We cannot sit; it’s agony to stand. No one can eat, spit, or piss. We collapse like felled timber and sleep like blocks of stone.

Costas the chronicler finds us amid the rubble. We hate him. We hate everyone who has not burst through doors beside us. To his credit, the correspondent reckons this and treads with delicacy. His presence remains unendurable.

“Do you know what I hate about you wax-scratchers?” Lucas addresses the writer in a tone I have never heard from his gentle soul. “It’s the phony phrases you use to make this shit sound like it makes sense.”

My friend has changed in these six days. We all have. We have had to kill men in cold blood, unarmed men, bound and blindered. There is no option. The foe can’t be held in custody. He can’t be released. Besides, we hate and fear him. We line him up, in ranks twenty-across, and send him to hell as fast as a camp-cook goes through a brace of doves or thrushes. Lucas no longer resists this. He takes part. Like me, he packs an Afghan khofari knife, curved for cutting throats, and wears his whetstone on a rawhide thong around his neck.

“What phrases?” Costas asks.

“‘Subdued the region,’” answers Lucas. “That’s a beauty. I love that one.”

We’re all thinking of Dice and Little Red, and that no chronicler will put out a paragraph about either of them and, if they did, they’d fake it up to conform to some sham notion of honor or integrity. We’re thinking of the sheepfold of Afghan prisoners, whose throats we slit yesterday. Or was it the day before? It’s not fair taking this out on Costas, who’s a decent fellow if the truth be told. We don’t care. “Why can’t you tell it straight?” Lucas demands.

Costas replies that the public only wants certain kinds of stories. There’s no demand for the other kind.

“You mean the true kind,” says Lucas.

“You know what I mean.”

Flag appears in the doorway, or what had been a doorway but is now rubble. “Go easy on the man, Lucas. He’s only trying to earn a living.”

Costas defends himself. What does he, or any correspondent, want? “Just to acquire a modest name, sail home bearing tales of distant lands, and offer them for readings and recitals. What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s wrong, you fuck,” answers Lucas, “is that words have meanings. People believe the bucketwash you put out. They think that’s how it is, particularly young men, who are suckers for tales of glamour and glory. You have an obligation to tell them the truth.”

The phrase Lucas hates most, he says, is “put to death.”

“What the hell does that mean? That we tapped these sheep-stealers on the shoulder and they slipped off to slumber?”

I have never seen Lucas like this. I’m in awe of him. We all are. As each word spits from between his teeth, it’s all we can do to keep from cheering. He feels it and lets it fly.

“Language matters, Costas. Words mean something. How dare you paint over with pretty phrases the acts of horror that turn us, who have to perform them, from soldiers into butchers and from men into beasts? Look at my feet. That black isn’t dirt. I can scour my flesh with lye and caustic: That man-blood never comes out.

“‘Put to death?’ Why don’t you tell it plain? How we hood these luckless bastards in their own cawls, truss their limbs, and bend them over, asshole-to-navel alongside their fellows. Leave the throat bare, orders the sergeant. One stroke, mate. Mind your hand, you don’t dice yourself. Where is that picture in all your ‘chronicles’? Where is the line of living men, on their knees in the dirt with their hands bound behind them? Where are the smocks we wear, like butchers of the charnel house, and how when it’s over we sling every garment into the fire, so deep goes the stink. You don’t tell that, do you? Nor how the men we slaughter writhe on the earth, squirming away from the weapons’ edge, how you have to pin their feet between your legs, or that it takes two of you. What shrift are these victims given? The less the better; none at all if possible. By the time we get to them, they’re so bundled it’s as if we’re butchering packages. Soldiers call them ‘bags.’ Bags of blood. Bags of entrails. God, what a stench when a man’s guts are opened to the air. That doesn’t go into your dispatches, does it? We read nothing about the sound the ‘follow-on’ makes, going down the line of throat-slit men with a club, bashing skulls like walnuts, while the still-living men pray without voices or curse us in gurgling blood or plead for their lives. The silent ones are the scariest. Men with guts. Better men than we are.”

Flag has stood still for Lucas’s tirade, knowing how young soldiers can choke on horror and must be given the chance to spit it out. But he will not endure a word uttered in favor of the foe.

“Were they better men, Lucas, when they flayed our countrymen alive or spitted them over coals?”

“I hate the Afghan,” Lucas replies. “He is a beast and a coward. But what I hate most is he has dragged us down to his level. Can you defend the massacres we enact, Flag? Is this Macedonian honor?”

Our sergeant’s lips decline into a dark smile. “There is no honor in war, my friend. Only in poems of war.”

“Then what is there?”

“Victory.”

The circle falls silent.

“Victory,” repeats Flag, addressing all of us. “Nothing else matters. Not decency, not chivalry. Look war in the face. See it for what it is. You’ll go crazy if you don’t.”

He turns to Lucas.

“I admire you, Lucas. You’re a good soldier and you showed guts to speak your mind. But with respect, my friend, your position is that of a woman. Your words are the words of women. You should be ashamed of yourself, even to think such thoughts, as I know your father and brothers would feel shame if they knew. It is a man’s role to fight, to achieve, to conquer. In what era has it been otherwise? A man’s call, if he is a man, is to exert his supremacy or die trying. As Sarpedon addressed his friend Glaucos, leading him into battle on the field of Troy,

Let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.

“Glory,” replies Lucas, “is in short supply around here.”

Flag rejects this. “Does a lion hesitate? Does an eagle hold back? What is the call of a gallant heart, except to aspire to mighty deeds? Here is the standard Alexander holds before us. By Zeus, men a thousand years unborn will curse bitter fate that they have not strode here at our sides. They will envy us, who have labored in such a cause and wrought such feats as no corps-at-arms will ever achieve again.”

“Like cutting unarmed men’s throats?”

“Would you prefer them armed, Lucas?”

“I’m no coward, Flag. I’ll fight anyone, including you. But I won’t butcher you. I won’t tie your hands and kill you like a pig and call it valor. And if you can perform such acts in good conscience, you’re worse than a woman, you’re a beast.”

Flag comes out of his seat. I spring in front of him.

“Leave Lucas alone, Flag. He’s a man and a Greek to think and ask questions, to question what is right.”

In a moment Flag regains his self-command.

“And what is right, Matthias? Or do you take the enemy’s side too?”

“When we were boys,” I say, “we rode from dark to dark, training for the charge and the chase. We dreamed of standing before our king as knights and heroes. I still do.” I turn to Lucas and the others. “There must be some way to be a good soldier in a rotten war.”

Boxer laughs. “When you find it, Matthias, be sure and let us know.”