The Afgan Campaign

32

The army pushes north in five columns spread across 280 miles. Commanders are Hephaestion, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Coenus and Artabazus jointly, and Alexander himself. Areas in-between are “wolf country,” enemy territory, across which the foe moves with impunity. Brigade commanders dispatch patrols into these deserts. These operations are of three types-probes, penetrations, and reconnaissances-in-force. The first may be comprised of as few as two or three men, the second and third of up to hundreds. All aims are the same-to find and track the enemy, take prisoners, bring back intelligence of any kind that will permit our columns to hedge off and close with the foe.

Before the Big Push, Alexander calls the army together. The force assembles at Bactra City beneath the great fortress of Bal Teghrib, “Stone Mountain,” whose slopes hold a hundred thousand.

“Brothers, are you tired of this war?”

The corps erupts.

“I am!” Alexander cries. “By the rivers of hell, I am!”

Our lord likens Afghanistan to a great dusty floor. He intends to sweep it clean. We start here where we stand, in Bactra City, and drive north, subduing every village and camp, however remote, and reducing every stronghold as we go. Indeed, Alexander acknowledges, we will be bringing into submission the same country we vanquished in last year’s campaign. This time we will make it stick.

“Note this, you officers who will be dictating dispatches and situation reports. There is a phrase I wish never to read: pockets of resistance.”

Again the army roars.

“We shall leave no pockets of resistance. The unsubdued foe-man, woman, or child-shall be driven before us, north toward the Oxus, and beyond across the Jaxartes. Along the way we shall found a mighty string of forts. We will cut off the foe’s lines of retreat. Where he shelters, we will rout him out. We will make all Afghanistan between here and the Wild Lands hostile to him. He shall find no patch of green to graze his stock and no shade to get his men out of the sun. This will be our summer’s work, my friends. And when it is done we will not go into winter quarters. We will pursue the enemy into his sanctuaries. We will hunt him down and kill him. I do not intend to spend another winter in this sphere of hell, do you?”

The corps answers with a tumult of spearshafts clashing on shields.

“Spitamenes! He is the head of the hydra. Slay him and the serpent dies. Every act we take must have this object: Bring the Wolf to battle!”

Alexander underscores one final point: that in this campaign, columns and individual units will of necessity be dispersed across hundreds of miles and thus out of communication with higher command. Junior officers, and even sergeants and corporals must act on their own.

“Act for this then, men, and I shall never fault you: Find the Wolf! Attack him! Drive him toward our allied columns! Brothers, I pledge this night his weight in gold to that man who brings me Spitamenes-the living man or his head!”

Thunder breaks across the plain, as it does in that season. The army’s ovation joins the storm in riotous uproar.

I am sitting between Flag and Stephanos as Alexander finishes.

“Sounds easy, doesn’t it?” observes the poet.

Flag rises, scratching his buttocks. “Nothing to it.”

The columns roll out of Bactra City next morning. The king’s division takes the rightmost track, the ancient camel trace across the spurs of Paraetacae toward Cyropolis. Our column under Coenus parallels his advance, sixty miles west. West of ours comes Ptolemy’s brigade, then Perdiccas’s, and Hephaestion’s. It takes all day for the full force to get clear of the city and another five for each division to reach its assigned axis. The blank spaces between columns are so vast-two days’ ride at some points-that existing reconnaissance elements can’t cover them all. New companies must be formed.

Our section under Stephanos becomes one of these. This is good news. It means bonuses and hazard pay, and it gets us out from under column discipline. It’s also, by far, the most dangerous duty we’ve ever undertaken.

It is no small thing to set out into such country with five men or ten, guided by shikaris who are almost certainly working for the foe and, if they’re not, stand ready to go over at a moment’s notice. When contact is made with the enemy, riders must be sent back to column. The Afghan knows this. He lets you spot him, then picks off the lone courier or the pair galloping in tandem. If his party is numerous enough, he takes on your whole patrol. He gets behind you, cuts you off from the way you came. The enemy loves to attack out of the rising or setting sun. In the mountains, vales and even shadows can conceal battalions. In prairie country, dust storms building late in the day provide cover behind which the foe maneuvers and strikes. The tribesman appears along your track, where you think only your own men are coming from. He knows how to use glare to blind you and grit and rain to obscure his numbers. Suddenly he’s on top of you.

The foe has other tricks. One is to lure a lesser detachment into trouble, then ambush the more numerous column dispatched to its aid. Another ruse is the counterfeit convoy. The enemy baits our patrols with a slow caravan or a herd of sheep or horses. When our greed overcomes caution, the foe strikes from hiding. He fattens himself on our convoys. Every strongpoint that Mack troops fortify must be garrisoned and supplied. The train bringing their mooch is a duck on the water. In this desert you come upon “write-ups”-massacres for which nothing can be done except file the report.

In the forty-three days the column takes to advance from Bactra City to Nautaca, our section runs twenty-one probes and penetrations. Nine times we make contact and set up blocking positions, observation posts, ambushes. But always the enemy uncovers our intentions and either slips away or turns the tables. East and west, no one can find Spitamenes. One thinks of such wilderness as being uninhabited; in truth the waste supports a surprising density of population-nomads and herdsmen, “shy camps,” pocket villages. Here every goatherd is a lookout and every caravanner a sentry. Wherever Spitamenes is, he learns of our approach days in advance. Can our forces track him? We never even come on his trail. The desert is so vast, it swallows armies like stones in the sea.

Under such conditions, morale takes a beating. Not so much for us in scout detachments, who can keep on the move and thus fend off boredom, as for the foot troops of the central columns, whose experience of campaign is nine-tenths tedium, in which they endure the tramp, the heat and dust, the constant wind, frigid nights and baking days, and one-tenth pandemonium, in which they are rousted out of a dead sleep to arm and form up double-quick, then chop at flying speed into the wasteland, with no mooch, no bonze, evil water, where they must prepare an assault or take up a blocking position, only to watch the crisis fizzle for cause of arriving too soon, too late, upon the wrong site, or because the foe has fucked off under their very noses and they’re too beat or parched to give him chase.

Candor compels me to cite another factor adding to the troops’ frustration and exasperation. I mean liquor and dope. In conventional warfare, commanders knew when a battle was coming; the quartermasters had days if not months of buildup, throughout which they could lay in stocks of spirits to ease the men’s anxiety. In Afghanistan there’s no such luxury. Here, action can break out any moment. The result is men get varnished every chance they get. We learn from the natives. Our allied Afghans live on black nazz and juto, a desert plant the juice of whose spiny leaves will keep you awake day and night. This stuff catches on among the Macks. I myself use it. We all do. You can buy “jute” from the Daans and Sacae or harvest it from the desert yourself. You get thin on it. Your cheeks get hollow, you lose muscle. But you can stay up forever and never get hungry. In these badlands, where a man must pack every ounce of mooch he cooks for his dinner, such advantages are hard to resist.

On the fifty-first day out of Bactra City, two of our scouts spot an enemy convoy threading its way across the badlands. The foe’s train is forty mules, traveling by night and lying up by day, escorted by an equal number of tribal cavalry. We are thirty-two, counting two shikaris and four Afghan muleteers. Stephanos decides not to attack the convoy but to send back to the column for help. He picks two Macks-our comrades Tower, so called for his height, and Pollard for his doughy complexion-and a guide named Hakun. Their orders are to track the foe from concealment while our main body continues parallel on the far flank of a ten-mile spur. In that country, dust will betray an outfit as small as three or four.

Our company emerges next morning beyond the ten-mile spur. No sign of Tower or Pollard. Instead, where the enemy convoy should have appeared, we mark a swath of earth gouged in a great livid X. Hoofstrikes. Our shikaris refuse to ride in. Stephanos sends riders onto all wings, anticipating an ambush, while he and Flag spur forward. Their search turns up nothing except the violently hoof-scarred earth.

Several ravens are observed pecking at a patch of dark dirt.

Stephanos and Flag dismount. They discover, planted upright in the earth, the headless corpses of Tower and Pollard. The scout Hakun is missing. Murdered by the foe? Or welcomed, betraying the men he was supposed to protect?

The enemy has buried our comrades alive, with only their heads sticking from the dirt, then either trampled them or used them for some grisly manner of horseback sport.

“These are the savages,” says Stephanos, “that our king proposes to hire for pay, to fight at our sides.”

Despite such tragedies and misfortunes, the Big Push is working. On the highway south of Nautaca, our company runs into Costas the chronicler. Give this fellow credit; he has crossed the waste on his own from Bactra City, supported only by two servants and a Daan guide. He tells us of battles east and west. Hephaestion’s column has killed eight hundred in one clash, and Alexander has cut off a number of powerful bands trying to slip around his eastern wing. Soon we are in the action too.

Along the caravan trace to Maracanda lies a broad grass valley called To’shoma, “the Lakes,” because it becomes that in the winter rains. Here, in the second month of the advance, wings of Coenus’s brigade and Ptolemy’s pin elements of the foe and rout them with great slaughter.

In desert war, pursuit is everything. This is how you make kills. The chase from the Lakes goes on two months. Our sections under Stephanos are reintegrated into the battalion commanded by Bullock; we become an element, now, of a line unit.

Our charge is to pursue the foe wherever he flees. “Come back with kills,” Bullock tells us, “or don’t come back at all.” A terrible competition arises between companies of the same battalions. Sooner than return empty-handed, we bag any luckless bastard we see. Every village that aids the foe is obliterated. We take no prisoners. Every man we catch, we kill. Driving a band into the mountains, we pursue till not one soul remains. Nothing stops us. Fugitive contingents are chased across the steppe for hundreds of miles.

The instrument of counterguerrilla warfare is the massacre. Its object is terror, to make oneself an object of such dread that the foe fears to face you ever. This practice has worked for the army of Macedon across all Asia. It does not work here. The Afghan is so proud, so inured to privation, and so in love with liberty that he prefers death to capitulation. The more terror we apply, the more stubborn his resolution becomes. His dames and urchins are worse than he is. They hate our guts. For all the blood we have drained into Afghan soil, we have succeeded neither in breaking the foe’s will to resist nor severing him tribe from tribe, but have instead ignited in his breast a fierce and unquenchable defiance and united him against us in a front of a thousand once-warring tribes, clans, and khels.

When the chases at the Lakes are over, our company is in a state beyond exhaustion. The hair beneath our desert caps is so matted with dust, grease, and sweat that we can’t shear it even with a razor. The nails of our toes and fingers are busted to nubs. Our kit can’t be peeled off. We have to cut it away. We reek. We’re so dirty, rivers can’t get us clean.

Our horses are skin and bones. So are we. We can’t eat. We’ve forgotten how to sleep. We’ve been living on nazz and jute for so long, we can’t keep down so much as a turnip. Wine when we get it runs through us like water. Speech has become superfluous. Who needs it? Flag knows what I’m thinking. At the gallop I glance to Lucas across a hundred feet of steppe. He knows. Even our horses know.

We have kept Tower’s and Pollard’s ashes. One night, on an eminence north of the Lakes, a likely spot presents itself. Our urns are leather sacks. We inter them not within cairns, which the foe will sniff out and desecrate, but beneath stones marked underside with our names and unit. We offer the Hymn for the Fallen. Stephanos composes these lines:

Hunting for Baz

The boys need their nazz.

Lacking soap, dope, and hope; coochless, moochless,

We achieve the unachievable, sustained by belief in the unbelievable.

Lucas has been keeping a notebook. He won’t tell anyone what’s in it. Finally this night he breaks it out.

He calls it Letters I Never Sent Home.

The document tells what we do in a day. No story. Just a list.

“When we first marched out from Macedon,” says Lucas, “trekking was our life. It was all we did. We thought nothing of it. You remember.

“Now we get up in the morning and we kill people. We kill them all day, and the next day we kill some more. That’s our life. It’s so ordinary to us, we think nothing of it.”

He rattles off the chases we’ve run in the last two days. Already the others call him to quit.

He won’t.

“How do you know how far-gone you are? When you write letters home. Try to tell your people what you’ve been doing. You can’t. Not even your old man, a decorated vet himself. He can’t understand; no words can make him. So you write in this crazy prose that says less than nothing.”

Dark laughter now. Lucas doesn’t smile.

“You look in the faces of your mates, boys of twenty who look fifty, and you know that’s how you look too. But you’re not fifty. You’re twenty. You’re twenty and fifty. Things you thought you’d never do, you’ve done, and you can never tell anyone…”

Dice lobs a fist of pebbles. “Sack it, Lucas.”

“…never tell anyone except your mates. Only you don’t need to tell them. They know. They know you. Better than a man knows his wife, better than he knows himself. They’re bound to you and you to them, like wolves in a pack. It’s not you and them. You are them. The unit is indivisible. One dies, we all die. Individual mind? It doesn’t exist anymore. We’ve become incapable of independent thought or any thought at all except when is the next mooch, the next bonze, the next chop. Where is the foe? One day we chase him into the mountains, next day over the plains. That’s all we know. That’s all we do. That’s all-”

This is enough. Even I tell Lucas to stop.

He looks up. “Why doesn’t some correspondent write about this? Stephanos, you’re a literary fellow. Why don’t you set some of this to stanzas?”

Our leader stands above the circle. He tells Lucas his harangue has gone on long enough. “You’re tired, my friend.”

Lucas’s eye glitters in the firelight.

“You have no idea,” he says, “how tired I am.”