The Afgan Campaign

37

The column moves out the next day, pushing hard to gain the Black Beards. Philip rides ahead with the Silver Shields.

Let me here address the army’s state of mind in the aftermath of the Cleitus debacle and make plain, if I can, by the following minor but extremely significant incident, the undiminished love the corps bore for its king.

Dispatching Ptolemy’s and Polyperchon’s brigades round the western shoulder of the Scythian range, Alexander struck straight across with his own divisions, Coenus’s, and that portion of the siege train that had come up from Maracanda. This force made good speed for two days. But mounting a pass called An Ghojar, “the Barber,” on the third morning, the column was brought up in its tracks. A torrent in spate with late-summer snowmelt had washed out half the valley. I chanced to ride up, delivering dispatches, just as all progress ground to a halt.

The gorge down which the cataract thundered stretched, bank to bank, broader than a bowshot. Where the downshoot plunged against boulders in midchannel, each the size of a two-story house, the impact sent geysers of mud-colored spume fifty feet into the air. The din was so deafening that troopers, even hundreds of feet up the slope, could make themselves heard only by shouting directly into their fellows’ ears. How to get across? The alternative, backtracking the way we came, would have cost days and wiped out every advantage of speed and surprise Alexander had worked so hard to attain. Any lesser commander would have elected this option. And even our lord, drawn up before the torrent, seemed to consider it. His presence on-site alone, however, drove the divisions into action.

Without waiting for orders, combat engineers began surveying the ascending slope, seeking spots where rockfalls could be started. Rigging teams of mules and setting great timbers as levers, the sappers and bucket-men succeeded in dislodging several critical boulders. Half the mountainside came down, straight into the river. The fall didn’t span the flood, but at least it brought the banks closer together. From a perch atop one newly formed promontory, archers launched scores of light lines across, of which the looped ends of two, after infinite pains, were at last coaxed into holds around outcrops on the far bank. Upon these filaments, which looked in the scale of the scene no stouter than threads, two young and athletic volunteers, stripped naked to make themselves as light as possible, worked their way across hand-over-hand. By now the column had massed like spectators at the games at Olympia. The youths swung perilously above the torrent (and even slipped once or twice into it), while their onlooking countrymen’s emotions alternated between ecstatic citation and excruciating suspense. Alexander had pledged a talent of gold to the man whose sole first touched the far shore and a talent of silver to the second. When the champion at last found footing and turned back, raising his arms in triumph, the roar could be heard even above the cataract. Heavier lines were warped across. By midafternoon a rope bridge had been rigged. By the following dawn a span of timbers stood in place, stout enough that laden mules-hoodwinked and shielded by side-screens from sight of the plunge below-could be coaxed across.

This was what Alexander’s presence alone meant.

The result was that two of our four columns appeared in the enemy’s rear days before even the Wolf could have anticipated. Coenus’s division assaulted the least-well-defended of the Black Beards, driving its occupants into refuge on the other two. Beard number two was separated by a cavernous rift from the only spot upon which sufficient siege elements could be assembled. Under Alexander’s direction, however, the soldiers working in shifts succeeded in dumping into the chasm such tonnage of boulders and cartloads of soil and brush that by the fourth dawn the interval had been built up enough for a crude mole to be laid across its spine. By this time the engineers, assisted by hundreds of carpenters and mechanics drafted from the ranks to assist, had put together a rolling siege tower, seventy feet high, shielded by hide-faced mantlets, and had rigged a system of tackle and cables by which it could be warped across the gap and thrown against the face of the cliff.

That the Wolf got his forces safely away, even his women and wagons, must be accounted a feat of tactical brilliance equal to any in this campaign. He made his escape by back trails unknown to the besiegers, concealing his withdrawal by darkness and by the ruse of hundreds of watch fires, which boys and youths kept blazing nightlong, to simulate the appearance of a camp on customary alert.

Still, the foe had been dealt a tremendous moral defeat. Our chronicler friend, Costas, evaluated it in the following account, which made its way in under three months, I am told, via Sidon and Damascus to Athens:

The enemy’s tribal troops cannot appreciate the utility of such a tactical withdrawal, engineered here with such brilliance by their commander Spitamenes. To them it is an ashan, or “runaway,” a term of shame. Who is the enemy? His types run in hundreds. He is a Sogdian soldier; he is a sheepherder; he is a savage, a shopkeeper. He has fought under Darius, trained by Persian officers; he is a boy armed with a sling and a stone. The Wolf’s rolls contain thugs and bandits, patriots in it for glory and opportunists out only for gold. The foe is someone whose son we have killed, whose village we have burned, whose sister we have outraged. He enrolls with the spring and vanishes in the fall. Sometimes brothers take turns serving, employing by rounds the one pony and one set of arms the family possesses. Is this weakness in an army? Not the way Spitamenes manages it. For what all own in common is hatred of the invader. The native is not going anywhere, but we are-and he knows it.

The Afghan fights neither as we do, nor for what we do. He lives to distinguish himself as an individual champion. By nature he is a raider, restless, avaricious, constantly craving excitement and opportunity for plunder. The Bactrians and Sogdians, and especially their allies of the savage Daans, Sacae, and Massagetae, are not soldiers in the Greek or Macedonian sense, that is, disciplined men possessed of patience, order, and cohesion. They are more like wild children; impatient, hot-blooded, easily bored. Spitamenes, who understands their hearts better than they do themselves, knows he must produce a redeeming strike soon against his nemesis, Alexander, or forfeit a portion of the faith his dashing and piratical cohorts have placed in him.

Summer ends with more Mack victories, no one conclusive but all collectively diminishing the Wolf’s freedom of maneuver. Hephaestion’s division has constructed and garrisoned no fewer than forty-seven forts and strongpoints, forming a chain south of the Jaxartes. Many of these are no grander than a dozen meres roosting on a stone summit, but all are in communication by courier and by fire and smoke. Wherever Spitamenes sticks his head up, one of these outposts will sound the alarm.

Meanwhile, construction nears completion on a new garrison city-the bastion of Alexandria-on-the-Jaxartes. Palisades and ditches stand ready; the armed force will be in place by fall. Oxyartes and the other Afghan warlords have retired south for the winter to fastnesses in the Scythian Caucasus, unassailable after the first snows. Alexander takes his elite brigades, with Perdiccas’s, Ptolemy’s, and Polyperchon’s, and establishes a ready base at Nautaca. From here he can ride quickly to the aid of Craterus in the south or us in the north. That is his plan.

The initiative has gone over to the Macedonians. Alexander tasks our brigade with flushing Spitamenes from his sanctuaries beyond the Jaxartes. He reinforces Coenus by placing under his command Meleager and his regiment of mobile infantry, stiffened with four hundred Companion cavalry under Alcetas Arridhaeus; all the mounted javelineers of Hyrcania; and the allied Bactrians and Sogdians who had been attached to the brigade of Amyntas Nicolaus (Amyntas himself being named governor of Bactria, the post that would have belonged to Black Cleitus). Alexander’s instructions to Coenus are to hunt and harass Spitamenes.

“Drive the Wolf from his lair,” are our king’s orders posted throughout the Maracanda camp. “And I will finish him in the open.”