The Afgan Campaign

5

It takes our column of replacements 127 days out of Tripolis to catch up, at last, with the trailing elements of Alexander’s army. We have trekked 1,696 miles, according to the army surveyors (who measure the roads down to the half-hand’s-breadth), crossing all of Syria and most of Mesopotamia, Media, Mardia, Hyrcania, and no small portions of Parthia and Areia. I have gone through three pairs of road-beaters and my march-pay twice over. My kit is rags. I arrive at the front-if such a term can be used for a war that is prosecuted across a theater 1,000 miles broad and 900 deep-already three months in debt. So does everyone else.

When you march long distances in column, you pass the time by landmarks. Say you come over a rise into a desert valley, a pan twenty or fifty miles across. You’ll set your object as the hills on the far side and march to that, marking your progress as you approach. That will be your day. Or you’ll pick out intermediate landmarks, little hills, washes, dry riverbeds-wadis or nullahs, as they call them out east.

You can see weather for miles, crossing Media and Hyrcania. Squalls play across the pans at midday. Rain falls on one section of the column but not another. You’ll see precipitation sheet from the bellies of the clouds, never to reach the ground but burning away high in the heat of the air. Great shadows play across the plains, making the earth dark in one spot, bright in another, in shifting patterns as the clouds transit the sky. Thunderheads collect over the mountains; you get downpours late in the day.

Alexander’s commanders will not stand for a body of men straggling in one long column; it’s unsightly and unmilitary; you can’t fight from such a formation. So when terrain permits, the troops are fanned out ten or fifteen columns across. This is good because when you reach camp, the whole body can catch up in an hour instead of four. The column packs up everything at night, so it’s ready to go in the dark before dawn. Cavalry other than reconnaissance ride their horses sparingly on the march; they tramp on foot alongside, to conserve the animals’ strength. Grooms lead a remount in each hand. Horses are never permitted to herd on their own, even at rivers where they water. Otherwise they’ll revert to equine hierarchies and be worthless as cavalry.

Crossing Media, we see game in abundance. Gazelle and wild asses; the column spots them from miles, trailing their dust in the clear air. Hunting parties are organized like military operations: Divisions send mounted companies to envelop the game, circling as widely as twenty miles sometimes to cut off the herds’ flight, drive them into rope pens if they have time to rig them, or simply run them to exhaustion on the open plain. Riders return with meat for the army’s pots. This is great sport; everyone wants to go. It breaks the monotony.

An army passing through a territory attracts commerce and curiosity of every kind. Actors have come out from Ephesus and Smyrna; we have dancers and acrobats, harpers and reciters, poets, rhapsodes; even sophists offering lectures, which to my astonishment are actually attended. I took in a fascinating one on solid geometry in the middle of a thunderstorm on the High Line in Armenia. Between camps the caravan traders, or just natives loading up asses with anything they can sell, trek alongside the column, peddling dates and sheep, pistachio beer, eggs, meat, cheese. What do the lads crave most? Fresh onions. Back home onions go to flavor a stew. Out here you eat ’em raw. They taste sweet as apples. A man’ll give half a day’s pay for a good onion. They keep your teeth from falling out.

I have a fiancee at home. Her name is Danae. On the march I write letters to her in my head. I talk about money, not love. When we get married, Danae and I will need the equivalent of six years’ pay to make an offer on a farm, since neither of us wish to be beholden to our families. I will volunteer for Forward Operations, first chance I get. Double pay. I cannot tell Danae this. She will worry.

There are many things a fellow cannot tell his sweetheart. Women for one. An army travels accompanied by a second army of whores and trollops, not to mention the camp wives, who constitute a more permanent auxiliary, and when these melt away in “wolf country,” enemy territory, their numbers are made up by locals. We have heard much about the Asiatic’s sequestration of his women, and no doubt this is true in normal times. But when an army as laden with plunder as Alexander’s passes through, even the most hawkeyed patriarch can’t keep watch over his daughters forever. The maids dog the column, seeking novelty, freedom, romance, and even the lamest scuff can gin them down to nothing for a quick roll-me-over. The girls’ll even stay to mend kit and do the laundry. Half the young cooches are blinkered-with child, that is-made so by our fellows passing through with Alexander months before. This doesn’t stop us from stropping them. Not me of course, or Lucas. We hold true to our girls back home, much to the amusement of our comrades.

Tollo is the primary fig-hound. He’s sluicing the natives two at a time. “One on each hip,” he says, “just to keep warm.” Tollo’s Color Sergeant pay, counting bonuses, is four drachmas a day (four times my packet). You can buy a house for that here, or hire half a village to do any labor you want.

The army has its own language. “Steam” is soldiers’ slang for women. Dish. Fig. Cooch. Hank or bert (from the native tallabert, “mother”) for an Afghan. The locals have their slang for us too. Mack. Scuff. Bullah (from their word for “stupid”). Sex is qum-qum. The enemy himself our lads call “Baz,” the most common name for an Afghan male-as in, “Baz is out there tonight.”

Women are of two types in Areia and Afghanistan. Those beneath the protection of fathers and brothers are called tir bazal, “the jewel.” If you so much as glance at them, their people will slit your throat. The other type has lost the protection of the clan. Maybe their male kin have been killed in feuds or war, or the females have committed some transgression and been cast out. These are the girls we Macks take up with. They’re not tramps though. They have dignity. You have to marry them.

Marriage here is not like back home. One of my littermates, Philotas, met a girl in a village west of Susia. By night they were married. No ceremony; you just declare it and that’s it. My mates make fun of me because I take wedlock seriously. That’s how I feel. I can’t accept these riteless, walk-away hitch-ups. They seem wrong to me.

We get mail on the column. The post from home catches up every ten days; the troops even get letters from the army out east. This from my mother:

You need not write me chatty notes, dear, nor do I care to learn the progress of the latest campaign. Just let me know you are well. Stay alive, my child, and come home to me.

A letter comes from my brother Elias, ahead with Alexander’s corps in Afghanistan. It has no toll-seal. Mail from the fighting army travels free.

All letters report the same news:

Darius is dead.

The king of Persia has fallen, slain by his own generals as they flee before Alexander. In our column of replacements, we are cast down to hear this. The war will soon be over. We’ll pack home as broke as we started.

Elias sounds in fine fettle.

Matthias, you hound! How are you? Have you snagged your first Asiatic cooch? Welcome to the fighting army, you poor scuff!

He is well, my brother says, except for a wound he downplays. He is in hospital now, as I said, at Phrada near the Great Salt Desert; that’s how he has time to write.

The Persian war is drawing down, little brother. The enemy’s big augers all seek terms. It’s a capital show, these grandees coming in. They send their lieutenants first, under a flag, or their sons if they have them. Their mules are loaded with loot-“for Iskander.” That’s Persian for Alexander. We take them in like wayward kittens. Our orders are to treat them as if they were sugar and we must carry them home on our tongues.

Great generals and governors of the Persians, nobles who have fought our fellows across all Asia-Artabazus, Phrataphernes, Nabarzanes, Autophradates, as well as the slayers of Darius: Satibarzanes and his cohort Barsaentes-have bent the knee and been received with clemency by Alexander. Who else can run the empire for him? Even the mercenaries Glaucus and Patron, commanders of Darius’s crack heavy infantry, have come in with their commands and made their peace. They now form a unit of Alexander’s army.

Only one enemy remains wild. The Persian general Bessus, with 8,000 Afghan cavalry and access to 30,000 more-Scythian raiders from beyond the Jaxartes. He is calling himself Darius’s successor and raising an army to fight on.

Don’t worry, little brother. His own generals can read the wind. They’ll bring in his hat-with his head in it-soon enough.

In Areia, nearing the frontier of Afghanistan, we get our first chance outside of training to unsheathe our arms. Tollo and Flag are assigned, with half our company of mercenaries, to provide security for a train of supplies to be delivered to a village two days off the military highway. Lucas and I go along. Halfway out, in wild ravine country, a detachment of tribal riders shows itself on a ridge ahead. Tollo, Flag, and the mercs take off after them, leaving us rawbones with a few muleteers and natives to guard the train. Sure enough, as soon as our mates drop from sight, a party of thirty more bandits materializes. We are twelve, only four of us armed. The brigands are the most savage-looking villains we have ever seen. They have no fear of us whatever. They ride straight up to our goods and start helping themselves. We try to brass it out, shouting threats and brandishing our weapons. The foe brandishes back, with a good deal more credibility. Our natives have hotfooted it up the hill, clear of bowshot. Pretty soon we’re up there too. Lucas wants to attack; he says we’ll be court-martialed for cowardice if we don’t. “Are you crazy?” declares Rags. “These sand-trotters’ll murder us all.”

The bandits take everything. We feel like fools. Tollo and Flag return; without a word they mount a pursuit. When the raiders see our mob coming, they dump the loot and flee. We recover it all. “Don’t lose a wink over this,” Tollo reassures us afterward. “You did right. It was my fault for leaving you.”

But we are chastened. We have seen our wits go blank with terror and felt our limbs turn to stone from fear.

On the march, the army lays over every five days to rest the stock. At home these would be off-days, spent in recreation or refurbishing of kit. Not in Alexander’s army. Out east, we train.

We learn defense against cavalry. We learn hollow squares and moving screens; we learn how to feign a rush and how to recover. We even get to ride a little. For every primary mount, the grooms lead two remounts. These strings are the property of individual cavalrymen; in conventional warfare, the troopers would never let you near one. Not in this theater. Out here there’s no such thing as a led horse. We are recruited, those on the books as Mounted Infantry. In the event of action, should our primary cavalry be drawn off, we will form an auxiliary of remounts to shield the column.

On we trek. We practice cordon operations; encirclement of villages. Our companies rehearse on dummy sites across Armenia and Mesopotamian Syria, then on the real thing in the Kurdish mountains east of the Tigris. The force surrounds a farm hamlet in the dark, to be in assault position at first light. The job is carried out in strict silence. Its purpose is to let no villager escape. The formation for assault is open order, in three ranks. The same configuration is employed in pursuit of the foe. Its principle is the inverted swallowtail, in which an individual of the foe is passed through the points, attacked by the wings, and finished off by the backs.

When the cordon rings the village, an avenue of escape is always left. Cavalry and missile troops conceal themselves on the flanks of this getaway lane. This is how we are taught to take prisoners, running them down as they flee (the highest-ranking are always first out), instead of attempting to selectively take captives in the confusion of the assault.

We spend more time now practicing killing blows. It’s unsettling. Can we do the same to a living man?

Will we freeze in the crucial moment?

We are keenly aware that we are boys, not men like Flag and Tollo. We do nothing like they do. We don’t talk like them or stand like them; we can’t even piss like them. They inhabit a sphere that is magnitudes above us. We ape them. We study them as if we were children. They remain beyond us.

The column has passed through Susia now. My father’s bones lie here in the military cemetery. We are given no time to stop. The Afghan kingdoms lie only a few marches ahead. For days our force has been tracked by “clouds” and “ghosts,” army slang for the ragged, yaboo — mounted tribesmen who, our guides tell us, are not Afghans but Areians and Parthians, peoples we have supposedly conquered. Lucas eyes them dubiously. “They don’t look very conquered to me.”

Our column advances under arms at all times now, with cavalry on both wings. One thing I have not anticipated, coming out to the army, is the prodigious consumption of liquor. The boozing is breathtaking. Veterans drink themselves blind every night. They collapse like the dead. You have to kick them awake each morning, and even that doesn’t work sometimes. The column packs out in a cacophony of hacking, spewing, hawking, puking; the men are blind as ticks for the first five miles. The foe attacking at dawn would make mince of us.

It’ll get worse, Flag says, after the first action. He advises Lucas and me to start drinking now; get our bellies used to it. “At the front, you can’t do without it.” “Pank” and “jack” are army slang for the fiery cheap bozzle that knocks a man out like a blow to the temple. Such spirits are not wine cut with water, as gentlemen imbibe at dinner to enliven the conversation, but hard liquor guzzled neat. Distillers arise from the column who know how to cook up the stuff from rice and barley, rye, beets, pistachios, date palms; they make a brew from millet and sesame, vile as rancid curd, but with such a kick that fellows stand in line for it, and flag colonels exempt the brewmasters from duty, sending them off with cavalry escorts even, to steam up their mash, which the army cannot function without. Hogsheads of rye and wheat beer, so thick with lees that you have to suck it up through a reed, are trucked to depots along the column of march. One stretch of four days in Areia, the column ran out of souse; mates were getting in knife fights just from nerves. The commanders had to send out armed parties to scrounge up some form of spirits, such stuff even as peels paint off ships’ planks, just to keep the men from murdering each other.

Why do soldiers drink? To keep from thinking, says Flag. If you think, you start to fear.

The primary narcotic in Afghanistan is naswar, or “nazz”-a dark resinous gum made from poppy opiates. You roll it into a ball and stick it under your lip. It turns your gums black. The drug comes in two types, black and brown. Brown is cheaper; it still has the seeds in. The troops call it “birdseed.” Black is a pure paste. The joke is you can tell an officer from an enlisted man by whether he uses “black” or “bird.” Myself, I will not touch such stuff. But many cannot stand up for count without it. Other drugs are hosheesh, kanna, and bhang, opium. You burn the first and third in a pipe and crush the second between your teeth. All three are cheap as turnips and as easy to come by. Alexander has outlawed the use of all but wine. But even he cannot curb this traffic.

Every night, drink carries off one or two men. Their sergeants have to write the widow letters. Stephanos supplements his pay by composing fictional demises for these reports. You cannot tell a wife that her husband has fried his wits on black nazz and split his skull plunging into a ditch.

Afghan ghosts continue to track the column. Our pace picks up; we close in on Alexander. Messengers arrive who have been with him only six days before.

When will we see action?

Flag answers: “When we least expect it.”