BOOK 1

THE WILL
TO FIGHT

ONE

A SOLDIER

I HAVE ALWAYS been a soldier. I have known no other life. The calling of arms, I have followed from boyhood. I have never sought another.

I have known lovers, sired offspring, competed in games, and committed outrages when drunk. I have vanquished empires, yoked continents, been crowned as an immortal before gods and men. But always I have been a soldier.

From the time I was a boy, I fled my tutor to seek the company of the men in the barracks. The drill field and the stable, the smell of leather and sweat, these are congenial to me. The scrape of the whetstone on iron is to me what music is to poets. It has always been this way. I can remember no time when it was otherwise.

One such as myself must have learned much, a fellow might think, from campaign and experience. Yet I may state in candour: all that I know, I knew at thirteen and, truth to tell, at ten and younger. Nothing has come to me as a grown commander that I did not apprehend as a child.

As a boy I instinctively understood the ground, the march, the occasion, and the elements. I comprehended the crossing of rivers and the exploitation of terrain; how many units of what composition may traverse such and such a distance, how swiftly, bearing how much kit, arriving in what condition to fight. The drawing up of troops came as second nature to me: I simply looked; all showed itself clear. My father was the greatest soldier of his day, perhaps the greatest ever. Yet when I was ten I informed him that I would excel him. By twenty-three I had done so.

As a lad I was jealous of my father, fearing that he would achieve glory on such a scale as would leave none for me. I have never feared anything, save that mischance that would prevent me from fulfilling my destiny.

The army it has been my privilege to lead has been invincible across Europe and Asia. It has united the states of Greece and the islands of the Aegean; liberated from the Persian yoke the Greek cities of Ionia and Aeolia. It has brought into subjection Armenia, Cappadocia, both Lesser and Greater Phrygia, Paphlagonia, Caria, Lydia, Pisidia, Lycia, Pamphylia, both Hollow and Mesopotamian Syria, and Cilicia. The great strongholds of Phoenicia – Byblus, Sidon, Tyre, and the Philistine city of Gaza – have fallen before it. It has vanquished the central empire of Persia – Egypt and nearer Arabia, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Media, Susiana, the rugged land of Persia herself – and the eastern provinces of Hyrcania, Areia, Parthia, Bactria, Tapuria, Drangiana, Arachosia, and Sogdiana. It has crossed the Hindu Kush into India. It has never been beaten.

This force has been insuperable not for its numbers, for in every campaign it has entered the field out-mounted and outmanned; nor for the brilliance of its generalship or tactics, though these have not been inconsiderable; nor for the proficiency of its supply train and logistical corps, without which no force in the field can survive, let alone prevail. Rather, this army has succeeded because of qualities of warriorship in its individual soldiers, specifically that property expressed by the Greek word dynamis, ‘the will to fight’. No general of this or any age has been so favoured by fortune as I, to lead such men, possessed of such warlike spirit, imbued with such resources of self-enterprise, committed so to their commanders and to their call.

Yet now what I have feared most has come to pass. The men themselves have grown weary of conquest. They draw up on the bank of this river of India, and they fail of passion to cross it. They have come too far, they believe. It is enough. They want to go home.

For the first time since I acceded to command, I have found it necessary to constitute a unit of the army as Atactoi – ‘Malcontents’ – and to segregate them from the central divisions of the corps. Nor are these fellows renegades or habitual delinquents, but crack troops, decorated veterans – many of whom trained under my father and his great general Parmenio – who have become so disaffected, from actions and words taken or omitted by me, that I can station them in the battle line only between units of unimpeachable loyalty, lest they prove false in the fatal hour. This day I have been compelled to execute five of their officers, homegrown Macedonians all, whose families are dear to me, for failure to promptly carry out an order. I hate this, not only for the barbarity of the measure but also for the deficiency of imagination it signalizes in me. Must I lead now by terror and compulsion? Is this the state to which my genius has been reduced?

When I was sixteen and rode for the first time at the head of my own corps of cavalry, I was so overcome that I could not stay myself from weeping. My adjutant grew alarmed and begged to know what discomfited me. But the horsemen in their squadrons understood. I was moved by the sight of them in such brilliant order, by their scars and their silence, the weathered creasing of their faces. When the men saw my state, they returned my devotion, for they knew I would burst my heart for them. In strategy and tactics, even in valour, other commanders may be my equal. But in this, none surpasses me: the measure of my love for my comrades. I love even those who call themselves my enemies. Alone meanness and malice I despise. But the foe who stands with gallantry, him I draw to my breast, dear as a brother.

Those who do not understand war believe it contention between armies, friend against foe. No. Rather friend and foe duel as one against an unseen antagonist, whose name is Fear, and seek, even entwined in death, to mount to that promontory whose ensign is honour.

What drives the soldier is cardia, ‘heart’, and dynamis, ‘the will to fight’. Nothing else matters in war. Not weapons or tactics, philosophy or patriotism, not fear of the gods themselves. Only this love of glory, which is the seminal imperative of mortal blood, as ineradicable within man as in a wolf or a lion, and without which we are nothing.

Look out there, Itanes. Somewhere beyond that river lies the Shore of Ocean: the Ends of the Earth. How far? Past the Ganges? Across the Range of Perpetual Snows? I can feel it. It calls me. There I must stand, where no prince has stood before me. There I must plant the lion standard of Macedon. Not till then will I grant rest to my heart or release to this army.

That is why I have called you here, my young friend. By day, I can keep up a front, knowing the men’s eyes are on me. But at night, the crisis of the army overwhelms me.

I must unburden myself. I must reorder my thoughts. I must find an answer to the corps’s alienation.

I need someone I can talk to, someone who stands outside the chain of command, who can listen without judgement and keep his mouth shut. You are my bride Roxanne’s younger brother and, as such, beneath my protection only. No other may be your mentor, to no other may you carry this tale. These are my motives of confidentiality. As well, I recognize in you (for I have watched you closely since you came into my service in Afghanistan) that instinct of command and gift for war that no amount of schooling may impart. You are eighteen and will soon receive your commission. When we cross this river, you will lead men in battle for the first time. It is my role to instruct you, for, though prince you be in your own country, here you are only a Page, a cadet in the academy of war which is my tent.

Will you stay and hear my tale? I shall not compel you, for such confidences as I must disclose in attempting to reorder my priorities may place you in peril, not now while I live, but later, for they who succeed me will seek to employ your testimony for their own ends.

Will you serve your king and kinsman? Say aye and you shall come to me each evening at this hour, or at such interval as may suit my convenience. You need not speak, only listen, though I may employ you as the occasion demands upon errands of trust or discretion. Say nay and I release you now, with no hard feelings.

You are honoured to serve, you say?

Well, my young friend.

Sit then. Let us begin ...

TWO

MY COUNTRY

MY COUNTRY IS A RUGGED and mountainous place. I came out of it when I was twenty-one. I will never go back.

The great estates of Macedon’s plains produce horsemen who call themselves Greeks, descendants of the sons of Heracles. The mountaineers are of Paeonian and Illyrian stock. Infantry comes from the mountains, cavalry from the plains.

Great clefts transect my country’s uplands into natural cantons, spectacularly defensible, which themselves are divided into mountain valleys called ‘creases’ or ‘runs’. A run is a watershed; what ‘runs’ is the rill or wash. One vale may contain a dozen runs; each has its clan and each clan hates every other.

The law of my country is phratreris. This means ‘feud warfare’. Custom forbids a man to marry within his crease; he must court a maiden from another. If her father will not give his consent, the suitor steals the maid. Now the bride’s kin mount a raid to take her back. No end of bloodshed is produced by this, and of saga and ballad. I have heard melodies all over the world, yet none more haunting than those of the mountains of my home. The songs are of feuds and lovers’ quarrels, of loss and heartbreak and revenge.

The love a highlander bears for his crease is irrational and ineffaceable. I have officers whose fortunes exceed those of rajahs; yet each dreams of nothing grander than to return to his crease and tell his tales around the fire. Look there, to those three soldiers beside the stacked arms. They are from the same crease. Two are brothers; the third is their uncle. See the four beyond? They are from a rival crease. If they were home now, these fellows could not sleep, hatching schemes to split one another’s skulls. Yet here in this far country they are the best of mates.

The Greek of the south grows to manhood in a polis, a city-state with a marketplace, an assembly, and walls of stone to keep out the foe. He is a good talker but a poor fighter. The plainsman of Scythia lives on horseback, trailing his stock and the seasonal grass. He is savage but not strong.

Ah, but the hill clansman. Tough as dirt, mean as a snake, here is a man whose belly you can split with a pike of iron and he’ll still crawl back to carve out your heart and eat it raw before your face. The mountain man is proud; he will rend your liver over a trifle. Yet he knows how to obey. His father has schooled him by the oxhide of his belt.

Here is the stock of which great soldiers are made. My father understood this. Once in the high country when I offered a smart remark of some clay-eating creaseman, Philip snatched me short. ‘My son has fallen under the spell of Homer’s Achilles,’ he remarked to Parmenio and Telamon at his side (both of whom served my father before they served me). ‘He cites his descent from the hero – by his mother’s blood, not mine – and dreams of assembling his own corps of Myrmidons, the invincible “ant men” who followed “the best of the Achaeans” to Troy.’ Philip laughed and swatted me gaily across the thigh. ‘Who do you imagine Achilles’ men were, my son, except raw bastards like these? Clansmen from the hinter creases of Thessaly, rude and unlettered, soaked in spirits, and hard as a centaur’s hoof.’

Men are hard in my country, and women harder. My father understood this too. He paid court to these lasses of the uplands, or, more accurately, to their fathers, whose friendship and fealty he secured by all means. Thirty-nine marriages he made, seven official, by my mother’s count; the tally of his brats may only be guessed at. There is an old jest of my army’s loyalty: of course they will not desert me; they are all my half-brothers.

When I was twelve, my dear friend Hephaestion and I accompanied a recruiting party under my father to a crease called Triessa in the highlands above Hyperasopian Mara. Horses may not be ridden into such rugged country; their legs will break. One must use mules. My father had invited the clans from a number of contending runs. They all showed up, all drunk. Philip was born to rule such men. He boasted that he could ‘outdrink, outfight, and outfuck’ the lot, and he could. The clansmen loved him. It was just after dark; a pig-riding contest was in progress. A sow the size of a small pony had broken loose; men and boys, mud-slathered, attempted to bring her down. Hephaestion and I looked on from the ring of the stone corral as one rogue with a great moustache flung himself upon the beast’s neck. His friends began daring him to mount the sow and have intercourse with her. My father seconded this with exuberance, himself shit-faced and waist-deep in the slough. Cataracts of hilarity descended as the moustached fellow wrestled the sow in the slop. When the act had been accomplished, the luckless beast was butchered. The banquet of its flesh went on all night.

As we rode home next day, I asked my father how he could countenance such brutishness in men he would soon lead into battle. ‘War,’ he replied, ‘is a brutish business.’

This response struck me as outrageous. ‘I would sooner have the sow,’ I declared, ‘than the man.’

Philip laughed. ‘You will not win battles, my son, leading an army of sows.’

It was my father’s genius to forge these carlish highlanders into a disciplined modern army. He perceived the utility of recruiting such clansmen, who had been enslaved for centuries by their own vices and vendettas, to a new conception of soldiering, in which station and birth counted for nothing, but where a man might make his career on guts alone, and within whose order the very qualities that had held the hillman in chains – his own clannishness, brutishness, ignorance, and implacability – would be transformed into the warrior virtues of loyalty, obedience, dedication, and the ruthless application of force and terror.

From the time I was a child, it was acknowledged that Philip’s Macedonians were the fiercest fighters on earth. Not only because they were individually tough, reared in this harsh and flinty land, or because my father and his great generals Parmenio and Antipater had drilled them to thoroughgoing professionalism, so that in discipline and cohesion, speed and mobility, tactics and weaponry, they surpassed all the militia armies of Greece and the royal and conscript levies of Asia, but also because they were possessed of such dynamis, such will to fight, born of their poverty and their hatred of the contempt with which their rivals had held them before Philip came, that it could be said truly of this force, as of none save the Spartans before them, that in action they never asked how many were the enemy but only where were they.

My father never schooled me in warfare as such. Rather he plunged me into it. I first fought beneath his command at twelve, led infantry at fourteen, cavalry at sixteen. I never saw him so proud as when I showed him my first wound, a lance thrust through my left shoulder, got on Mount Rhodope against the Thracians of the Nestus valley. ‘Does it hurt?’ he bawled, spurring up in the flush of victory, and when I answered yes, he roared, ‘Good, it’s supposed to!’ Then turning to the officers and soldiers round about: ‘My son’s wound is in front, where it should be.’

My father loved me, I believe, far more than he knew or cared to show. I loved him too and was as guilty as he of failing to display it. He drew a blade on me once, when I was seventeen, and would have spitted me through had he not been so soused he pitched flat on his cheesehole. My own dagger held poised in my fist, and I would have used it. For a time after that, my mother had to retire to her kinsmen’s court at Epirus and I take refuge among the Illyrians. For it was known to all that my ambition, even as a boy, exceeded my father’s and that I understood (or my mother did) that there may be, as the proverb declares,

Only one lion on a hill.

I was twenty when Philip was assassinated and the nation in arms called me forward as its king. I rarely, then, gave my father a thought. Lately, however, he has been much on my mind. I miss him. I would call upon his counsel. What would he do about mutiny on the plains of the Punjab? How would he reinspirit a corps gone sour?

And how, by the track to hell, may I get across this river?

THREE

INDIA

HEPHAESTION ARRIVES FROM THE Indus in time to witness the executions. Two captains and three warrant officers of the company of Malcontents have been put to the sword. Hephaestion comes straight to my side, in formation, without stopping even to relieve his thirst. He holds himself expressionless throughout the proceedings, but afterwards, in my tent, he trembles and has to sit. He is thirty years old, nine months older than I; we have been the best of friends since childhood.

He speaks of this unit of Malcontents. Their numbers are only three hundred, seemingly insignificant among a force whose total exceeds fifty thousand. Yet such is their prestige among the corps, from past performance of valour, that I can neither detain them in camp under arrest (where they would only spread the contagion of their disgruntlement) nor cashier them and post them home (where their appearance would foment yet further disaffection). I can’t break up the company and distribute its men among other units; it was to remedy this that I segregated them in the first place. What can I do with them? My skull aches just thinking of it. Worse, I need their prowess – and their courage – to cross this river.

In India there is no such thing as a staked tent. It’s too hot. My pavilion is fly-rigged, open on all sides to catch the breeze. Papers blow; every scrap must be weighted. ‘Even my charts are trying to fly home.’

Hephaestion glances about, noting the composition of the corps of Royal Pages. ‘No more Persians?’

‘I got tired of them.’

My friend says nothing. But I know he is relieved. That I have shown preference for homegrowns among my personal service is a good sign. It shows I am returning to my roots. My Macedonian roots. Hephaestion will not insult me by congratulation, but I see he is gratified.

After me, Hephaestion is the ranking general of the expeditionary force, which is to say of the army entire. Many envy him bitterly. Craterus, Perdiccas, Coenus, Ptolemy, Seleucus – all consider themselves better field commanders. They are. But Hephaestion is worth the pack to me. Him awake, I can sleep. Him on my flank, I need look neither right nor left. His worth exceeds warcraft. He has brought over a hundred cities without bloodshed, simply by the excellence of his forward envoyage. Tact and charity, which would be weaknesses in a lesser man, are with him so innate that they disarm even the haughtiest and most ill-disposed of enemy chieftains. It is his gift to represent to these princes the reality of their position in such a way that accommodation (I resist the word submission) appears not at his instance, but at theirs, and with such generosity that we wind up straining to contain its excesses. Five score capitals have our forces entered, thanks to him, to find the populace lining the streets, hoarse with jubilation. He has saved the army deaths and casualties ten times its number. Nor have his feats of individual valour been less spectacular. He carries nine great wounds, all in the front. He is taller and better-looking than I, as good a speaker, with as keen an eye for country. Only one thing keeps him from being my equal. He lacks the element of the monstrous.

For this I love him.

I contain the monstrous. All my field commanders do. Hephaestion is a philosopher; they are warriors. He is a knight and a gentleman; they are murderers. Don’t mistake me; Hephaestion has depopulated districts. He has presided over massacres. Yet these don’t touch him. He remains a good man. The monstrous does not exist within him, and even the commission of monstrous acts cannot cede it purchase upon him. He suffers as I do not. He will not give voice to it, but the executions today appalled him. They appalled me too, but for different reasons. I despise the inutility of such measures; he hates their cruelty. I scourge myself for failure of attention and imagination. He looks in the eyes of the condemned and dies with them.

‘Whom will you set in command now?’ he asks. He means over the Malcontents.

I don’t know. ‘Telamon’s bringing the two youngest lieutenants. Stay and we’ll see what they look like.’

Craterus enters; the mood lightens at once. He is my toughest and most resourceful general. The executions haven’t bothered him a bit. He has an appetite. He farts. He curses the heat. He launches into a tirade of this crust-sucking river and how, by the steam off a whore’s dish, can we get this salt-licking army across? He stalks to the water pitcher. ‘So,’ he says, splashing his face and neck, ‘which marshals are plotting our ruin today?’

Soldiers, the proverb says, are like children. Generals are worse. To the private soldier’s fecklessness and ungovernability, the general officer adds pride and petulance, impatience, intransigence, avarice, arrogance, and duplicity. I have generals who will stand unflinching before the battalions of hell, yet who cannot meet my eye to tell me they are broke, or played out, or need my assistance. My marshals will obey me but not one another. They duel like women. Do I fear their insurrection? Never, for they are so jealous of one another, they cannot abide beneath the same roof long enough to contrive my overthrow.

My generals won’t stick their toes in this river. Each has his eye on the empire behind. Perdiccas wants Syria; Seleucus schemes for Babylon; I’m already calling Ptolemy ‘Egypt’. The last thing each marshal needs, he believes, is a spear in the guts, chasing some fresh adventure. Who can blame them? They’ve made their kill; they want to work their jaws on it. Of eleven corps commanders, I trust with my life only two, Hephaestion and Craterus. Do the others hate me? On the contrary. They adore me.

This is an aspect to the art of war, my young friend, that does not appear in the manuals. I mean the combat within one’s own camp. The freshly commissioned officer imagines that the king rules his army. Not by far! The army rules him. He must feed its appetite for novelty and adventure, keep it fit and confident (but not too confident, lest it grow insolent), discipline it, coddle it, reward it with booty and bonuses but contrive to make sure it blows its loot on spirits and women, so that it’s hungry to march and fight again. Leading an army is like wrestling a hundred-headed hydra; you quell one serpent, only to duel ninety-nine more. And the farther you march, the harder it gets. It has been near nine years for this corps; of its original complement, many have sons who have since come out to us, and a few grandsons. They have earned and lost fortunes; how can I keep them keen? They are incapable of it themselves. I must play to them, as an actor to his audience, and love and drive them as a father his wayward sons. The commander’s options? In the end, he may lead his army only where it wants to go.

‘Well,’ Craterus observes, ‘it didn’t come off too badly.’

He means the executions.

Not badly? ‘Yes, the show was a real crowd-pleaser!’

‘Well, it’s over. The pair you sent for are outside.’

We step out. It is like entering an oven. The two lieutenants wait on horseback. They are the most junior officers of the disaffected cohort, and the only ones unindicted. Telamon has brought them, as I instructed.

I regard them, hoping they have the belly to take over. The younger is from Pella in Old Macedonia; the elder from Anthemos in the new provinces. We ride out along the bank. I aim to make trial of these bucks.

The youth I know. His name is Arybbas; the men call him ‘Crow’. His father and brother fell at Gaugamela, both officers of the Royal Guards; he has two more brothers and a cousin in my service, all decorated veterans. Crow himself served as a Page in my tent from fourteen to eighteen; he can read and write and is the best lightweight wrestler in the camp. The other lieutenant, Matthias, is older, near thirty, an up-through-the-ranks man, what the troops call a ‘mule’, from a noble but poor family in the annexed Chersonese. He has a bride of Bactria, of extraordinary beauty, who left her people to follow him, and is, so I have been told, the engine of his ambition. Both officers are keen, and both in action stalwart, resourceful, and without fear.

I indicate the enemy fortifications across the river. To the Anthemiot, Matthias: ‘How would you attack?’

The river is eight hundred yards. Too deep to ford and too swift to swim; we must cross on boats and rafts. These will come under bowfire from enemy towers for the last hundred yards. The final fifty pass between further concentrations of archers, then terminate at an eight-foot mud bank, bristling with more bowmen and topped with ten feet of spiked and castellated dyke. The length of this rampart is three miles. Behind it await Raja Porus and his war elephants, his corps of Indian ksatriyas – princes schooled from birth for war alone and renowned as the finest archers in the world – and an army of a hundred thousand.

The lieutenant turns back to meet my eye. ‘How would I attack, sire, if I were you, or if I were myself?’

Telamon laughs at such brass, and I too must bite my lip. I ask the lieutenant what the difference would be.

‘If the army attacks with myself commanding, no scheme on earth could take that position. But if you lead, lord, it will fall with ease, though our troops be ill-armed, half-starved, and ragged as dirt.’

I ask why.

‘Knowing your eye is on them, sire, all men will compete furiously in valour, seeking to win your good opinion, which will mean more to them than their lives. Further, you, lord, by fighting at the fore, will inspire all to surpass themselves. Each will feel shame to call himself Alexander’s man and not prove worthy of such fame.’

Matthias finishes; Craterus snorts. Such flattery, he declares, is unseemly coming from officers in a company whose freshest repute is for mutiny!

The lieutenant rejoins respectfully but with heat. No man may fault his comrades for want of spirit. ‘Indeed the king,’ he says, ‘has set us always the sternest chores, against the meat of the foe. If you condemn us, sir, cite the occasion and I shall refute it.’

This is dynamis. I am encouraged.

I ask the second youngster his plan. This is Arybbas, Crow.

‘First, lord,’ he replies, ‘I would try all else before risking battle. Raja Porus is canny, men say. Can we not treat with him? Offer him sovereignty beneath our rule, or simply request, or purchase, passage through his kingdom? Perhaps Porus has enemies he hates and fears more than ourselves. Will he accept us as allies to turn, united, upon these foes? Can we promise him rule over his rivals, vanquished by our mutual exertions, while our army passes eastward out of his realm, leaving it enlarged and enriched?’

It sounds so easy. Anything else?

‘Sire, this river. Must we cross it here? Under fire? Against fixed fortifications? Why not ten miles north? Or twenty, or a hundred? Why even permit the river to remain?’

Why indeed?

‘Divert her course, sire. Dig sluiceways and run her westward into the plain, as Cyrus the Great did at Babylon. Leave her high and dry and let our cavalry cross at the gallop!’

‘Hear, hear,’ remarks Telamon. Craterus taps his breastplate in mock applause. I indicate the river, swollen by premonsoon rains. To turn it will take ten armies.

‘Then let us raise ten armies, lord. I would sooner spend a barrel of my men’s sweat than one thimble of their blood. Tyre took half a year to reduce. Let us spend two, if that’s what it takes! And here is a further point, sire. The audacity of the stroke. Its temerity alone will awe the foe. He will believe the men who besiege his country are unlike any he has encountered, with resources of will and scale of imagination against which he cannot contend. He may delay, he will see, but not prevail. And this will render him more tractable to accommodation.’

The elder backs his comrade up. ‘One thing your victories have taught us, lord, is to see all foes as potential allies. Why compel such formidable warriors to contest us, when, motivated aright, they may march at our sides? After all, it is not our object to defeat and smash all peoples simply for the sake of defeating and smashing them.’

I raise a palm to shield the sun, regarding both officers. The older, Matthias, is near thirty, as I have said, with a dense chestnut beard and eyes that call to mind the image of Diomedes in the hero shrine at Leucadia. The younger, Crow, cannot be twenty-two, beardless and lean as a whippet, but with an aspect crackling of purpose and intelligence.

I have taken to our two lieutenants. Command of the Malcontents, I tell them, shall be theirs.

‘Do you understand, gentlemen, why we must cross this river? God help us, upon those ramparts yonder stands the only worthy foe this army has faced since Persia! Look at me. Do you think I don’t share your dissatisfaction? Am I not as frustrated by the petty campaigns and gloryless sieges we have been compelled to mount since the fall of Darius? There, look, across the river ... Raja Porus and his princes. I love him! He has brought me back to life! And he will reinspirit this corps too, and your company with it, when we face him, again as soldiers and as an army.’

FOUR

TELAMON

WHEN I WAS A BOY I had two tutors. Aristotle taught me to reason. Telamon taught me to act. He was thirty-three; I was seven. No one appointed Telamon over me; rather I fell in love with him and refused to be driven from his side. He seemed to me then, and does to this day, the perfect incarnation of the soldier. I used to trek the drill field in his train, aping his gait. The men pissed themselves laughing. But I intended no disrespect. I wished only to walk like him, stand like him, ride like him. He is from Arcadia in southern Greece. My mother wished me to speak pure Attic. ‘Listen to the boy! He drawls like an Arcadian!’ Telamon was a sergeant then; he is a general now. Still I cannot bring him in from the field to the staff tent; he will not come. His idea of a good breakfast is a night march, and of a good dinner, a light breakfast.

When I was ten I begged Telamon to teach me what it meant to be a soldier. He would not respond in words. Rather he packed Hephaestion and me three days into the winter mountains. We could not get him to speak. ‘Is this what being a soldier means, travelling in silence?’ At night we nearly froze. ‘Is this what it means, enduring hardship?’ Was he trying to teach us to hold silence? Obey orders? Follow without question?

At the third dusk we chanced upon a pack of wolves, chasing a stag onto a frozen lake. Telamon whipped onto the ice at the gallop. In the purple light we watched the pack fan out in its pursuit, turning the prey first one way, then another, always farther from the treeline and the shore. Wolf after wolf made its run at the fast-tiring buck. At last one caught him by the hamstring. The stag crashed to the ice; in an instant the pack was on him. Before Hephaestion and I could even draw rein, the wolves had torn his throat out and were already at their feed.

‘That,’ Telamon declared, ‘is a soldier.’

I remember looking on as a lad of eleven, when Telamon (serving then under my father) formed up his company prior to the first marchout against the Triballians. He ordered each trooper to unshoulder his pack and set it upright at his feet. Telamon then proceeded down the line, rifling each kit, discarding every item of excess. When he was done, the men had nothing left but a clay cup, an iron spit, and a chlamys to serve as both cloak and blanket.

There are further items, Telamon taught, which have no place in the soldier’s kit. Hope is one. Thought for future or past. Fear. Remorse. Hesitation.

On the eve of battle at Chaeronea, when I was eighteen and first commanded squadrons of Companion Cavalry, Hephaestion and I paced the lines, puzzling over this axiom of our mentor. How could a soldier perform without hope? Clearly our men’s expectations were heaven-high, as were our own; in fact we had spared no measure to elevate their hopes of glory, riches, the mastery of Greece. We were laughing, as young men will, with our mates when a sergeant of the staff rode up with a secretary, taking down each man’s will. Not a fellow would sign, of course. ‘Give my globes to Antipater!’ ‘Leave my arse to the army!’ I was about to chip in my own remark, when Black Cleitus asked, ‘Who will get your horse, Alexander?’ He meant Bucephalus, a prize worth ten lifetimes’ wages. The thought of parting from him sobered me. At once Telamon’s axiom came clear.

A warrior must not advance to battle hopeless – that is, devoid of hope. Rather let him set aside all baggage of expectation – of riches, celebrity, even death – and spur beneath extinction’s scythe lightened of all, save surrender to that outcome known only to the gods. There is no mystery to this. All soldiers do it. They must, or they could not fight at all.

This is what Telamon meant when he pared his soldiers’ packs or trekked to frozen peaks to show two boys the cold kill of predation.

Another time when we were youths, Hephaestion and I asked Telamon if self-command had a place in the soldier’s kit. ‘Indeed,’ he replied, continuing to stitch his overcloak, which chore our query had interrupted. ‘For the self-control of the warrior, which we observe and admire in his comportment, is but the outward manifestation of the inner perfection of the man. Such virtues as patience, courage, selflessness, which the soldier seems to have acquired for the purpose of defeating the foe, are in truth for use against enemies within himself – the eternal antagonists of inattention, greed, sloth, self-conceit, and so on. When each of us recognizes, as we must, that we too are engaged in this struggle, we find ourselves drawn to the warrior, as the acolyte to the seer. The true man-at-arms, in fact, can overcome his enemy without even striking a blow, simply by the example of his virtue. In fact he can not only defeat this foe but also make him his willing friend and ally, and even, if he wishes, his slave.’ Our mentor turned to us with a smile. ‘As I have done with you.’

There is a clue here.

Perhaps in the simple virtues I learned as a boy lies a way back, for myself and for this army. Time is short. The men will not wait, nor will this river.

Let us retrace the route then, my young friend – I to recount and you to attend. From the start.

From Chaeronea.

BOOK 2

LOVE OF
GLORY