Virtues of War Read Free Page A

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 that 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?

T
hree
    INDIA
    H EPHAESTION 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 proceeding, but afterward, 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 mates 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 valor, 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