The Afghan Campaign

  All units in training are in formation under arms at two hours before dawn. No day’s trek is shorter than thirty miles and many are above forty. The pace eats twenty miles before noon, nor are these one-day jaunts, but five and often ten. No mooch but what you carry; run out and you starve. God help the man who develops blisters or worms. In training at home, the sergeants drove you. Here it is the men themselves. Alexander issues no orders. He simply acts. He treks beside the men, on foot, with weapons and armor, and no buck in the army can keep up with him. He trains in all weathers, day and night. An officer who distinguishes himself shall dine in the king’s tent, at the shoulders of great Craterus and Hephaestion. Corporal punishment does not exist in Alexander’s army. Our lord brings us to heel by threat of exclusion from the corps and from his own favor, alongside which fate death itself has no meaning. One disapproving glance from Alexander will plummet the stock of the most decorated vet, while a smile or a word of praise elevates the meanest to renown.

  The men are in love with Alexander. This is no overstatement. The troops are aware of his movements, moment by moment, as pack dogs are of the stud wolf. The corps gravitates to his apparition and feeds upon sight of him, as the lover on that of his darling. If any mishap should befall him, the army senses it, even at a remove of miles, and reacts with alarm and distress, which are not allayed until they see their lord again and satisfy themselves that he is whole.

  The corps will endure anything for its commander. The most tedious drills are borne without an oath or a grumble. Exercises for which no purpose can be discerned are enacted with a will. At orders from headquarters, we strike camp, stripping the five-mile site to bare dirt. Fresh orders arrive: We unpack and set it up all over again. Building the city, the troops chop frozen sod all day, booze and fornicate all night. They are lean as leopards and as eager for action.

  The king has half a hundred Forward Operations units at work in the mountains. My brother Elias and his comrades form one of them. These are elite outfits, composed entirely of Companions, the tallest and handsomest, mounted on the most spectacular stock. Their job is to negotiate with the tribes. They carry gifts of honor—golden cups, Damascene swords—and are authorized to speak and deal in Alexander’s name. They have guides of the Panjshiri, Salangai, and Khawak Pactyans, the tribesmen who inhabit the high valleys and passes that the army must take in spring. Will the clans resist our passage? Their numbers are said to be between 125,000 and 175,000, including the khels and sub-khels of valleys and side-valleys. No invader, including Cyrus the Great, has ever made them yield.

  Our training is clearly to take on these trotters. Every battalion has its high-line artillery, to take possession of the commanding heights, and its companies of missile troops. We train in snow boots and fleece bundlers. Engineers and pioneers keep the track out of Kapisa clear, all the way to the head of the Panjshir.

  We see the foe constantly. Hundreds winter here, with their families, in the Kabul Valley. Thousands more have descended to milder elevations roundabout. Their sword shops line the lanes in Bagram City. All are mounted and all are armed to the teeth.

  Many find employment with the army. We have several in our unofficial mess. I come to know two, Kakuk and Hazar, brothers, about my age. The first word they teach me, indicating themselves, is tashar, meaning wild young bucks. Both are fine fellows, handsome as lions, the former with blond hair, the latter of black, both with great bushy beards of which they are vainer than gamecocks. They care nothing for pay and routinely spree a month’s wages in an evening. They consort with us for the novelty and the adventure. Their kit is the felt Bactrian cap with earflaps, heavy woolen trousers bloused into lambskin boots, vest, waistcoat, and pettu. The sashes round their waists are tribal colors; in them they tuck their lunch, medicine, and their three iron-edged man-killers—short, medium, and long. They are curious as cats. They cannot hear enough about my home country. Each custom I relate sends them spooling into gales of hilarity. More genial companions could not be imagined, though it is plain they will carve our livers, or their fellow Afghans’, over the most trivial matter of honor, and that, when the army marches out in spring, violating the integrity of their territory, they will hurl themselves upon us with all the violence they possess. The pride of the Panjshiris, I learn, is their great valley, which is to them home and heaven. Will Alexander serve up the toll to march through under badraga, official escort? Cyrus did. Or will our king attempt to force his passage? He has never bowed yet to extortion. As with Ash, the brothers, Kakuk and Hazar, see no contradiction between working for Alexander and looking forward to eviscerating him.

  It is impossible to dislike these fellows. I find myself envying their proud, free life. Labor is unknown to them. Their ponies graze on sweet grass in summer, dry fodder when the passes close. Their wives and sisters weave their garments, prepare their dal and ghee. Families shelter in stone houses, ownership of which they recite back twenty generations, whose only removable parts are the wooden doors and roofs (in case of evacuation due to feuds). Every kin-group holds two residences, summer and winter. If a rival clan raids, the khels drive them out through superior local knowledge. Should an alien power enter in force, as Cyrus in the past or Alexander now, the tribes withdraw to loftier fastnesses, sending to wider spheres of kinsmen until they assemble the necessary numbers; then they strike.

  Nangwali is the Afghan warrior code. Its tenets are nang, honor; badal, revenge; and melmastia, hospitality. Tor, “black,” covers all matters concerning the virtue of women. An affront to a sister or wife’s honor can be made spin, “white,” by no means short of death. Blood feuds, the brothers tell me, start over zar, zan, and zamin: money, women, and land.

  In cases of badal, vengeance is taken by father or son. In tor, it’s the husband, except in the case of unmarried women; then all males of the family may not rest until justice has been exacted. The code of nangwali forbids theft, rape, adultery, and false witness; it prosecutes cowardice, abandonment of parents or children, and usury. The code prescribes rites for births and death, armistices, reparations, prayer, almsgiving, and all other passages of life. Poverty is no crime. Reverence for elders is the cardinal virtue, succeeded by patience, humility, silence, and obedience. Statues for hygiene are strict, the brothers swear, though if any were adhered to within my vision, I must have missed it. The view of life is that of a noble resignation to fate. God determines all, the Afghan believes. One can do nothing except be a man and bear up.

  As for my guardianship of the girl Biscuits, this will bring trouble, my friends declare. The maid has at least one living brother, a captain of horse serving now with Spitamenes. Kakuk and Hazar know the man, champion of a rival tribe. If I come upon him I must strike without hesitation. In matters of tor, blood is everything. A dead man can always be paid for.

  One morning I wake to find Kakuk and Hazar gone. Every other Panjshiri in camp has skipped too. Spring approaches. The buds are on the mulberries. Scouts report tribesmen in the hundreds slipping back into the high valleys, by routes known only to themselves. I quiz Flag for the latest. “The passes,” he says, “are still under twenty feet of snow. Nothing without wings is getting over for at least another month.”

  But Ash tells a different tale. The contractors of the pack train are balking, he reports. They won’t take their stock up into the Panjshir, not if the clans are given time to get home and become organized into armies.

  That night Alexander calls another pack-up. We strike tents and load up the train, as we have done in a dozen previous drills.

  This time it’s no exercise. Two hours before dawn, lead elements of the army are on the march, with the king at the fore, up the track into the Panjshir.

  16.

  Kabul’s elevation is seven thousand feet. By the second day the column is at nine. The summit, at the Khawak Pass, will be twelve thousand. The date is Artemisius 6. Early. Very early.

  The sun burns hot this high, so strong in fact the first day that
we strip our winter cloaks and trek bathed in sweat. The string is one mule per man; half the beasts bear nothing but fodder, each man’s pannier is the better part mooch. Even cavalry mounts are loaded; they carry their own snow boots, blankets, and wrappers. The army packs no heavy baggage and few dependents. These will follow at a safer time. The women porters trek with us. Alexander has doubled their wages; the overage will be paid to them, not their handlers. Biscuits hikes with me, Ghilla with Lucas.

  The column marches in four sections. The vanguard breaks the trail. These are army engineers. Their division leads three thousands camels, laden with timber posts and beams, cables, ropes, planking, and fittings; they will fabricate bridges to span the torrents and gorges in spate. The van drives sheep and oxen as well, not only to drag timbers for the construction but to beat down the trail—and to be slaughtered for meat. To protect the fore elements, the engineers have archers, slingers, and javelineers, mercenary cavalry of Lydia, Armenia, and Media, with hired Afghans of the west, mountain troops who hate the Panjshiri, and our own Mack pioneers. The latter are miscreants of the army, stripped of the privilege of bearing arms, and handed axes and mattocks instead. The poor scuffs are clearing tracks through twenty- and thirty-foot-high drifts. Alexander and the elite units come next, the agema of the Companions, the Royal Guardsmen, battalions of Perdiccas’s and Craterus’s crack brigades, with Agrianian javelineers, Cretan archers, and other specialized mountain companies, including combat engineers with stone-throwers and bolt-hurlers. These divisions will take the foe in strength, here in the Panjshir if the tribesmen contest our passage, and on the plains of Bactria beyond, when the king overhauls Bessus’s and Spitamenes’ cavalry. Next the central phalanx brigades, including ours, Hephaestion’s and Ptolemy’s, and the nondetached battalions of Perdiccas and Craterus; then the heavy sections; then the light brigades of Erygius, Attalus, Gorgias, Meleager, and Polyperchon, along with mercenary and Iranian cavalry. The baggage, such as there is, comes between them and the rear guard, composed of other foreign contingents and native light troops. The total is nearly fifty thousand.

  Up we go. Winter has broken with a vengeance; spring torrents thunder down the gorges, the color of mud. The summit is supposed to take thirteen days. The track runs straight through the Panjshir. Seventy miles. Scores of tributary valleys branch from this central axis. Each donates its plunging cataract, glacier-spawned, and each descends with deafening fury. No non-Panjshiri has ever been back in these fastnesses.

  “When we reach the summit,” Rags relays the army bucketwash, “we’ll be at twelve thousand feet. The Khawak Pass starts here. Forty-seven miles long.”

  The first storm strikes on the third day. Hail first, then snow, then hail again. Stones the size of sling bullets make us break out shields and helmets, beneath which we hunker, on our knees against any outcrop we can find, while the mules and horses bunch in mute misery till the drubbing ceases. The trail has gone to ice. Every rope and line is encased in the stuff; the slopes glisten, sheer and treacherous. A frigid wind whips in the wake of the storm. We are drenched, every one, and shivering like colts. “Up, lads! Keep moving!”

  The column has entered the Panjshir proper. The valley is beautiful, far broader than I had imagined, and not, despite its elevation, particularly “mountainous.” Great terraces are carved, our guides tell us, beneath the snow; in fall the natives harvest rice, barley, cucumbers, lentils, and broad beans from hillsides that now dazzle blindingly. Whole orchards hide beneath the snowpack—mulberries and pears, pistachios, wild plums, and more apricots, we are told, than can be loaded onto mules and driven to market.

  We make camp early in the middle of a second storm. We can’t spread fodder for the animals; hail and sleet drench it instantly. We feed them using nosebags, themselves frozen, lashed to frozen halters. There’s no wood, so no fires. Chow is cold kishar, goat meat, and curds gone to ice. I choke down a frost-ball onion. “Day three,” grins Flag. “Only ten more to the summit.”

  We bonze in a huddle, women too, using the tethered beasts as windbreaks. Twice in the night we hear attacks resound at a distance up the column. We’re too wretched even to budge. I’m squeezed between Biscuits and Lucas when I feel a rhythmic thrusting somewhere south of my soles. “Tollo, you swine!” Laughter follows.

  “Just trying to keep from freezing, mate.”

  No one sleeps that night or the next. Each soul prays for sunrise, which comes late because the peaks block the sun’s warmth till midmorning. By noon men have stripped naked, despite the cold, except for their boots. We trek, spreading our sodden gear atop the pack rigs, letting the gale whip it dry.

  “You’re not really wet,” pronounces Tollo, “till the crease of your ass is soaked.”

  “It’s soaked!”

  “Then may the gods bless you.”

  Stephanos cheers the men by predicting victory in Bactria. We’ll catch Bessus and Spitamenes, he swears, with their bollocks in the breeze. Why? “Because they’re men of intelligence. It’s beyond their imagination to believe that anyone in their right salt-sucking mind would cross these mountains at this season.”

  Day five. We trek, two miles high now. Storms strike morning and evening, dumping snow and hail, then dispelling to vapor, followed by fierce sun. Now comes the melt. The whole mountain weeps. A thousand rills and runnels come flushing from the rock, racing together into tributary torrents, then plunging as cataracts to the river below. The stone has been splintered over millennia; it’s all scree and shingle, poised to slide. Step wrong and you’re in the books, as soldiers say. It’s the same all the way to Khawak, so we hear, only up there it gets worse. At that elevation, nearing three miles high, rivers become glaciers, rimmed by slatey, unstable moraines, the only avenues of passage. The ice fields themselves are untrekkable, wide as half a mile, crazed with fissures, cracks, and crevasses, and upshot with great jumbled towers of ice.

  The fifth noon the male porters revolt. About a hundred serve our division; they dump their loads and refuse to climb farther. They want more pay. Stephanos is our section commander. What can he do, massacre them? He capitulates, paying out of his own purse (the porters refuse army chits).

  All night hail and snow pound the camp; in the morning it takes hours to shake the rebels out of their dens. Now the muleteers revolt too. Ash is one of their leaders. They are not warriors! They did not sign up for such an ordeal!

  Ash wants his mules back. They all do. Stephanos and the other officers spend half the morning negotiating. The column is breaking apart. Forward elements push on without us. Gaps open. Behind us, other revolts must be in progress because no section is pressing us from the rear. By noon Stephanos succeeds in quelling the insurrection. The sun has returned; optimism rekindles. But within an hour purple clouds descend, temperature plummets, deluges of sleet and hail thunder down. The gale is so fierce a man can’t advance a pace into it; even the mules spill and tumble on the treacherous underfoot. We make camp three hours before dark, simply because it’s impossible to go on.

  I search for Ash. He has vanished. So have the other muleteers. They have abandoned their stock, their livelihood, preferring to take their chances, alone and afoot, on the trail back down.

  Darkness descends. Our bones rattle with the cold. The women endure it, uncomplaining. At night Biscuits sleeps barefoot, with her foot-wraps round her chest to dry, burying her soles for warmth against another girl’s belly, for whom, beneath her own pettu, she performs the same favor. She has me protect my hands under the tucks of her arms. We learn to site our sleeping hole out of the narrow gorges, where gales howl. It’s better in the wide parts of the trail, or in the lee of an outcrop if you can find one before your mates do. Nights are unbearable, no matter what you do.

  “Only eight more wake-ups,” says Flag.

  Dawn: Stephanos has the Macks fall in under arms. We roust the male porters from their snowholes. Before they can issue the next ultimatum, Stephanos publishes his own: Get out! Hell ta
ke you—and your loads. At spearpoint, we drive the mob back down the trail. They want food. Indeed, answers Stephanos, I’m sure you do. We want our fleeces and shelters, they cry. “Come and take them,” replies Stephanos, quoting Leonidas.

  The porters yield. Stephanos harangues them. Press on to the Khawak! Downhill from there! Bonuses for all in Bactria!

  We make a good day, and another after that. Where is the summit? We have lost touch with the column in front and behind. Our shikaris are useless; they don’t know the mountain. Each storm buries the trail deeper. Sun is worse. Its heat spawns avalanches. None have threatened our section yet. But their great falls, plunging ahead, wipe out the trail. It takes hours to break a new one and when we emerge on the far side, only prayer reassures us we have not lost our way.

  The seventh day, fodder runs out for the mules and horses. We ourselves have been on half rations since the fourth dawn. My belly echoes like a hollow tank. Each step has become agony. “Tollo,” I say, laboring beside him. “Should we be getting worried?”

  “Put your faith,” he says, “in the benevolent gods.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in the gods.”

  “I don’t.”

  We hear no more talk of mutiny. Porters trek tight beside us. We will live or die together.

  This is the way peril overhauls you. One hand’s-breadth at a time. Suddenly you’re in it. I glance to Lucas. Even in his pinpointers, bundled like a bear, I read his apprehension. The issue is no longer war. It has become survival.

  Night seven: Two rangers stagger into camp, sent back from the section before us to guide us on. A village! Just three miles ahead! The natives’ bunkers, beneath the snow, hold food and fodder. We survive another interminable siege of darkness, succored by hope.

  All next day the section treks in a stiff gale. This is good; it means we’re near the summit. Around noon we spot fresh graves. Our own countrymen, from the sections ahead. With shame we welcome the sight. It means we’re still on the trail. Mountain sickness adds to our woes. No one can eat; you can’t keep anything down. We are weak and disoriented. The simplest chore becomes monumental. You recall, say, a chunk of jerked meat in your kit. Now try and get it. To wring one mitt off your fist takes the count of fifty. By then you’ve forgotten what you took it off for. Two fellows put up their pinpointers and forget to tug them down; they go snow-blind. They must be roped and led.