The Ten Thousand (16 page)
As the enemy steadily approached, Clearchus dismounted and strode over to the seers waiting before the front lines of troops. Like Euripides, he believed that it is with the gods' favor that wise commanders launch an attack, never against their wishes, and so he ordered a goat sacrificed to Zeus and then to Phobos, God of Fear and Rout, seeking to avert the latter's eyes from our men and to focus them instead on the Persians. Clearchus himself began the ritual, and despite the relentless advance of the enemy troops, he carefully and deliberately followed the prescribed protocol, slicing his blade through the beast's exposed throat and letting the blood spurt and gush, placating the gods. As it fell, it soaked into the hot, parched earth, leaving only a dark, steaming stain which itself would be effaced within minutes by the stifling dust, as the earth healed itself of the scars and stains inflicted by men in their puny affairs.
Clearchus had not yet called his troops to attention. Though they carefully watched the advancing hordes and the sacrifices, they feigned nonchalance, glancing out of the corners of their eyes, their shields leaning against their legs and the gripcords exposed, some of the men still sitting down. Xenophon and I had been warned in advance by Proxenus of this unsettling habit of the Spartans, a calculated effect designed to indicate their scorn for the advancing enemy. It was not until the Persian archers, some 200 yards distant, finally began finding their range that the men casually stood up and mounted their shields.
At a signal from Clearchus' trumpeter the Greeks bellowed the watchword we had devised,
Zeus soter kai Nike!
"Savior Zeus and Victory!" clanging their shields and increasing the volume of their roar with each repetition until the very earth seemed to shudder. After a moment, the reedy, high-pitched wailing of the battle pipes soared over our voices, an otherworldly top-note rising in arrhythmic counterpoint to the bass of the hellish chorus. The rising, rolling beat of the oxhide drums, which we felt as a thumping tremor in our bellies, resonated through the ranks, and as the throbbing beat suddenly doubled we broke as one into the chanted war hymn, the paean to Apollo. The thunder of the massed ten thousand voices and the explosive clanging and crashing of spears on shields rolled over the field between the opposing forces, and seemed to hit the Persians almost physically, like a wall. The enemy companies directly across the field from our right wing faltered and their front visibly wavered as the troops behind them began to cluster in bunches. At another deafening blast from the salpinx we broke toward the Persians' left wing in a trot. Our hoplites maintained a flawless, tight phalanx formation on the slightly downward sloping plain, while the light infantry followed close behind, fitting their arrows on the run, forever chanting the bloody hymn. As we approached to within fifty yards of the enemy lines, the heavy infantry broke off the rhythm of the war chant and commenced a full-throated, wordless wail, a howl as if of pent-up rage, summoning Ares, the implacable god of war, with the deafening cry, "
Eleleu! Eleleu! Eleleu!
" They snapped their spears down in perfect unison to full horizontal, the freshly sharpened edges and tips glinting their promise of painful death in the blinding sun. The mouths of the terrified enemy soldiers before us worked soundlessly, contorted in fear, and their officers' horses rolled their eyes wildly and reared their heads to the side in an effort to escape the bellowing wall of men and metal fast approaching.
The enemy line faltered, its front ranks stopping dead. The rearward Persian marchers, unable to see what was happening uphill beyond their leading comrades, kept pushing forward, tripping over those who had halted in front, and in turn being pushed by their fellows in the rear. Encouraged at this sign of hesitation, the Greek heavy infantry picked up its pace to a full sprint, armor and shields crashing madly. The discipline of the Greek forces was heart-stopping—men prepared against those unprepared, good order against disorder, troops surging forward in absolute, deadly precision, as tight and as uniform as the scales on an asp.
As for what happened next, it is impossible to say whether the gods were responsible, or whether no enemy could resist a tide of men as determined as ours. The Persian ranks collapsed without a struggle in the face of the Greek hell-storm, unable to muster even the deafening crash one usually hears as the lead warriors of the opposing forces collide and fold into one another in a chaos of metal, body fluids, and screams. The front line broke and we plowed over them as if they were so many molehills, neglecting even to kill those we ran over, but simply trampling them and moving on to the next rank, a seething, roaring wall of iron and death. The frenzied camp followers swarming close behind us stripped the dead of their valuables and food, using clubs and discarded spearheads to make short work of any enemy soldiers who remained twitching or sobbing after being mowed down by our surging hoplites. The Persians in the front lines tried desperately to wheel and run to the rear, but their comrades behind, fifteen or twenty ranks thick, marched doggedly forward like the slaves they were, under the whips and threats of their sergeants, blocking the path of the panic-stricken front ranks and hindering their retreat. Slaughter ensued, panic fed upon panic. Even those few Persians originally inclined to take a stand and fight lost heart when they saw they had been deserted on all sides, and then they themselves joined the terrified mob.
Our archers took special aim at the enemy chariot drivers, who had held slightly back behind their heavy infantry, waiting for a gap in the fighting to open up through which they could drive their lethal scythes without cutting apart their own men. The Spartans loathed such machines, and had not used them in their own forces for a hundred years. They did, however, relish the thought of facing them, for they had mastered the trick of calmly opening up gaps between which the chariot drivers would charge harmlessly, while one or two Spartans darted in from the side and stabbed the horse or driver. In his youth, Clearchus was known to be well accomplished in this trick.
The Spartans were to be disappointed, however, for not a single Persian scythe-chariot even made it to the Greek lines. Our bowmen toppled several of the drivers, and in the ensuing chaos none of the Persian infantry even bothered to pick up their comrades' reins. The panicked horses raced about aimlessly among their own men, the razor-sharp blades violating the sanctity and virginity of fragile skin, lopping off an arm here, a head there, gouging through men's breastplates and ribs as if they were cheese, exposing the gods' secrets to the eyes of leering and terrified onlookers. I watched as two Boeotians from Proxenus' battalion, brothers as it happened, each took charge of a runaway chariot and began lending method and discipline to the general carnage they were wreaking, turning the Persians' most terrifying weapons against them with devastating effect. They cut a bloody swath through the most densely packed of the enemy lines, and then calmly drove their captured trophies up to Proxenus, grinning, with odd pieces of bloody flesh and dripping helmet leather still hanging off the murderous tines. Socrates once said that to peer inside a human being, you can make him laugh or observe him in love; he neglected to note that you can also use a blade or a spear point. The latter method proves beyond a doubt that people are more alike inside than they are outside, and in fact are scarcely different from pigs or asses.
Xenophon galloped back and forth the length of our immediate line, wheeling his mount in tight circles at the end of his range, and observing Tissaphernes' forces closely for any indication of an attack or an attempt to outflank our troops. The exercise was useless, however; Tissaphernes' cavalry were helpless in the chaos, and they assembled nervously far to the rear of the battle, awaiting the outcome. I glanced at Proxenus, who was darting in and out of the slaughter on his horse, trying to maintain order among the fury, and at Clearchus, who after having led his men directly to the enemy lines, had backed away to monitor the situation, and was now sitting on his horse impassively on the edge of the fray, watching as his men mowed down the enemy as if harvesting wheat in a field.
Finally the Persians' surviving middle and rear ranks reversed their march and began a general retreat. The Greeks ran them down as they went, tripping over the bodies of the fallen and slipping in the gore on the ground as they churned it into an ankle-deep slurry of mud and piss, salted with shattered weapons and the detritus of dying men. The Hellenes' spears, both the throwing point and the
sauroter
, the bronze-tipped "lizard-killer" used for standing the weapon in the ground when at rest, had long since broken and shivered on the fragile spines and skulls of the Persians, and our men were now reduced to a frenzied, blind hacking with their short swords. Mobs of Persians threw down their shields and weapons in their panic, forgoing any protection, forgetting even to fight, but doing everything to assist in their own slaughter. The enemy dead numbered in the thousands, while our troops had scarcely lost a man, suffering only from the weary numbness in our limbs from the strain of the relentless killing.
Clearchus at last roused himself from his apparent boredom at the appalling carnage, and ordered his trumpeter to sound a halt. For what seemed an eternity, nothing happened. The horrifying bloodbath continued unabated. Finally, however, after further trumpet blasts, Clearchus resorted to riding into the slaughter himself, swinging and beating at his own men with the flat of his sword to drive them back, to force a respite. The mad blood-trance lifted and the Greeks staggered, gasping, to a halt. The shattered men slowly lowered their arms and stood trembling in place, dropping their weapons in exhaustion. The terrible roar of battle died away to a mere echo in our heads, which was gradually replaced by the moans of the injured and dying. The troops' appearance was hellish, godlike—so slathered in gore from helmet to greaves they might have been wallowing in it like dogs, their eyes glittering evilly through the darkness of their visors, the muscles in their shoulders and thighs swollen and taut. Their chests heaved, quaking legs collapsing in exhaustion, some crumpling into the steaming, fetid muck, kicking aside corpses and unclaimed viscera to make room for themselves. Moans of agony filled the still, heavy air, the death throes of bleeding Persians who had not yet been dispatched by the pitiless camp followers. The ground was purple with blood, it flowed in rivulets into puddles and pools and collected in hollows, corpses lay mingled with each other, shields pierced, spears splintered, daggers unsheathed, some on the ground, most stuck in bodies, some still in the hands of the dead. The hardiest of the Greek troops struggled to remain on their feet, their hands shaking from the shock of the slaughter and the intensity of their effort, and they sought out comrades, even strangers, to lean against in their exhaustion and to feel some human comfort.
It was only now that the men realized the extent of their accomplishment, and of the danger they had faced. For all our awesome bluster, our attack was a precarious one—the men had kept their shields in an even line out of sheer discipline, but the unintended effect of this was to hide the enemy's view of what lay behind our front. We had, in fact, stretched ourselves so thin, in order to cover the entire length of the massed Persian forces facing us, that our phalanx was only four ranks deep—half the normal depth. We had had only one chance to break through the enemy, and against all odds, we had succeeded.
Clearchus dismounted and walked solemnly among the dazed men, lending a shoulder to one on which to lean momentarily, helping another to rise from the spot where his knees had given way in the shock of the killing. I was astonished to see him offer calm, quiet words of encouragement, amazed at the visible strength he lent to each man as he strode among the ranks. The groups through which he passed stood noticeably taller and stronger than those whose shoulders he had not yet touched. This, I reflected, was the source of Clearchus' own strength, his fierceness, this restorative and inspirational effect on the men at his command. After a few moments, he found a small boulder on which to stand, and throwing his helmet back from his face and raising his blood-encrusted sword to the heavens, he lifted a heart-stopping cry to the gods: "Lord of the Gods, Protector of Armies, these men—these men are
Greeks!
Savior Zeus and Victory!"
The troops leaped to their feet in triumph, clanging their swords upon shields with deafening effect, repeating the terrifying war chant. Hearing a strangled "
Eleleu, eleleu
" voiced with great effort from somewhere nearby, I glanced behind me and realized it was coming from the parched, constricted throat of Xenophon as he too stared at Clearchus, an expression of murderous triumph in his eyes.
The men settled back down to rest for a moment, silent in their exhaustion and gratefulness at remaining alive, and gulping watered wine from their skins. At Proxenus' request, I galloped atop a small rise for better visibility, peering through the heat waves rising from the earth to where Cyrus' cavalry and the Greeks' left flank stood awaiting the outcome of our skirmish. The dust was still heavy in the air, but as it slowly cleared, I could perceive the outline of our other troops, a mile or so distant. I raised Proxenus' battalion flag and waved it in mad circles, and as I did so I saw their pennants lift high in jubilation, men raising their weapons above their heads. A moment later I heard their throaty cheer come rolling toward me over the plain. I glanced at Proxenus, and his eyes smiled beneath the uptilted brim of his visor.
The most imminent danger was from the king's right wing, which extended to our front as far as the eye could see, far overlapping Cyrus' relatively short left line. The king himself had maneuvered to face Cyrus, and had apparently ordered an encircling movement, for his hyperextended right wing was now folding in and around the prince's left side. Even the most ignorant battle squire could see that unless immediate action were taken, Cyrus' troops would either be surrounded, forced to retreat leaving our group separated and vulnerable, or driven back toward its right to the river, leaving all of us to our own fates, trapped between an enormous army in the front and an impassable river in the rear. Seeing the prince's quandary, Clearchus ordered the men up and in battle order, and we wearily began a forced trot in the blazing sun back across the field whence we had just come, to support Cyrus' forces. Tissaphernes' cavalry, however, was nowhere to be seen, and when I pointed this out to Xenophon, he looked up, startled. Proxenus had assigned him to observe their movements, but in the exhaustion and glow of our rout over the Persians facing us, he had neglected this task for several minutes.