Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (8 page)

Alexander’s sycophantic entourage ridiculed the caution of the old man. The philosopher Callisthenes (soon to be executed himself) is the most likely source of these pejorative morality tales, which culminated in the story of Parmenio’s advice to cease entirely the advance eastward. Before the campaign of Gaugamela, he had purportedly urged acceptance of Darius’s eleventh-hour offer of a Western Persian Empire for Alexander under the aegis of a general truce. “I would accept if I were you,” he told his king. “And I too if I were Parmenio,” Alexander barked back (Plutarch
Alexander
29.8–9).

In the heat of battle, with Darius almost in his grasp, Alexander scoffed that Parmenio fretted more about the loss of the Macedonian camp and its valuables than the course of the battle itself. Nevertheless, he sent back the rider with the promise that Alexander and his Companions would reverse their course, though not without the insulting admonition to Parmenio that the victorious add the baggage of their enemies to their own, while the defeated must not worry about money or their slaves, but only how to fight bravely and die with honor. Parmenio was not worried about his own baggage, nor even about getting his hands on the rich camp of the enemy, but was terrified about the very survival of his entire wing, and with it the fate of a Macedonian army thousands of miles from the Aegean. That same specter struck Napoleon centuries later, when he remarked that Gaugamela was a great victory but too risky, since defeat would have stranded Alexander “nine hundred leagues from Macedonia.” Parmenio knew that the gallant dash of his king, brilliantly timed to crack the weakened Persian left and middle, was nevertheless a tremendous gamble: a chasm opened in the Macedonian lines the moment the Companions took off. If Alexander was right that the Macedonians were a victory away from inheriting the entire Persian Empire, Parmenio was equally correct that they were also a defeat away from total annihilation— 50,000 Europeans 1,500 miles from home in a sea of millions of enemies.

Up until Parmenio’s messenger arrived, the battle had been a perfect day. Plutarch says that Alexander’s chief problem when he slammed into the Persian line was the sheer mass of enemy dead and wounded who obstructed the pursuit “by grabbing on and entwining themselves around both riders and horses” (
Alexander
33.7). Arrian adds that horsemen were literally “shoving” the Persians before the phalanx came on with their bristling spears (
Anabasis
3.14.2–3). Alexander’s tactical plan was simple but typically brilliant: as Parmenio pivoted on the left, tying down the Persian right and securing the safety of the army’s rear, he would have the entire Macedonian line drift slowly rightward, toward the rough ground where Darius’s scythed chariots would be useless. In response, the Persian king would be forced to send his left wing to surround Alexander’s right and block the Macedonian drift—and thereby deplete his own middle companies in an effort to herd Alexander back.

Alexander would continue to send rightward successive contingents—light-armed, horse, and infantry—to force the Persian flanking contingents into an ever-widening hook. Meanwhile, Alexander himself would sit tight with his veterans until he spotted a gap at the heart of the weakened enemy middle. For just such a moment, Alexander was holding back his grand punch—a wedge of his Companions, hypaspists, and the phalanx. With these veterans—the best fighting men the ancient world would produce—he would charge through the hole, into the heart of the Persian line and right at Darius himself. True, the Persian army was far larger and in theory might outflank both his wings. But as long as his horsemen and reserves channeled the flanking assaults outward, the base of the Persian attack at some point surely must thin and weaken. In every outflanking attack, troops must be transferred from somewhere; that somewhere Alexander was confident he could spot and exploit before it was too late.

The key for Alexander was organization, tactics, and timing. Novel mobile contingents of light skirmishers and horsemen must be placed independently on the wings—backed by a reserve line of 6,700 heavy infantrymen—while the best of the Macedonian cavalry and phalangites were to be kept out of the preliminary fighting, ready as a razor-sharp blade for the decisive blow against the Persian center. Alexander must strike before his two wings were overwhelmed—and yet not
too
soon lest he hit the massive wall of the Persian middle that had not yet become weakened. When the long-expected gap in the Persian line for a moment opened up, there rode Alexander into the imperial guard, directly after Darius and the prize of the empire itself.

With Alexander’s recall the Achaemenid king escaped—only to be murdered nine months later by one of his satraps, Bessus. A disgruntled Alexander reined in Bucephalas and turned back out of the dusty cloud of dying men and horses to ride in the opposite direction, into the retreating Persians who had almost killed Parmenio. But the old baron no longer seemed to be in danger; in fact, Alexander spotted Parmenio’s fleeing attackers and deliberately rode head-on into them. If he were not to slaughter Darius’s fleeing entourage, he might as well wipe out the best horsemen of Scythia and Bactria in this secondary engagement.

All extant ancient sources emphasize that this final collision of horsemen was the most deadly moment of the entire battle. More than sixty Companions fell; hundreds of horses on both sides were slaughtered; and the Persian cavalry was nearly annihilated. Arrian adds that there was “no more javelin throwing or maneuvering of horses” (
Anabasis
3.15.2), but rather a war of continual blows. More than sixty years earlier at the infantry battle of Coronea, the old Spartan king Agesilaus had likewise deliberately charged his victorious Spartan phalanx back into a retreating column of Theban hoplites and was nearly wiped out for his efforts. A battle like “none other of our time,” the eyewitness Xenophon wrote of that dreadful collision between heavy shock troops. In the Hellenic tradition an enemy on the horizon was not to be avoided, bypassed, or ignored, if there was even a slight chance that he could be struck head-on, face-to-face, and en masse.

Lord
of
Asia

Alexander would come to Gaugamela, Darius thought. He was sure of that much. So the king had prepared for the Macedonian’s arrival, seeking out a flat plain without obstacles for his scythed chariots, clear ground for his elephants, thousands of horsemen, and his much longer battle line— even Alexander could not overcome such advantages of terrain and numbers. At last, Darius thought, a cavalry battle in an open plain, precisely the type of mobile warfare his nomadic horsemen excelled at, and exactly the scenario dreaded by the phalangites of the West. Alexander, Darius also knew, would ride to battle at Gaugamela, just as he had charged across the river Granicus and up the high banks into the Persian mass, just as he had once ordered his men to advance through the stream, stockade, and embankment at Issus, just as he had insisted on storming the nearly impregnable Tyre and massive walls of Gaza, just as he had always come to destroy any obstacle, army, or citadel—flesh or stone—in his path. He would come to Gaugamela, river or no river, unfavorable ground or not, mused Darius. Alexander would come onto the chosen ground of King Darius III and thus once more be forced to battle according to His Majesty’s plans.

And why not? These “most foolish” Greeks had always done just that. At Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea they had forced decisive battles against Persians, despite being outnumbered. Seventy-seven years ago not too far from this spot, the trapped Greek hoplites of the Ten Thousand had refused the terms of Darius’s ancestor, Artaxerxes II, preferring to fight their way out of Persia. Even after their generals had been lured into a parley near Gaugamela itself, then tortured and executed, the leaderless Ten Thousand had still chosen to fight. They had battled the entire year, killing their way to the Black Sea and safety. Then in sight of Europe, many of them had stayed on, joined the Spartan army in Asia Minor, and fought Persians again. Yes, Darius thought, this crazed Macedonian youth would come up the Tigris River, hunt him down, and force a final battle for the empire of his forefathers.

This time Darius had picked his ground well. There were few hills. Alexander could use neither river nor sea to protect his flanks. Darius’s subjects had cleared the plain for the easy onslaught of his scythed chariots. Traps and spikes had been hidden where it was most likely Alexander would ride in. Had the Macedonians, the king thought, ever encountered elephants in battle?

The only worry? Long gone were most of his Greek mercenary hoplites, who had fought so well in the two prior pitched battles against Alexander. The original phalanx of hired Hellenic killers had been surrounded, and exterminated or captured at Granicus. Their replacements—more than 20,000 strong—were destroyed or scattered at Issus. Nowhere in Persia were there any such comparable infantrymen left who welcomed shock battle, men who could stand up to Alexander’s pikemen—surely neither the old Immortals of Persian legend nor the gaudy “Apple Bearers” with their famed sphere-butted spears. King Darius had only 2,000 Greek hoplites remaining, and thus no men in an empire of 70 million who were willing to charge the wall of Macedonian pikes. Alexander won at Gaugamela and elsewhere in Asia for the same reasons Greek infantry won overseas: theirs was a culture of face-to-face battle of rank-and-file columns, not a contest of mobility, numerical superiority, or ambush. It was no accident that Alexander’s veterans aimed their pikes and swords at the faces of the aristocratic mounted Persian elite, lords who had no experience with an enemy who sought to crash into them, push them down, and spear or slice them to pieces.

Could not Darius’s legendary scythed chariots—more than two hundred were assembled on the battlefield—mow down the clumsy phalanx if they could burst out unexpectedly from his line, race over the flat ground, and trap the phalangites before they were mobile? Could not elephants —he had obtained fifteen from India—also be useful if the Indians could bring them up safely through his lines and lead them head-on against Alexander’s Companions? Darius knew he had no real quality heavy infantry, but thousands of cavalrymen to surfeit, and so he determined that Gaugamela would be a vast war of horses, the greatest cavalry battle in Asia since the legendary battle of Kadesh between Egyptians and Hittites nearly a millennium earlier. Darius may have had nearly 50,000 mounted troops against fewer than 8,000 cavalry of Alexander. If the king could sweep the flanks of the Macedonian army, send his prized Bactrians and Scythian cataphracts around the enemy right, and simultaneously his trusted Mazaeus behind their left, then Alexander’s terrible phalanx would be not so terrible after all—surprised from the rear by mounted killers who could race around and cut the clumsy pikemen from behind. At Gaugamela, for the first time in the war for the Persian Empire, there were fearsome veterans from the steppes of the Eastern empire, men Alexander himself had never encountered before in the western satrapies, men of the caliber that could outflank and herd the Macedonians onto Darius’s massive advancing Persian center.

The
Empire’s
Last
Battle

On October 1, 331, an aerial view of the battlefield of Gaugamela in the first few minutes would have revealed an enormous three-sided box of embattled Macedonians, as Alexander’s two wings bent backward, in their struggle to keep their encircling enemies to their sides rather than allowing them to their rear. Within the hour, however, Gaugamela was a radically different picture, more a race between desperate horsemen of both sides who had penetrated their respective enemies’ lines. Could Alexander and his Companions ride through the gap and shatter the Persians before the horsemen of Darius burst through a similar rip in his own lines? The answer was clearly yes. In singular fashion, Alexander wished to kill Darius, destroy his army, and annihilate every enemy soldier on the battlefield. He would pursue and slaughter his fleeing enemies unmercifully until they ceased to exist as a military force. For all that, he rode into the Persian mass: to stab the faces of the enemy with pikes, to throw them off their horses bare-handed, to crash their own mounts into the bigger horses of Darius. For all that and more, the dutiful Companions followed their king into the horde of enemy horsemen.

In contrast, the Persians and Indians who breached the Macedonian line headed directly for the cache of booty, more intent on the king’s adulation in freeing the Achaemenid royal prisoners than on the hard work of finishing off Parmenio. Alexander in a sea of Persians went about slaughtering an army, while amid Macedonians the Persians butchered camp followers. To Persian horsemen of the plains, loot, the rare chance to kill the unarmed, the frenzy of riding and raiding among tents and wagons, were the stuff of nomadic warfare: better to get your hands on plunder than lose it to some rival band of rapacious interlopers. To Macedonians and Greeks, however, charging, killing, and still more killing face-to-face were the essence of three centuries of the Western way of war.