Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (9 page)

Gaugamela (“the camel’s house”) was Alexander’s third, final, and greatest battle against the Achaemenid empire, more a slaughter than a real set piece per se, since a numerically superior force rapidly disintegrated through panic, fear, and the brilliant tactics of its adversaries. For hours until dusk Gaugamela was a story of thousands of imperial subjects—50,000 is a reasonable estimate—speared and ridden down from the rear as they sought safety along the plains of the upper Tigris valley. Scholars are unsure how many fought on October 1 and find unanimity only in rejecting the fantastic claims of our ancient sources that more than a million Persians were assembled. Most likely, Darius III had collected well over 100,000 horse and infantry, pitted against 47,000 Macedonians, some 7,500 to 8,000 of them horsemen—the largest European army that Alexander had hitherto mustered. Alexander may have had more Greeks in his army at Gaugamela than during his prior two battles, as Hellenic mercenaries—Thracians, Thessalians, and stout infantrymen from the Peloponnese—increasingly discovered that service with Macedon meant life and booty, while work for the Achaemenid king more likely ended in a lonely death in a far land.

Mesopotamia was a good enough place to fight. Both armies had ample provisions and plenty of water. The weather was dry and mild in early fall; and there was enough flat ground to accommodate thousands of killers. Babylon, with its promise for the victors of rest, feast, loot, and women, was a relatively easy three-week march downstream.

After tearing off the western portions of the empire and Egypt, Alexander in late summer 331 B.C. drove on toward Babylon in hopes of capturing the ancient city and forcing a showdown with the final military reserves of the Persian Empire. After having witnessed his own Achaemenid armies routed at Granicus (334) and again at Issus (333), as well as losing the key strongholds at Tyre and Gaza, in addition to the rich provinces of Ionia, Phoenicia, Egypt, and Cilicia, Darius understood that he must finally stay put and fight for the survival of the remaining, eastern half of his empire. He chose a small plain, more than three hundred miles north of Babylon on a small branch of the Tigris River, the Bumelus, about seventy-five miles from the town of Arbela.

Because Alexander’s tactics were well known, Darius had a good idea what to expect. The king, always on the enemy right wing, would seek a gap or some flanking entry around his own left, pour through with 2,000 to 3,000 heavy horsemen, and head straight for the Persian high command, all in hopes of creating a breach through the mass, as his shield-bearing spearmen and dreaded pikemen followed. Meanwhile, Parmenio on the left would stay steadfast and pivot if need be, until the morale of the imperial army was shattered as the ruling Achaemenid clique fled for their lives. All that Darius knew, but was helpless to stop, and so the day’s slaughter followed the script Darius feared and Alexander planned.

The Macedonians parted on cue for the scythed chariots— Gaugamela seems to be the only time these much-feared but rather impractical weapons were actually used en masse in any battle—and stabbed the drivers as they sped past. Darius’s elephants apparently panicked or were let through the phalanx—or never even made it to the front. Both chariots and elephants were found largely unscathed after the battle and taken as trophies. The latter after their maiden appearance at Gaugamela became a mainstay of Hellenistic warfare; the former became little more than the rhetoric of Greek romances and the sketch-pad doodles of Western engineers until the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The Persian flanking columns never quite surrounded their enemies; and the decisive charge of Indians and Persians that slammed into the Macedonian left and center now went after plunder, not Parmenio.

The consequence was that when the dust cleared on the morning of October 2, the plain of Gaugamela was an ungodly mess—Diodorus says that “the complete area of the battlefield was full of corpses” (17.50.61). Fifty thousand Persians were dead or dying—we need not believe some ancient reports of 300,000 killed—among a general detritus of wandering camp followers, crippled horses, and booty scavengers. Thousands of wounded crawled to the tiny streams and mudholes of the surrounding alluvial plains. Alexander himself returned to the battlefield to bury his dead. He collected little more than a hundred men from under the carcasses of well over a thousand Macedonian horses. Five hundred Persians had fallen at Gaugamela for every Macedonian—such were the disparities when a polyglot, multicultural force of panicked men fled on level ground before heavily armed veteran killers with pikes and seasoned cavalry, whose one worry was not to turn fainthearted in front of lifelong companions -in-arms. The myriad corpses of his enemy were left to decompose in the autumn sun. Alexander, worried only about the rot and smell, quickly moved his army away from the stink and headed south to Babylon and the kingship of the Achaemenids. “The battle,” Plutarch remarks, “resulted in the utter termination of the Persian Empire” (
Alexander
34.1).

THE MACEDONIAN MILITARY MACHINE

There was irony in the Macedonian conquest of Greece and Persia. After spending two decades creating the army that had pacified Greece, Alexander’s father, Philip II, was gutted by a young aristocrat and embittered hanger-on, Pausanias, perhaps as part of a broken homosexual affair, but more likely on orders of Alexander and his mother, Olympias, to ensure the young prince’s succession. If Philip was assassinated at the moment when his murderous twenty years of command had at last borne fruit to create the unified kingdom of Macedon and Greece, so Alexander, after reaching the Indus, would die in Babylon at thirty-three, without enjoying the empire for which he had also fought so long and killed so many.

The royal army of Macedon was Philip’s, not Alexander’s. It had been formed and led for more than twenty years by Philip, while Alexander was at its head for little more than half that period. It was King Philip who crafted a grand new army; Philip who supplied it, led it, and organized it differently from anything in past Greek practice—in order to kill other Greeks. As it turned out, Alexander found his inheritance even more useful for killing Persians.

The equipment and tactics of his Macedonian phalanx in theory did not differ all that radically from that of the traditional hoplite spearmen of the Greek city-states, though the phalangites were mercenary and handpicked as the “tallest and strongest” of Philip’s recruits. The thrusting spear was retained, but lengthened from eight to between sixteen and eighteen feet and fitted with a heavier iron point and stouter bronze butt spike. Thus, it became a true pike—weighing nearly fifteen pounds, more than six times heavier than the old hoplite spear—and required both hands for adequate control and handling. Such
sarissai
were held six feet from the butt, and so extended twelve feet in front of the phalangites, giving the Macedonian pikeman an advantage in reach of eight to ten feet more than the traditional hoplite spearmen. The old hoplite round shield of some three feet was discarded, and in its place a tiny disk was hung from the neck or shoulder; greaves, heavy bronze breastplates, and headgear were also replaced, with either leather or composite materials, or abandoned altogether. In the bargain, the first four or five rows, not three, were thrusting, giving 40 percent more spearheads in the killing zone. Such a hedgehoglike front also provided an unusual degree of offensive might as well as defensive protection for the lighter-clad initial ranks.

In ideological terms the traditional Greek hoplites’ large shields, heavy breastplates and helmets, and spears of moderate size had reflected the old civic and defensive values of the militiamen of a free city-state— precisely the opposite mentality of pike-wielding, lightly protected, and aggressive Macedonian phalangites. The latter were hired and rootless men without a polis, often with no farm of their own, who added numerous feet to the hoplite’s spear but reduced the shield’s area by two-thirds: killing and the advance, rather than personal protection and holding ground, were prized. To this phalanx of grim, professional “foot companions”
(pezetairoi),
Philip added the Companion Cavalry
(hetairoi),
an elite body of aristocratic horsemen, heavily armored on strong mounts. Horse raising had always been frowned upon to the south in Greek city-state culture; it was an inefficient use of scarce land, privileged an elite who often agitated for autocracy, and was of little value against a wall of yeoman spearmen. Not so in Macedon, a society of two, not three, classes, of masters and serfs, in a land as broad and wide as Thessaly. The Companion Cavalry, we should remember, was ultimately to end up fighting lighter-armed Eastern, not Western, spear-carrying infantry.

Another contingent of infantry, with more armor and shorter spears, the “shield bearers” (hypaspists), also occupied the center of the Macedonian line, beside the phalanx. The hypaspists were the first infantry forces to follow behind the Companion Cavalry’s initial onslaught, thereby providing a crucial link between the mounted attack and the subsequent follow-up by the phalanx proper. Professional corps of light infantry, slingers, archers, and javelineers rounded out the composite army group, supplying both preliminary bombardment and crucial reserve support. The latter at Gaugamela—along with the tough Agrianians— held off the flanking movements of the Persian left, while Alexander and the
hetairoi
rode in, the hypaspists following, with the
pezetairoi
lumbering behind, clearing and widening the gap with their pikes.

The old Hellenic phalanx had been reinvented by Philip and had therein gained fresh importance. It was to evolve even further from the dependence on rural protocol and ritual that made Greek armies operate close to home, and without the ability to be supplied for extended marches. Philip’s intention was to craft a new national army that might outmaneuver a Greek phalanx, and yet still easily crash through the Persian Immortals. He wanted an army like the phalanx of the Ten Thousand that had cleared the field of Persian infantry at Cunaxa (401 B.C.), but one that also might outflank such heavily armed and far more deadly Greek hoplites.

The Greeks’ central idea of fighting en masse through shock battle remained predominant at Macedon. Integrated with, and protected by, such variegated forces, Philip’s phalanx of true pikemen was more lethal and more versatile than the traditional hoplite columns. “Nothing,” the historian Polybius concluded nearly two centuries later, “can stand up to the phalanx. The Roman by himself with his sword can neither slash down nor break through the ten spears that all at once press against him” (18.30.9–10). Surely, Polybius was correct: the idea that men could stand firm when three, four, five, and more iron spearheads plunged into their limbs, heads, necks, torsos, and legs is improbable. Since the first five ranks of the Macedonian phalanx would present a staggered wall of points—with the first row’s pikes extending ten feet into the killing zone—an enemy would have to fight his way through “a storm of spears,” which protruded at every angle, before he could even reach the initial rank of the phalanx.

The Macedonian phalangites turned their full attention to thrusting their dreadful spears, without the cumbersome weight of the old hoplite panoply—or the need to protect with an enormous shield their immediate comrades on the right. Offensive movement, leveled pikes, and constant motion forward meant everything; defense, large shields, and worry over covering neighbors were of little consequence. Once a phalanx achieved momentum, and its pikes were rambling forward, nothing could withstand the terrifying force of oncoming Greek iron. Imagine the Persian unfortunates shredded by repeated stabbing: the chief problem for their victorious Macedonian executioners was to keep spearheads free of ruined enemy equipment and the weight of mutilated corpses. From literary sources we receive the impression that in this horrendous world of phalanx-killing, it was not sleek youth or elegant muscle that the infantry commander sought out, but stout, grubby old veterans, with the nerve and experience not to flinch in the task at hand and thus stay in rank during the charge and collision to follow.

Used with greater precision and power, the new Macedonian phalanx delivered a knockout blow once the target had been sighted and left vulnerable by the work of cavalry and ancillary contingents. Hammerlike, the Macedonian cavalry charges concentrated on a set spot on the enemy line, broke through, and eventually battered the enemy back onto the clumsy anvil of the spear-bristling phalanx. This coordination between infantry and horsemen was an entirely new development in the history of Western warfare, and was designed to make numbers superfluous. Philip’s battles were not to be huge shoving matches between phalanxes, but sudden Napoleonic blasts to particular spots, which when exploited would collapse and thereby ruin the morale of the others. Unlike the prior evenly matched battles inside Greece, the Macedonian army in Asia had to assume it would be outnumbered by three to one.

Alexander’s Successors in the decades after his death were often criticized for abandoning his mastery of mounted and infantry coordination in favor of sheer bulk: lengthening pikes to twenty feet and more and bringing in elephants and torsion artillery in place of skilled, seasoned cavalry. In their defense, captains like Antigonus, Seleucus, Eumenes, and Ptolemy were not, like Alexander, fighting Persians but other Macedonian and Greek armies against which mounted charges had little effect. To break apart a phalanx of pikemen in a decisive battle required elephants or another phalanx. Consequently, Alexander’s fluidity and mastery of cavalry battle were not so much forgotten by his successors as deemed irrelevant in the new wars that saw armies of Greek and Macedonian pikemen, led by tough European veterans who would have frightened Alexander’s horsemen.

Philip brought to Western warfare an enhanced notion of decisive war. True, the Macedonians’ face-to-face, stand-up fighting was reminiscent of the shock assaults of the Greek phalanxes of the past. The running collisions of massed infantry, the spear tip to the face of the enemy, were still the preferred Hellenic creed of any Macedonian phalangite. But no longer were Macedonians killing merely over territorial borders. Battle was designed predominantly as an instrument of ambitious state policy. Philip’s destructive mechanism for conquest and annexation was a radical source of social unrest and cultural upheaval, not a conservative Greek institution to preserve the existing agrarian community. Decisive face-to-face battle, once embedded in Greek cultural protocol—notification of intent, limited pursuit, exchange of prisoners, agreement to accept the victory of the battlefield scrum—had become the centerpiece of a new total war of brutal annihilation which the world had not yet seen. Small Greek armies of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. had met on small plains to collide together, push, stab, and force their adversaries off the battlefield, an hour or so of battle often deciding an entire war. The Macedonians saw no reason to stop fighting at the collapse of their enemy on the battlefield when he could be demolished in toto, and his house and land looted, destroyed, or annexed.

Philip’s men, too, were a completely different breed from the Greek hoplites of the city-state. In his lost comedy
Philip,
the playwright Mnesimachus (ca. 350 B.C.) makes his characteristic Macedonian phalangites brag:

Do you know against what type of men you’ll have to fight?
We who dine on sharpened swords, and drink down blazing torches as our wine.
Then for dessert they bring us broken Cretan darts and splintered pike shafts. Our pillows are shields and breastplates, and beside our feet lie bows and slings.
We crown ourselves with catapult wreaths.
 (Mnesimachus frg. 7 [cf. Athenaeus 10.421b])

In the conservative fourth-century-B.C. oratory of the Greek polis, Philip himself appeared as a limping, one-eyed monster, a terrible man who would fight at any time, in any manner. Demosthenes warned the Athenians:

You hear of Philip marching unchecked, not because he leads a phalanx of hoplites, but rather because he is accompanied by skirmishers, cavalry, archers, mercenaries, and similar troops. When relying on these forces, he attacks a people that is at odds with itself, and when through distrust no one goes forth to fight for his country, he next brings up his artillery and lays siege. I need hardly tell you that Philip makes no difference between summer and winter, and has no season set apart for inaction. (Demosthenes 9,
Third Philippic
49–51)

After the assassination of Philip (336 B.C.), and Alexander’s subsequent subjugation of the Greek states following the destruction of Thebes, the twenty-year-old king inaugurated his deceased father’s planned Persian invasion with a victory at the Granicus River near the Hellespont (334). In his first savage onslaught at the Granicus, Alexander established a pattern of battle in which we can distinguish a rough sequence of events that appears at all three of his subsequent major triumphs at Issus (333), Gaugamela (331), and the Hydaspes River (326): brilliant adaptation to often unfavorable terrain (all his battles were on plains chosen by his adversaries); generalship by frightful example of personal —and always near fatal—courage at the head of the Companion Cavalry; stunning cavalry blows focused on a concentrated spot in the enemy line, horsemen from the rear turning the dazed enemy onto the spears of the advancing phalanx; subsequent pursuit of enemy forces in the field, reflecting Alexander’s impulse to eliminate, not merely to defeat, hostile armies. In all such cases, the overriding agenda was to find the enemy, charge him, and annihilate him in open battle—victory going not to the larger force, but to the one who could maintain rank and break the enemy as a cohesive whole.

Alexander never led an army larger than 50,000 men—by necessity more than by intent: he was forced to leave at least 40,000 Macedonians back in Greece to keep the peace. In his first battles (e.g., Granicus and Issus) there were more Greeks fighting against him than for him. Given the fact that garrisoning and constabulary forces were also needed to secure his conquest, it is a wonder—given the limited manpower reserves of Macedonia—that he had any army left at all. Such practical manpower considerations are critical in any assessment of his later “humanitarian” efforts at including Persians and other Asians in his army. Remember also that for the first four years of his invasion (334–331), there were thousands of Greeks who made their way to Persia to fight Alexander the “liberator”—and almost no Persians who fought for him.

To Alexander, as was true of Napoleon, the size of the opponent mattered little, since he would concentrate on only a small segment of the enemy line, while his father’s old marshals would hold the enemy fast elsewhere. Reserves would help to ensure that the enemy did not reach his own rear. Alexander himself would wait, seek his opening, and send his wedge of horsemen and heavy pikemen to blast apart the enemy, his charge sending ripples of fear through thousands of less disciplined imperial subjects. Who of the enemy—themselves of differing speech and custom—would be the first to stay and die against the crazed Macedonian so that others in the Great King’s army could follow their sacrifice and swarm Alexander?