Into the Land of Bones. Frank L. Holt
military alliances. The Persian Empire had accepted this fluid state, but Alexander would not.8 He intended to isolate the region from its neighbors. It was becoming obvious that the new ruler of Persia had his own ideas about the governance of Bactria. Wary warlords like Spitamenes began to wonder about their trade of Bessus for Alexander. Their formal summons to attend the Afghan council at Bactra to witness the punishment of Bessus emphasized the inauguration of a new regime and put the Bactrians ill at ease about their uncertain futures.9
Without warning, the entire region exploded into armed resistance. An unsuspecting party of Greek soldiers out collecting supplies was suddenly attacked. Those not slain were taken prisoner into the nearby mountains. Stunned and then furious, Alexander led a retaliatory strike against the insurgents, whose numbers quickly swelled to twenty thousand.10 In the forefront of the fighting, the king took an arrow through his leg that splintered the bone. He had not suffered an injury since leaving the Mediterranean coast, and his men reacted bitterly to the sight. They stormed the enemy stronghold, killing most of the defenders.11
The uprising spread rapidly to Cyropolis and the neighboring towns, whose inhabitants murdered Alexander’s garrisons and closed the towns’ gates. Alexander dispatched one of his best generals, Craterus, to put Cyropolis under siege. Meanwhile, though wounded, the king began a systematic attack against each of the six outlying towns. As they fell one by one, huge fires and plumes of smoke announced to the next in line that Alexander was coming. Without mercy, the angry Greeks and Macedonians slaughtered the males and reduced the women to slavery. Hardly innocent, the Sogdians also proved treacherous, reneging on pledges and luring the invaders into an ambush under a flag of truce. Returning to Cyropolis, Alexander pressed the siege begun by Craterus. The king noticed that a streambed ran under its walls, carrying water inside through several channels. With a small commando force, Alexander personally slipped through the conduits and entered the city. He and his men broke open a gate and admitted their comrades. Many of Cyropolis’s fifteen thousand defenders were killed.12
Across the land, tens of thousands lay dead and countless others were wounded or captured. The ferocious, close-order fighting spared no one; even Alexander suffered another serious injury. The king fell unconscious when struck in the head and neck by a large stone. For many days, his vision blurred and he could barely speak. The scab on his wound kept opening, prolonging his painful recovery. This wound, perhaps the first reported case of transient cortical blindness, combined with the leg injury to make it impossible for Alexander to walk, ride a horse, see clearly, or speak audibly.13 He was in bad shape at a terrible moment, for the news became grimmer by the hour.
A similar thing later happened in 1879 when Lord Roberts sent out foragers from Kabul to bring in supplies for the winter. Local villagers refused to give up willingly what they needed themselves, so Roberts tried next to seize some local chieftains in order to force their cooperation. The British came under immediate attack, compelling Roberts to storm the nearest villages, burn down the houses, and plunder the grain and livestock. Town by town, the insurrection spread. Roberts split his forces and attacked the villages in a bloody cycle of retribution. Officers wondered aloud what had gone wrong: “A change has indeed come over the vision of our dream—last night we were all cock-a-hoop, thinking ourselves fine fellows, and that all we now had to do was to walk around and burn some villages; and within twenty-four hours we are locked up, closely besieged, after a jolly good licking and all communications with the outer world cut off.”14 Alexander’s troops could have expressed the same shock as they counted up their losses. Almost overnight, what seemed a successful invasion had turned into a debacle. The Greeks and Macedonians were unprepared for the consequences of Alexander’s actions, and they realized too late that the fighting extended all the way back along their lines of communication to Bactria. The cakewalk had become a death march.
Alexander must have felt himself trapped and cut off from the outside world when, beleaguered at the Jaxartes, he learned that his huge garrison at Maracanda was also under serious attack. Adding insult to Alexander’s injuries, Spitamenes and his associates—the captors of Bessus—had taken up arms and brought the Bactrian cavalry back into the war.15 None of these insurgent warlords, called hyparchs (commanders) by the Greeks, claimed to be a king. They ruled, in a rough sense, no more than isolated locales. Some controlled a valley, others a mountain fortress or string of villages. When not in revolt, they normally served as local princes or chiefs, levying fighting men and taxes for the Bactrian satrap who, in turn, answered to the King of Kings. They commanded their own contingents in war. This loose arrangement gave each hyparch a great deal of autonomy and preserved the powerful sense of localism so natural in places like Afghanistan. An easygoing loyalty to the state and its representatives could vanish in a flash once parochial interests seemed threatened. When such “commanders” (a title still popular among Afghan warlords) repudiated their oaths to a king or state, they might at times band together against a common foe or break off and fight alone at the head of their own followers and kinsmen.16 From Alexander’s day, we know a few of the strongest by name: Ariamazes, Austanes, Orsodates, Catanes, Dataphernes, Itanes, Oxyartes, Sisimithres, and Spitamenes.
These men are precisely reminiscent of the clan warlords common to modern Afghan history. Terrorists might seem too strong a term for them, but the word does apply in many ways. They singly and collectively acted as expatriate agents intent upon undermining an established government through violence and intimidation, often aimed indiscriminately at civilians as well as soldiers and officials. As modern commentators point out, all sorts of groups might fall into this category, some of them vilified and others openly admired: al-Qaeda, the Kenyan Mau Mau, the French Resistance, Irish nationalists, and so on.17 To Alexander’s army, the Bactrian and Sogdian hyparchs became true terrorists, and Spitamenes the worst among them; but to the native peoples, Alexander and his generals fully deserved the title.18 There were no discussions of anything like Geneva Conventions, no apologies for the abuse of prisoners, no public oversight of military actions or expenditures. On all sides, atrocity answered atrocity in the brutal arithmetic of war and retribution.
Wars in the fourth century B.C.E. concentrated their horrors into a narrow space of slashing blades, piercing shafts, and massive blunt-force traumas. Scarcely anyone could kill an enemy without staring him in the eye; everything became personal and desperate within the shower of a victim’s blood and the sound of his gasping breath. If most soldiers truly fear the bayonet more than the bullet, then ancient warfare stands out for its frenzied close-range slaughter with primitive weaponry. The Bactrians and their Scythian allies wielded stones, bows, battleaxes, spears, and swords. Some of the bows were powerful compound types; the arrows usually were tipped with bronze, three-edged points. Scythian riders developed a handy carrying device called a gorytus that combined a bow case and a quiver. They also experimented with armored cavalry of a kind later made famous in the Middle Ages.19 Spears of varying lengths were employed either as thrusting weapons or as javelins; the latter were fitted with leather throwing-thongs to increase range and accuracy. Bactrians carried a short sword hung from the right hip and laced to the leg. They wore a waist-length corselet made of thick leather reinforced with metal. A skirt of leather strips protected the groin and thighs. Some Bactrian fighters donned helmets, while others preferred a lighter, hooded headgear.20 All in all, the Bactrians and Scythians looked so frightening with their wild, unkempt hair and great shaggy beards that one Macedonian general suggested fighting them only in the dark of night.21
For their part, Alexander’s armed forces encompassed a wider array of tactical units operating under a sophisticated command structure, the most advanced in that era, thanks largely to innovations begun by Philip II.22 The Macedonian cavalry and infantry derived from territorial levies. Originally, the cavalry formed the elite arm, particularly the mounted Companions (Hetairoi) of the king. The term Companion highlighted a close association with the king endowing status and privilege. To avoid slighting the infantry, the Macedonians wisely extended the title to a special brigade called the Foot Companions (Pezhetairoi); when that name was later granted to the Macedonian infantry as a whole, the former Foot Companions claimed the designation Shield Bearers (Hypaspists) and later Silver Shields (Argyraspids). These carefully recruited and trained Shield Bearers were more mobile and versatile in battle than the king’s