The Nature of Alexander (25 page)

Once aware of their disaffection, Alexander took it seriously. He knew their discomforts and sympathized; but he had dealt with it all before, he had never failed to pick up their spirits and carry them along with him,
and had no fear of failing now. He called the regimental officers together; his address in Arrian shows that he knew they were dejected too. He recalled past exploits and victories and their rich rewards; he reminded them that he had always shared the hardships and let them share the spoils. It is a lovely thing, he said, to live with courage, and die leaving an everlasting fame. When they had reached the Endless Ocean, all could go home who wished; it would be easy then; for, he assured them with passionate conviction, it was well known that Ocean flowed into the Caspian Sea. He recalled to them that Heracles by labours became divine.

It was probably one of his best speeches. This time it failed. The cast-iron-reliable Coenus broke the unresponsive silence. With meticulous respect and courtesy, he said the officers had no complaints; Alexander’s generosity had left them none; they were already overpaid even for future hardships. But he would presume to speak for the men. Arrian, himself a soldier, gives him a moving directness and simplicity. He spoke of their weariness (it was eight years since he had set out with Alexander); of their homesickness for wives and children left behind; of their many dead. “Most have died of sickness.” In an age without antibiotics, bad water and tropical diseases had killed more than the enemies on whom they had never turned their backs. Old enough, probably, to be Alexander’s father, he urged him to let his mother have a sight of him. Let him lead his veterans home, with the loot which would set them up as gentlemen in the homeland, and bring out the young men who would follow him to further conquests. When Coenus ended, the rest did not cheer; they wept.

Alexander had no illusions; he had met rock at last. Still undespairing, he dismissed them brusquely, hoping they would think again. Nothing happened. He called
them back, told them they could go as soon as they liked and leave him to advance with the auxiliaries; then flung back into his tent, and shut out everyone. Intellectually he may have seen it as Achilles’ angry withdrawal; emotionally, in view of their extraordinary bond, it had something feminine, an appeal to their concern over his wounds and illnesses; even over his grief, real as it had been, for Cleitus’ death. This time it did not move them. He kept it up for two days; they answered sulk with sulk. On the third, he ordered the sacrificial omens to be taken for crossing the river. Whether by Amnion’s guidance or his son’s, all the omens were adverse. He gave it out that he would turn back.

Their anger vanished. They were all his again. They shouted and cried with joy. Many came to his tent invoking blessings on him, saying that this, his sole defeat, was the victory of his kindness. Though the word defeat must have stung, he kept, as he would to the end, his sense of style. He made an occasion of it, holding games and horse races, dedicating the army to the twelve Olympian gods, to each of whom he raised a tower-tall altar (they have defied discovery; perhaps all he had was mud brick), marking the limit of his enterprise. Then he returned to Hephaestion’s new cities, where he could unburden himself to the one man who would understand.

The bitterness he felt was probably lifelong. It is not unlikely he could have reached the Bay of Bengal; his intelligence about the route was sound. There is no telling, however, what further knowledge the journey might have brought him of the vast Far Eastern land masses forever beyond his reach, or with what sense of diminishment it might have shaken his soul. The gods may have been kinder than he knew.

I
F THE MACEDONIANS EXPECTED
an easy march through the Khyber and peaceful Sogdiana, they had reckoned without Alexander, who told them acidly that they must at least allow him to leave India, not bolt from it. He had just had reliable information that the Indus did not flow into the Nile, but into the Endless Ocean. Baulked of reaching it eastward, he would not be stopped from getting to it in the west. There was more to this than the thirst of the explorer; like most of his “longings,” it had a practical side. From the Indus mouth he had been told of a seaway direct to Persia. It was said in his day that “the sea unites, the land divides”; it was quicker by water wherever water was, and frequently less dangerous. There was promise of a splendid trade route, cutting out the long, hard caravan trail beset with bandits; the coast road was said to be difficult; the obvious answer was the sea. Some states in the western Punjab had not paid allegiance yet; he would therefore voyage down the river till he met resistance, deal with it, reach the Ocean, and send the fleet to Persia while he marched beside it to keep it supplied from land, noting future sites for harbourage. His friend Nearchus, from the seafaring island of Crete, was given the post of admiral.

For the intermediate Indus voyage, Hephaestion would march along the left bank, in command of most of the
army, the elephants, and the huge train of noncombatants; including, presumably, Roxane after another brief reunion. Her husband can hardly have taken her to the Beas through swollen torrents and drenching rain; nor would he be taking her now in a war galley on a crocodile-infested river known to have dangerous rapids. For something like a year, she must have spent more time in Hephaestion’s custody than in his. On the right bank, Craterus would lead a rather smaller force. Hephaestion was now his equal in rank; rivalry had been felt, and there had been some kind of friction, which Alexander had smoothed over with mingled firmness and tact. This separation gave them time to cool off, and no more is heard of it.

While the fleet was preparing, one more name was added to the long roster of the dead from sickness, of whom Coenus had spoken: Coenus himself. Cholera was no doubt endemic in India then as now. He had voiced the men’s discontent, not incited it; and Alexander gave him a state funeral.

The embarkation was a spectacle on which Nearchus’ memoir lingered. They were seen off in state by Porus; on whom Alexander had bestowed no mere satrapy, but a tributary kingship over all the conquests between Taxila and the Beas. There were 80 warships, but the whole fleet reached a miscellaneous 2,000. The horses were on rafts, probably Hephaestion’s pontoons again, decked over; a marvel to the Indians, who had never seen a horse afloat. Nearchus gives the names of the trierarchs, honorary commanders of the processional ships (the working captains were the pilots) and privileged to decorate them: mostly high-ranking Macedonians, including Hephaestion, who must have joined his contingent later, and Ptolemy. Besides some Greeks, there was, perhaps significantly, one Bagoas “son of Pharnuces” (so spelled by Nearchus); not
the young favourite, but a Persian prince. Pharnaces, brother of Darius’ wife and half-sister Stateira, had fallen at the Granicus. This compliment to the cousin of Alexander’s future bride—the only Persian so honoured—may show his dynastic plans already forming.

At the dawn embarkation, Alexander poured libations to the river spirits, to Heracles, and the gods he usually honoured. In the first light the trumpets sounded, the chantymen timed the rowers; the high river banks gave back the sound; the Indians on shore, entranced by the show, followed it singing for miles.

Alexander stopped along the way to receive homage from various towns which had already promised it. Then they came to the dreaded confluence of the Hydaspes and Akesines, where the gorge was deep and narrow. “Even from far off one can hear the tumult of the waves.” The scared rowers paused; the pilots shouted to them to pull as never before, to avoid being slewed abeam into the rapids. Somehow they shot them (the horses must have been disembarked) at the cost of some broken oars and one collision, from which part of the crews were saved. Alexander made camp, sent on the ships, and assembled his troops from both sides of the river. Ahead were the lands of the recalcitrant Mallians who had defied his envoys. In no mood for delay, he did not offer a second parley. Leaving Craterus in charge of his base and the noncombatants beside the river, he advanced with a pincer movement, sending Hephaestion five day’s march ahead and telling Ptolemy to keep three days behind. Alexander and his men, avoiding the beaten road, made a short gruelling dash through desert, the quarter whence he would be least expected. His cavalry surprised the men of the first Mallian city still in the fields, and mowed them down as they were. He was as impatient, now, as his men to be done with India.

If he had hoped that one harsh example would end resistance, he was wrong. He had only hardened it. This was Brahmin country, and religion increased hostility.

A savage new campaign was more than his men had bargained for. Retreat would have been suicidal now; but as they stormed walled town after walled town, he found a loss of élan. For him there was only one answer to this—example. When they hung back from a breach, he leaped into it alone, and held it till they were shamed into pressing round him. The breach was forced, and many Indians burned themselves in their houses. Those who fled far were mopped up by Ptolemy and Hephaestion; but many took refuge in their chief city, on the site of modern Multan.

Leading ahead with his cavalry, Alexander managed to contain a greatly superior force which intercepted him, till the phalanx arrived to complete the rout. He then invested the city. It was the last focus of resistance, so Ptolemy and Hephaestion were sent back to the base. Alexander’s second-in-command was Perdiccas, with whom he now divided his forces so as to assault the city from two sides. (Ptolemy, though absent, does not fail to point out that his hated rival was late for his assignment.) When Alexander forced a gate in the outer wall, the Mallians all fled to the inner citadel. He chased them through the streets to its walls, and ordered an immediate escalade.

Scaling ladders were brought, but, he thought, were being set up half-heartedly. He snatched one himself, planted it against the wall, and ran straight up it, holding his shield over his head, without a look to see if anyone followed. Reaching the battlements he used the shield to shove off the men above him, clawed his way on to the wall, and cleared a space with his sword. Now three of his officers scrambled up to his help: Peucestas,
Leonnatus, and Abreas, a tried hero whose exploits had been recognized with double pay. The men below, seeing them stand on the wall a mark for every missile, began crowding up the ladder. Alexander had worked his spell again, but all too potently; the overburdened ladder broke, before any could reach the top. The four remained stranded; Alexander already recognized by the enemy, “not only by the splendour of his arms but by his superhuman courage.” Their section of wall was in missile range from adjacent towers; also from below, there being a mound on the inner side. On to this mound, into the thick of the enemy, he jumped down alone.

Arrian gives his reasons, so typical that he may have told them himself to Ptolemy or Nearchus. “He felt that by staying where he was, he would be at great risk without achieving anything fameworthy; but if he leaped down inside the wall, that in itself might scare the Indians; and if he had to be in danger he might then sell his life dearly, after doing great deeds fit to be heard of by men to come.” He did indeed scare the Indians to a distance, after killing some hand to hand; but from there they pelted him with weapons, while he had only stones to throw back. Meantime his brave companions jumped down beside him. Peucestas carried the Homeric shield from Troy, apparently his usual office though this is the first we hear of it. By the time he lifted it over Alexander, it sheltered a man at the point of death. The Mallians were big men, using powerful longbows; a three-foot arrow had gone through his corselet into his lung.

Even then he had fought on, dragging himself erect by clutching at a tree he had been using to guard his back. The movement caused a massive haemorrhage, with pneumothorax, a collapse of the punctured lung; on which he fell senseless. “Air along with blood blew out of the wound,” says Arrian, a very good observation of the
bloody bubbles seen in this injury, often fatal even without subsequent exertion. The gallant Abreas died from another “clothyard shaft” which pierced his skull.

All this time the Macedonians were frantically clambering up on each other’s shoulders or anything they could find. From the top, they stared at the inert body with cries and wails, which changed to frenzied battle yells. Transported with fury, grief and shame, they went through the citadel like some scourge of the Apocalypse, killing everyone they found, even the children.

Alexander, the arrow still in his lung fixed by its barb, was carried out of the battle. The cultured Curtius gives him a polished little speech, encouraging his friends to operate. Their hesitation, at least, must have been real, since the wound must be cut open to release the barb, whose withdrawal was likely to kill him on the spot. He was still pinned to his corselet. Feebly drawing his dagger, he signed with it to saw through the shaft, since the flights would not pass the hole in the cuirass. They managed this; Perdiccas later claimed that it was he who, at Alexander’s special request, opened up his side. Someone else (possibly Ptolemy!) said a doctor did it; the likeliest hero is Peucestas on the spot. The barb was tugged out; the inevitable fresh haemorrhage followed; blood loss, agony and shock induced nature’s anesthetic, and he lost consciousness again.

When the soldiers, returning from their massacre, learned he was still alive, they stood about his tent all day and through the night, till told that he was sleeping. His amazing constitution had won, for now; but like Achilles he had paid for glory with length of days. He had almost certainly a splintered rib; certainly a torn lung, its pleura perforated through both walls; and lacerated intercostal muscles. In healing, all these damaged layers, normally mobile, would knit together with adhesions of tight, ragged
scar tissue. Arrian, the only reliable source here, does not say which side it was; but with every arm movement and any hard breathing he must henceforth have felt the wound; and in three years it would kill him.