Free Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield Page A

Telamon, “Firewood!,” the cavalryman’s cry when his lance shatters and he must get another. But no, it would be infamous to strip a comrade for my own need. Instead I tear off my helmet and hoist it overhead, intending to strike with it as a weapon. At once cheers erupt. A lucky star has watched over my career, and here at its inception it does not fail. The Companions take the stunt as a gesture of triumph. It is seen even by the ranks of our pikemen, at that instant crashing to grips along the Theban front. They too salute it ecstatically; I hear them surge forward and see the foe give back before their press. I reelevate the helmet and sling it with all my strength across the ranks of the foe. With a great cry, our infantry falls upon them. The enemy’s reinforcements give way. Our first wedge punches through.
    A highway opens before us. We are in the clear. The foe’s camp is fifty yards ahead; it is already in full flight. Telamon overhauls me and tosses me his lance. The wedges re-form upon my colors. We charge from the rear. Each fifty is one tooth of the dragon, and each tooth tears off a steak from the meat of the foe.
    The enemy has no chance against our attacking divisions. What infantryman with his eight-foot spear or militiaman with his twelve-foot pike can stand against the phalanx man with his eighteen-foot sarissa? And our Companion Cavalry, on fire for glory, would that day have overrun Olympus itself.
    In minutes the struggle on my wing breaks down into three clashes. Against the river the foot companies of the enemy’s right, which have come forward against our allied infantry, are being taken in flank and rear by Hephaestion’s squadrons of horse. Our divisions under Amyntas and Nicolaus pin them from the front; they are being massacred. In the center, Coenus’s brigade has locked up with the foe’s militia foot; a titanic brawl rages amid storms of dust and cries of carnage. On our wing, the Sacred Band and its reinforcing regiments have been cut off. Our heavy cavalry assaults them from the rear; sarissa infantry hems them from the front. The enemy’s elite corps is enveloped. Now the blood work of slaughter begins.
    When a unit has been cut off from its supporting wings, its resistance becomes a matter solely of the character and courage of its components. In this, no corps I have ever dueled excelled the Sacred Band of Thebes. Their extinction was inevitable from the moment our first squadron penetrated their front. Yet the Three Hundred not only stood fast but rallied the militia troops of their own complement and the citizen regiments on their flank, compelling them by their own valor to emulation. One fought, it seemed, not warriors but champions. Timon, the Olympic boxer, slew two of our chargers, so we heard later, the second with his bare hands, breaking the animal’s neck. Thootes, the pancratist, would not go down, despite three lances in his guts and half his face hacked away. The chronicle of the foe’s individual gallantry filled two rolls in the dispatches. But greater yet was the way he held together. Though the penetrations of our wedges had broken up the initial four thousand into first three and then five severed companies, these units managed, by rushes upon our fronts in the breaks of our rushes upon them, to recombine and re-form into a fighting square. They fought their way out, first to the lone cypress that marked their original front, then to a low wall where their camp laundry had been hung, and after that to the kitchen camp of their servants, where they formed up again behind a row of cooking trenches. Not a man showed his back. Always our force advanced against lapped shields and thrusting spears. And if we drew breath, even for an instant, the champions of the Sacred Band rushed upon us.
    It is a brutal and graceless business to finish off a compact body of men who resist bravely and will not yield. In this, the sarissa