Free Tides of War by Steven Pressfield Page B

knight’s heart outraged at such horrors visited upon children and women. “It is hell.”
    For myself I had witnessed little of the nobility of war so eloquently advertised by this officer’s countrymen, my schoolmasters. In Aetolia we burned villages and poisoned wells. In Acarnania our blades were employed to slaughter sheep, not staying even to strip the beasts of hide or fleece, but dumping them throat-slit into the sea. The only real battle I had seen was at Mytilene under Laches, the ablest amphibious commander of the war, save only the Spartan Brasidas and Alcibiades.
    The latter had won his second prize of valor, in the raid on the Spartan harbor at Gytheium, and was to collect another at Delium, saving the life of your master Socrates, this time as a cavalryman—all in all a “triple,” on land, sea, and horseback. By then, too, he had entered his first chariot at Olympia, though his driver had spilled and failed to finish.
    I saw none of Alcibiades during those days. The Plague had hit his household hard. In addition to Pericles, whom rumors reported stricken, he had lost his mother, Deinomache, an infant daughter of his wife Hipparete, and both sons of his lover Cleonice, who herself had perished not long after. His cousins, Pericles’ sons Paralus and Xanthippus, had fallen, and Amycla, the Spartan nurse who had remained loyal, even when her country called her home.
    Without the walls awaited war; within, pestilence. Now arose a third scourge: one’s own countrymen, made desperate by the first two. The poor cracked first. Driven by want, they took to plundering the homes of those of middling wealth, which stood vulnerable owing to their banishment of watchmen and stewards, all save the most trustworthy, who themselves took to crime to pay a physician or an undertaker, which professions amounted to the same thing. What good was money if you would not live to spend it? A gentleman would perish, bequeathing his treasure to his sons; these, anticipating their own imminent extinction, ran through their patrimony as fast as their fists could scatter it, abetted by every species of parasite and bloodsucker, seeking the juice as it spilled. You saw it, Jason. Disease would carry off a man’s wife and children; bereft of hope, he sets his own flat alight, then lingersin numb
katalepsis,
nor disclaims his offense to the brigadiers hastening onto the scene as the blaze consumes the tenancies of his neighbors. Near the Leocorium I saw a man hacked to pieces for this felony. Others set fires purely out of malice. After dark, flame-spotting became a spectator sport.
    My brother served then with the infantry under Nicias in Megara; he and others shuttled regularly with dispatches. Again and again he urged me to get out. Enlist as a marine, take oars on a freighter, anything to vacate this antechamber of hell, the besieged city. He had sent his wife Theonoe and their babes to her kinsmen in the north; my own bride and child remained in Athens.
    “They’re dead already,” Lion addressed me with passion. “Their graves are dug. Father and Meri too, and us with them if we’re mad enough to stay.” This upon an evening when he and I drank alone, not for pleasure, but shamelessly, to render ourselves insensate. “Listen to me, brother. You’re not one of those pious nincompoops who see this scourge as a curse from heaven. You’re a soldier. You know one does not make camp in a swamp or drink downstream from a shithouse. Look around you, man! We’re kenneled like rats, ten crammed in space for two, the very air we breathe contaminated as a terminal ward.”
    This was how one spoke then. You remember, Jason. One tolled the truth with the candor of the condemned. Civility rode the greased sluice into the gutter, succeeded by scruple and self-restraint. Why obey the laws when you were already sentenced to death? Why honor the gods when their worst was nothing beside what you already bore? As for the future, to turn to