Free Empire of Ashes: A Novel of Alexander the Great by Nicholas Nicastro Page B

wiping their sweaty palms on their breastplates, or struggling to bend over for some dirt.
    At the sounding of the pipes, we marched forward in more or less good order. We were a loud army, clanking with every step, raising the paean; the Macedonians, on the other hand, moved over the battlefield in almost complete silence. The mood became very tense as the armies closed on each other. From many yards away we could see that the Macedonian pikes, their sarissas , were at least twice as long as the ones we carried. The whooping and hollering on the Greek side subsided; our lines contracted as each soldier pressed against his comrade to the right, trying to nestle behind his shield. This forced each shield bearer to move to his right, until our whole line began to drift north, angling obliquely toward the enemy. Lacking true shields, our enemies could not hunker behind their fellows, but marched straight and true. Watching them between the shoulders of my comrades, I could see their faces: the Macedonians were serene, even bored.
    The enemy halted their advance as our first three ranks leveled their spears. Our boys kept on coming, giving throat to the cry that terrified the Persians at Marathon and Plataea— eleleu eleleu ! With that, the Macedonians all turned around and withdrew on the double. There didn’t seem to be any signal given for them to do this. They just did it, as calmly as if they were drilling on the parade ground.
    Unlike at Marathon, our front ranks were not taken up by our toughest hoplites, but by our most enthusiastic. The Macedonian withdrawal confirmed what they had long imagined—that the barbarians had no stomach for fighting the free citizens of a civilized city! Our ranks dissolved as they pursued the retreating enemy; weighted down with their ancient panoplies, the Greeks exhausted themselves running after the lightly-clad Macedonians. Our officers were screaming at their men, trying to organize an orderly advance. Yet our glorious commander Stratocles, who was very probably drunk, was off celebrating the rout, riding with sword aloft, crying “We’ve got ‘em on the run, boys! Now on to Pella!”
    With the sole exception of our Theban allies, who anchored our right with no trace of emotion, all semblance of organization among the Greeks was gone. Our army opened up like a boiled onion, the ranks peeling away from the phalanx one by one. Some of the hoplites, half-blind with sweat under ill-fitting helmets, tripped on rocks and clumps of soil; as they struggled to rise, they were trampled in the dust by their jubilant comrades. This was in chilling contrast to the Macedonians, who wheeled around in their thousands without a single man going down. Not a single one!
    You know what happened next. At the sounding of a trumpet, the enemy retreat suddenly seemed to halt. What had really happened, of course, was that the Macedonians didn’t run away at all, but had only countermarched behind a new line formed by their best men. Having fooled many of the Greeks with this sham, they grasped their pikes underhand and lowered the tips. The Macedonian pike is long enough for men four and five shields deep in their phalanx to reach the enemy. Many of the Athenians were propelled by pure momentum into this swarm of spear points. Hemmed in by their comrades around them, hundreds were struck full in the face, noses or jawbones split. This was when I learned that the entrance of a metal point into the unprotected face of a man makes a peculiar noise—a certain combination of a crunch and a thud . I had much opportunity to hear it as the survivors tried to come about, colliding with the oncoming ranks, until we were all a helpless jumble of exhausted, blind men and boys, so terrified that we defecated ourselves with fear, or cried for our mothers.
    It was at this point that the enemy broke their silence. They let loose an inimitable cry—made in that strange dialect of theirs—that rose over the ongoing din