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This is a story about Alexander, not about me – but I love to tell this story, and it touches on Alexander in the end. That fight in the dark was perfectly balanced – a hundred fully armed Macedonian infantrymen against two thousand sleepy, drunk, unarmed Thracians.
Just when they should have swamped us, Drako swept over the wall behind us with fifty horsemen, looking like fiends from the Thracian hell, and they broke and ran off. Alcus bit into another group and then both my cavalry leaders – neither one of whom made any attempt to find or communicate with me – swept off into the dark. They got the pony herd and some stolen beef and headed back to camp.
By now, the sun was coming up, somewhere far to the east, and there was a line of grey on the far ridge and eye-baffling half-light. And more and more of my missing infantrymen were coming in – most of them from the wrong direction. By sunrise I had half a thousand men and full possession of their camp.
They formed in the middle of the valley – a dejected band of beaten men, most of them without spears. They knew they had to take the camp back, and their leaders were haranguing them.
My cavalry had begun to harass them with javelins.
I lined the dyke closest to them – every minute brought me more light and two or three more men, as they scrambled up the earth walls behind me. Most of my lost infantrymen had gone too far north in the dark.
The Thracians were game. They put their best-armed men in front, formed as tight as they could and swept forward to the base of the dyke, where they stood, roaring, getting their courage up. They still outnumbered my men four to one, and we didn’t have our sarissas – they were in camp. We had javelins – a good weapon, but not as useful in stopping an angry Thracian as a pike as long as three men are tall.
I walked up and down in front of my men – manic with energy, elated by my success, terrified of the next few minutes. I was at the right end of my line when a helmetless man leaped off his horse and ran lightly up the berm.
‘Well done,’ he said, and threw his arms around me. ‘Hold their charge and we have them.’
He gleamed like a god come to earth. It was, of course, Alexander.
‘We will, my prince!’ I said – torn between relief and a
The Thracians came up to the base of the berm.
We stood at the top.
A chief roared something – I think he called, ‘Who are we!’
And they roared.
Three times, and then they came in silence, rushing up the dyke faster than I could imagine.
Gordias, on the other hand, kept his head.
‘Ready?’ he called. ‘Throw!’ he roared, and five hundred javelins swept like birds of prey on the huddled mass of unshielded, unarmed men.
And that’s as far as they got. So many men fell in the shower of spears that they turned to run, and Alexander was on them with the older pages and the professional cavalry – Alcus was there, and Drako, and all the younger pages from camp.
We were all around them, then, and with numbers, too. And weapons and armour.
Maybe a hundred of them lived. I doubt it, though. We offered no quarter, and Alexander meant to make an example in his first battle. The cavalry went in again and again, and they had nowhere to run – even our shield-bearers and camp slaves were out, with slings and rocks, lining the forest edge, so that if an armed man burst free of the melee, they shot him down.
Hephaestion said that Alexander killed the chieftain, and that’s possible, but when he went down, the rest as good as fell on their swords. All the fight went out of them, and we took fifty prisoners.
And then there was nothing but the vultures and the corpses and the stink of men’s excrement, and we went back to camp. We didn’t form and march back – nothing so organised. That level of efficiency came later. Instead, men simply couldn’t stand looking at the dead any longer – or men snatched up a gold ring or a torc and left, or wandered blank-eyed for a while and found themselves by a fire.
Gordias got some slaves organised and started collecting the rest of the loot. I found Philip the Red and got him to help me organise collection of the wounded – we had a few. We killed their wounded. I found that I was turning my head away.
It was horrible. But you know about that – I can see it in your eyes. And the animals – the dogs, the carrion birds.
Luckily it was daylight.
By noon, we had most of the army in camp. It was a young army, and most of the men simply sat, slack-jawed. Older men guzzled wine.
Alexander paced, like a caged lion.
‘We need to be at them,’ he said.
Laodon put an arm around his shoulders. ‘Sire, there is no “them” to be at. You have destroyed them.’
Alexander shrugged off his arm. ‘Do not be familiar, sir. And their villages are open – right now. Not for long – other tribes will protect them.’
Laodon shook his head. ‘Your army is exhausted.’
Gordias backed him up. ‘My men have been up all night, and fought two days in a row.’
Alexander flinched – a visible shudder. I knew him well, and knew that he was fighting off a temper tantrum.
Instead, he managed a smile. ‘Well, then,’ he said. He caught my eye. ‘Not bad for the baggage guard, eh?’ he said.
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‘I expected to find you besieged,’ Alexander said.
Laodon shrugged. ‘We were sent to fail,’ he said.
I stood in shock. ‘Antipater betrayed us?’
Alexander looked out at his battlefield and then back at me. ‘It makes no snese – but they were waiting for us. Laodon said they were, and they were. So we left you to fort up and went off to try and ambush their ambush.’
‘You might have said,’ I shot back. In Macedon, we’re not slaves.
Alexander rubbed the stubble on his chin. ‘I might have. But it was a hunch, and I might have been wrong. Or Laodon might have been the traitor.’ He shrugged, even as Laodon flinched. Smiled at me. ‘I knew it wasn’t you,’ he said to me. ‘That’s why you got the baggage.’
I didn’t really know what he was talking about. Thank the gods.
He slapped his knees. ‘Well, if the men need a rest, they need a rest. We march at dawn.’
And that was that.
The next day, Alexander took the oldsters and the Thracian auxiliaries and rode north-west, into Thracian territory, and proceeded to burn every village he came to. I moved along the valley floors, building small fortified camps or using the stock dykes the way the Thracians had, but with better sentries and sanitation. We covered fifty stades a day and Alexander covered three times that, and after three weeks he’d burned a swathe across Maetian Thrace as wide as the Chersonese and twice as long. Four weeks to a day after we’d broken their army, we stormed their log-walled city. Alexander put in a garrison of veterans from the infantry corps – two hundred men who got five times the land grants they might have expected. He called it Alexandropolis.
My last camp in Thracian territory had a stockade with three thousand slaves – mostly very saleable young women. The soldiers took their pick, and the rest went up for sale.
Horrible. But they did the same to us.
And then we marched home to Pella, with a fortune in gold and slaves, and Alexander gave an excellent speech, and handed out the whole of the loot to the infantry and the professional cavalry. The pages received nothing.
Antipater greeted us at the main gate, reviewed the army and embraced Alexander. The town cheered us.
It was very difficult to go back to being a page, after that. Three nights later, I was punished for being late to guard duty outside the prince’s door – publicly admonished by one of Philip’s somatophylakes, who didn’t seem to know or care that I had just won a night battle, killed my prince’s enemies, stormed a city and handed in my accounts for the logistics of the army and had them passed. Like an adult.