Into the Land of Bones. Frank L. HoltЧитать онлайн книгу.
of men like Craterus, Hephaestion, Coenus, Perdiccas, and Ptolemy.24
After escaping this danger, Alexander renamed the place Prophthasia (Anticipation) to commemorate the failure of the plot. His march resumed south and then eastward along the high-duned fringe of the Dasht-i Margo (the Desert of Death). He had hoped to run down Barsaentes, another of Darius’s killers who had abused his pardon and sided with Bessus. The Persian, however, had too great a lead and vanished (like many of the Taliban) into what is now Pakistan.25 The Greek and Macedonian army passed by Kandahar, a site built up by Alexander and still bearing his name (derived from Iskandariya, Alexandria in Arabic).26 The center of so much strife during the invasions by Britain, the USSR, and now the United States, old Kandahar guarded strategic routes leading southeast to the Indus Valley, and northeast to the region of Kabul. Alexander took the same road later traveled by Lord Roberts in 1880; the Greeks and Macedonians thereby arrived at winter quarters in the vicinity of modern Begram, where the king fortified the camp as yet another Alexandria.27
Since declaring his intention to punish the outlaw regime of Bessus, Alexander had marched fifteen hundred miles over eight months in a wide arc through what is now the southern half of Afghanistan. Parts of the journey had penetrated a miserable purgatory with “plagues of midges, mosquitoes, houseflies, and poisonous snakes and hurricane-force winds.”28 Worse was soon to come in a region habitually short of food. No matter what the climate or circumstances might be, Alexander had to procure every day the equivalent of 255 tons of food and forage, plus 160,000 gallons of water, just to keep his army alive and moving forward.29 On the other (northern) side of the Hindu Kush Mountains, Bessus and his followers were destroying everything that might feed the invaders. The rebels knew that the Greeks and Macedonians would consume all their provisions as they struggled over the high passes of the mountains, arriving in Bactria’s heartland exhausted and hungry. The scorched-earth plan, a good one under the circumstances, recognized that warfare in central Asia depends upon logistics, and that attrition can deal the hardest blows of all.30
The fabled Hindu Kush Mountains, mistakenly called the Caucasus by Alexander’s men, soar as high as seventeen thousand feet (see Map 3). The lower slopes sustain modest vegetation, mostly scrub and grasses, but barren rock prevails above fourteen thousand feet. In winter, the snow line descends to six thousand feet and blocks the passes; blizzards are common, and snow falls even during summer at the higher elevations. The spring melt usually commences in March or April, gradually freeing the passes and sending torrents of icy water and boulders tumbling down every streambed. As early as possible—too early, in fact—Alexander threaded his army through these mountains. He had three possible routes: the western, through Bamian and the Shibar Pass; the central, via the Salang Pass; and the eastern, by way of the Panshir Valley and the Khawak Pass. The path through Bamian, where the giant Buddhas later towered near a pilgrim’s trail, until blown up by the Taliban, offered the easiest and most obvious choice, so Alexander probably refused it to surprise Bessus. The central course was shortest but by far the steepest, and it was never practical until the 1.6 mile Salang Tunnel, the highest in the world, was cut by the Soviets.31 The longer route over the Khawak Pass seems to have suited Alexander’s purpose in the spring of 329 B.C.E.32
3. Ancient Bactria
The Greeks and Macedonians struggled for two weeks through deep snow before the passes fully cleared. The food ran out, and starving men naturally resorted to every extreme: they caught and ate raw fish, chewed on local plants, and finally ate their own baggage animals to survive. Like the British in the First Afghan War who ate sheepskins fried in blood, the invaders persevered. Because firewood could not be gathered, they devoured the carcasses uncooked and stumbled on toward Bactra. Either their king had miscalculated his army’s needs, or he had moved of necessity and entered the mountains while the weather was still dangerous.33 Perhaps complicating Alexander’s operations was an extraordinary anomaly in the climate. Recent analyses of Fennoscandinavian tree-ring data demonstrate that some of the coolest summers of the past seventy-four thousand years (5407 B.C.E.—1997 C.E.) occurred in precisely the years 330–321 B.C.E.34 What so dramatically cooled the north at this time is not certain, but the effects may have contributed to Alexander’s trouble by producing unexpectedly early and longer winters, with heavier snowfalls, in 329–327, as well as a contemporary famine in Greece caused by widespread grain shortages.35 This data need not mean that the central Asian summers were comfortably cool, only that they may have been shorter and somewhat less horrendous while winters were correspondingly more severe.
Though in much distress, the Macedonian and Greek invaders made it across the mountains and found comfort in the Bactrian towns of Drapsaca (modern Qunduz?) and Aornus (modern Tashkurgan?).36 Bessus and the Bactrian cavalry were nowhere to be seen when Alexander’s troops emerged tired and famished from the icy clutches of the Hindu Kush Mountains. Had the rebels used the guerilla tactics for which the Afghan warlords are now famous, the Greeks and Macedonians might have suffered a major setback. But Bessus employed only half a winning strategy: he cut off Alexander’s supplies, but also should have attacked at opportune moments. As it turned out, Bessus was not in position to strike the invading army; he seems to have denuded the likeliest invasion route while ignoring the others. Alexander’s risky move paid off. He and his troops refreshed themselves and regrouped while Bessus, a few miles west at Bactra, held his hasty council of war.
Whatever Bessus’s exact words in his arrogant speech to his warrior band, he and the Bactrians were extremely worried.37 Blame Darius all he might for Gaugamela, brag of his own prospects as King Artaxerxes V, scoff at Alexander’s rashness, but as many as a hundred thousand foreigners had gotten into Bactria and were fast approaching, unopposed.38 When Bessus laid out the next stage of his strategy, enough wine had been drunk to make it sound quite sensible: They would retreat north through the desert, cross the Oxus River, and make their stand in the region of Sogdiana. The Oxus (modern Amu Darya) would hold back the Greeks and Macedonians while Bessus recruited allies from the nomadic peoples of the vast northern steppes.
To this plan, one banqueter, named Gobares, dared object. In a speech probably embellished in the retelling over the ages, Gobares sprinkled his appeal with local proverbs still popular today, such as “still waters run deep” and “his bark is worse than his bite.”39 This eloquence was meant to convince Bessus to give up and take his chances with Alexander, who could at times be incredibly merciful. Gobares questioned the legitimacy of Bessus’s authority, an indication that Alexander was already winning among some Persians the political battle for Darius’s throne. Bessus, of course, would abide none of this talk; when he drew his sword in anger, Gobares fled Bactra and reported the whole affair to Alexander. The Macedonian king hastened to the capital city, that bizarre oasis of Anahita littered with human bones, only to find Bessus already gone.
VICTORIES
At Bactra, the Greeks and Macedonians nonetheless got some very good news.40 The generals who had remained behind near Herat to capture or kill Bessus’s ally Satibarzanes now rejoined the army and reported what had happened. There had been a significant battle during which Satibarzanes had paused, taken off his helmet, and challenged any opponent brave enough to fight him in single combat. Old white-haired Erigyius, who shared the Macedonian command with three others (including a Persian, Artabazus), stepped forward and accepted the offer. During the fight, Satibarzanes missed with his spear and Erigyius charged, driving his lance into the enemy’s throat and out the back of his neck. Thrown from his horse, Satibarzanes continued to fight though still impaled. Erigyius grabbed the lance and pulled it free, then thrust it forcefully into Satibarzanes’s face. The latter could do nothing but help drive it deeper to hurry his death and end his own suffering.
At Bactra, Alexander and his soldiers marveled at the mangled head of Satibarzanes, which Erigyius carried around as a trophy of war.41 The deed had won the battle and ended the insurrection around Herat, preventing those rebels from reinforcing Bessus as the warlord had planned. The same dramatic news may have been what compelled Bessus to withdraw into Sogdiana in search of other allies, and no doubt it