The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great by Steven Pressfield

Author:Steven Pressfield
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-03-24T05:00:00+00:00

STEVEN PRESSFIELD

Book Seven

An Instinct for the Kill

227

The Virtues of War

Twenty

COUNCILS OF WAR

IT TAKES DARIUS TWENTY-THREE MONTHS to raise another army after Issus. As with the first, he marshals and trains it at Babylon.

This time I will go to him. This time we will duel beyond the Euphrates.

It is three years now since our army has crossed from Europe.

The expeditionary force has appended to its conquests Phoenicia, both Hollow and Mesopotamian Syria, Tyre, Sidon, Gaza, Samaria, Palestine, and Egypt. I have become Defender of Yahweh, Sword of Baal, Pharaoh of the Nile. The sun priests have anointed me Child of Ra, Boatman of Osiris, son of Ammon. I embrace all honors, but especially the religious ones. They are worth armies. The Persians were blind, when they ruled Egypt, to insult the gods of the land.

There is no surer way to make yourself hated; whereas to take up the native deities wins the people's love, and at no cost. Heaven speaks with the same voice in Memphis and in Macedon; I despise the man, however learned, who does not grant this. God is God, in whatever form He chooses to appear. I worship Him as Zeus, 228

STEVEN PRESSFIELD

Ammon, Jehovah, Apis, Baal; lion-limbed, jackal-headed, bearded, behorned; in the form of man, woman, sphinx, bull, and virgin. I believe in them all.

The king, my father taught me, is the people's intercessor with heaven. He invokes the Creator's blessing before the seed goes into the ground and proffers thanksgiving at harvest's bounty. Before every army marches out, every vessel sails, every enterprise originates, he presides. At every crisis he entreats God's counsel and interprets it. If the king is in favor with heaven, so is the kingdom.

What miscreant is so perverse as to spurn the blessing of the Almighty?

Tyre and Gaza trusted in the strength of their fortifications and compelled me to besiege them. What a waste of blood and treasure!

The lives of a hundred and ninety good men were squandered over six months in consequence of Tyrian stubbornness, and Gaza cost another thirty-six and a hundred and eleven days. The bastards nearly corked me twice, with a catapult bolt through my breast and a stone that nearly made powder of my skull. Had some malign god deprived them of their senses? Did they imagine that I would permit a state to command strategic ports in my rear, by which my enemies could assail me? Did they dream that I might pass benignly on, leaving their nation intact as an example to others that defiance of my will was the path to preservation? My envoys sought to make the leading men of Tyre and Gaza see reason; I dispatched letters beneath my own hand. I pledged to make their cities richer, freer, safer. Still they resisted. They compelled me to make examples of them.

What I abhor most about such obduracy is that it robs me of the occasion to be magnanimous. Do you understand? The enemy will 229

The Virtues of War

not see chivalry. He obliges me to fight not as a knight but as a butcher—and for this he must pay with his own ruin.

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