Tides of War: A Novel of the Peloponnesian War by Steven Pressfield

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

Tides of War

265

observed that we must get water or die. Lion indicated the “beaten zone” beyond our palisade, where the foe's missiles and stones rained.

“Step out there and solve your problems.”

Three times our company went up the hill. The pass narrowed to a single wagon–width; the enemy had sealed it with a wall.

Behind it he was massed twenty across and a hundred deep; thousands more blanketed the cliffs ides. They sent stones and javelins, even landslides upon us. By postnoon they had the knack; they let the attackers advance to the wall, where the facing rocks compacted them into a body; then they opened fire. Each assault company bore it in turn; when enough had gone down, or simply cracked, the unit fell back and another went up in rotation. The track had acquired a name, Blood River, though this was a misnomer, as all fluid soaked at once into the desiccated dirt.

Exposed on the uptrack, we pressed ourselves like lizards against sheltering rocks or hunkered beneath makeshift palisades, burrowing into these clefts, while the foe's stones and darts crashed upon us. You could see the shields of the fallen, great piles dragged back by their comrades repulsed in subsequent assaults or toppled or slid downslope on their own. Their oaken chassis had been bashed to splinters by the stones and boulders of the foe, signia and blazons effaced beneath a paste of dust and blood.

The track up had become a calf–deep furrow, riven to powder by the soles and knees of the assault troops as they mounted, marinated by their piss and sweat, then reground by their backs and heels as their corpses were passed down by others who mounted to take their place. The companies assaulted the hill all day. Next day the same. We had learned to shiver the enemy's javelins where they struck, for each time we fell back the foe retrieved them to fling upon us afresh. The lances slung downhill 266

STEVEN PRESSFIELD

terrified the men, not just the impact but the sound, and the stones and boulders were worse.

A cavalry captain galloped up, calling for volunteers. Gylippus had got in the rear of the column with five thousand; he was throwing up another wall to pen us for the slaughter. Lion and I leapt to it. Anything to quit this hellish ravine.

In the rear, our ten thousand assaulted Gylippus' five. By nightfall the foe fell back, depleted of missiles and stones. The company ahead of ours took the wall. They tore through the abandoned kits of the foe but could find no water. These companies must rejoin the main body. Ours and two others were ordered to remain, to bury the dead and set up a night perimeter.

We flopped atop the wall, dirty as death, and watched the units trudge back. From our vantage we could see the enemy cavalry, the dust of more squadrons than could be counted, and across the plain additional plumes, columns of infantry converging from the north and east—a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, massing for the kill.

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