Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield Read Free Book Online

actor, would you, mate?” The younger man’s curls look suspiciously perfect. “Give us a bit of
Medea
, you sons of whores!”
    The Thebans would be mad to post the Sacred Band on their extreme right. If they do, I need only refuse my left to strand them high and dry. Can they swing across to the center from this position, leading their adjacent units like a closing gate? Not if I hold back a force of foot and horse, to take them from flank and rear when they try. I review this with Antipater, whom my father has assigned to me as mentor and adviser. “The Band will be center or left, Alexander, never right. Even the Thebans are not that thick.”
    We rehearse till midnight. Afterward Hephaestion and I troop the lines. Chaeronea is famous for the herbs its farmers grow for the fragrance trade. The scent perfumes the valley, stronger with the night.
    â€œCan you feel it, Alexander?”
    He means the sense of something epochal.
    â€œLike the taste of iron on the tongue.”
    We are both thinking that this fragrant plain will, by tomorrow’s noon, reek of blood and slaughter. I realize that my friend is weeping.
    â€œWhat is wrong, Hephaestion?”
    It takes him moments to reply. “It struck me just now that this hour, which is so immaculate, will never come again. All will have altered with tomorrow, ourselves most of all.”
    I ask why that has made him weep.
    â€œWe will be older,” he says, “and crueler. We will have entered at last into events. That is a far different state from standing, as we do now, upon the threshold.” He draws apart; I see he trembles. “That field of possibility,” he observes, “which has opened out limitlessly before us all our lives, will by tomorrow’s eve have narrowed and contracted. Options will have closed, replaced by fact and necessity. We will not be boys tomorrow, Alexander, but men.”
    I quote Solon, that

    He who would wake must cease to dream.

    â€œDon’t think so much, Hephaestion. Tomorrow is what we were born for. In heaven it may be different, but here, no man may gain except by losing.”
    â€œIndeed,” Hephaestion concedes with gravity. “And will I lose your love?”
    So this is what troubles his tender heart! Now it is I who tremble. I take his hand. “That, you can never lose, my friend. Here or in heaven.”
    Two hours before dawn the courier comes: All officers assemble for final orders.
    Philip’s tent is bedlam, crammed in the dark not only with the marshals and brigade commanders of Macedon, horse and foot, but with the captains of the allied Thessalians, Illyrians, Paeonians, Thracians, and the other half-savage tribesmen, all of them blind-sozzled, and all, despite their brass and bluster, aquake with terror. War is fear, let no man say otherwise. And even these wild boars of the north feel Death’s tread about them in the dark.
    Where is Philip? Tardy as ever. His campaign tent is a patchwork appropriated from the commissariat; heaven only knows where the real thing went. The night has turned chill and gusty; the flaps buffet with a concussion that unnerves the grooms and Pages. Outside, the couriers’ ponies balk at their pickets. Inside, cressets gutter in the gale. The generals know they are in for the fight of their lives this day, against the Thebans, who stand at their zenith, vanquishers of the Spartans, unbeaten over thirty years. At their shoulders marshals half of Greece—Athenians, Corinthians, Achaeans, Megarians, Euboeans, Corcyrians, Acarnanians, Leucadians, braced up by five thousand mercenaries recruited from as far afield as Italy—all with the main forces of their armies and all fighting to defend sacred hearth and soil. Today will change the world. This clash will decide the fate not just of Greece but of Persia and all the East, for once Philip triumphs here, he will launch out of Europe into Asia, to overturn the order of