CHAPTER THREE

THE TROOPS' MORALE had dropped like a stone. Thus far we had spent over a week in these villages, accomplishing nothing but losing huge numbers of our men and animals to the bitter weather, exhausting our able-bodied troops by relentless forays into the mountains to attack local fighters who seemed to melt into the woods. Xenophon made endless rounds among the huts at night, dispensing what cheer he himself was able to muster, rewarding those who themselves took responsibility for furthering the march, and setting a strenuous example by working harder than the lowest battle squire. The man was exhausted, and I worried constantly for his sanity; yet still he pushed on.

The army finally marched, a forced effort beginning in the predawn darkness, in a final race to prevent the enemy from collecting themselves and occupying the narrows north of us. This time, upon our departure Xenophon looked at me with a more confident, or perhaps resigned, expression.

"You're more at peace with your decision to march this time," I noted. He looked at me curiously.

"I'm always at peace with the orders I give. I don't always know the results, and that's what worries me."

"Last time we were turned back by the snow," I said. "What makes you so confident of the outcome this time?"

I need not have asked, however, for the acrid stench of the black smoke, and the surprised shouts of the men outside our hut gave me all the answer I needed.

"I've ordered the villages torched," he said, "both in retribution for Tiribazus' treachery, and to eliminate any temptation we might have to return once more."

That night we reached the heights from which the barbarians had meant to attack us, and were able to pass through without a struggle. In their ignorance, Tiribazus' troops failed to realize that had they occupied the impregnable position instead of us, it would have meant the destruction of the entire Hellenic army in the frozen snows below.

We continued on, six miserable days to the upper Tigris, so different from its warm, placid offspring downstream, and then another six over a wretched, windswept plain, across which a north wind whipped mercilessly, blowing directly into our eyes and burning us as if by the rays of the sun, leaving our exposed skin dry, parched, and cracking. Xenophon's face, as well as those of Chirisophus and the others, had become faces I no longer recognized, all of them melding into one, with fierce, staring eyes, sunken cheeks and ragged, infested beards that erased all traces of personal features that had once been the marks of their humanity, blurring their individual identities and reducing them to a mere species. We forgot everything but the need to keep constantly moving, to take one more step forward, and because each day was so like the day before, each gray night so like each drab day, time no longer mattered. We communicated in grunts or gestures. True speech took too much effort.

The snow had no structure, no bottom. Men sank into it to their waists or their chests, causing us to lose countless animals and supplies and dozens of soldiers, many of whom simply vanished from sight forever, falling on their faces and disappearing in their exhaustion, unable to rise again. Even the most able-bodied were faint with hunger and cold, and Xenophon realized that part of the problem stemmed not from frozen feet but from empty stomachs. He personally made the rounds of the army, scavenging stores and supplies and sending the strongest runners back along the trail and out on either side. He sought those who had fallen and given themselves up to die, forcing them to eat a bit, even stale bread or raw horseflesh unfit for maggots, and urging them, sometimes at the cost of blows to the face, to rise and stagger on. I saw him pull a tattered Rhodian boy from the snow, slapping his face and shaking him like a rag doll until the youth finally shouted in protest and choked down some cold oats soaked in milk which in better times would have been used as fodder for the asses. Xenophon watched him closely until he saw him begin lurching along toward the rest of the wraithlike troops, and then he moved on to the next dark patch he saw lying forlornly in the snow under a thin cloak, to begin the process over again. I didn't have the heart to tell him that as soon as he was out of sight, the Rhodian boy again lay down in the snow while the troops passed silently by. If a man was going to die in any case, this was the easiest and most painless way. He just lay down and waited, doing nothing, patient as the Fates, until sweet death came in the form of a gentle, frozen sleep, and his heart simply slowed down and stopped. To men bearing excruciating pain, hunger, and exhaustion, the notion of such a respite from suffering, such an easy welcome into the gods' embrace, was a seductive siren song impossible to resist.

Those who did have the will to live, but simply not the strength to keep up, suffered the most. Unable to make it to the night's campsite with the main body of troops, they would spend the night foodless and fireless where darkness finally overtook them. It was rare that any of these men survived until morning. Small parties of the enemy were constantly following like vultures, picking off stragglers and robbing them of their pitiful belongings, carrying off disabled animals that we ourselves were not sufficiently quick to butcher for food, harassing us at every turn.

Men who had the fortitude to walk miles even after losing their toes to frostbite would be stricken down by an unexpected calamity: blindness by snow, which rendered them helpless, even when led by a kindly companion by a leash or belt, because the depth of the snow and roughness of the terrain made walking without vision impossible. Those astute enough to realize the problem improvised eye-shades, or simply marched holding a black object in front of their eyes, but it was too late for others. These men we saw kneeling piteously in the snow as we passed, their eyes swollen shut, fluid streaming from the corners, as they implored their comrades, who themselves could barely stand, to lead or carry them to safety.

Our feet were the worst problem, however. Good leather sandals, with heavy oxhide soles, will serve a man well in battle, even allowing him to tread through fire, but will last only a couple of months under marching conditions, even with nightly repairs, and the troops' footwear had long past outlived its usefulness. The absence of oxen and camp followers to tan the leather and manufacture the footwear meant that the men had to improvise their own, most often with the newly flayed hides of mules that had fallen by the wayside. These the troops would skin even without waiting for the pitiful animal to completely die, to gulp down the meat and blood while still warm, and obtain a precious supply of hide before the enemy or their other colleagues arrived. Unless it froze solid first, a dead mule would be stripped of everything within minutes, leaving the carrion birds nothing to pick at but bloody bones. At the next campsite the men would be seen diligently trading scraps of leather among themselves, improvising needles from bone and thread from sinew, making crude sandals from unscraped hide that had been the cover for living flesh only hours before. It was difficult to tell, looking at the men's feet, whether the blood that stained them red was from their own blisters and missing toes, or from the freshly flayed hides. Anyone who did not take care to make the straps much looser than he otherwise would have soon learned a painful lesson, as the fresh hides shrank at night when they dried, cutting deep into a man's numb flesh, then freezing solid if he stood still for more than a moment or two. More than one able-bodied man lost his life when his mule-hide sandals lamed him and forced him to stay behind, weeping in the snow.