LITMIR.BIZ

       I

       The Mystery of the Three Feet

      The Tigris, now invisible, to the right, the bare heights of the Gordyene Mountains to the left; between the two, the plain looked like a desert swarming with golden beetles. They were at Gaugamela, less than three years after the hundred and twelfth Olympiad. Darius had lined up some two hundred thousand foot soldiers and thirty thousand cavalry: auxiliary Indians, Bactrian troops led by their respective satraps, Scythians from Asia, an alliance of mounted archers from the Persians, Arians, Parthians, Phrataphernes, Medes, Armenians, Greek mercenaries, not to mention those from Hyrcania, Susa, and Babylon; Mazaios commanded the soldiers from Syria, Oromobates those from the shores of the Red Sea. They also boasted fifteen elephants and two hundred scythed chariots for which the King of Kings had cleared the stones from the soon-to-be battlefield.

      Alexander slept.

      Under his orders, the Macedonian army—forty thousand foot soldiers and only seven thousand horses—was deployed in an oblique front. The phalanx in the center was protected on its flanks by Nicanor’s hypaspists and Perdiccas’s and Meleager’s battalions, by Parmenion’s Thessalonian cavalry on its left wing, and by Philotas’s on its right. The sun, already high, made their helmets and cuirasses gleam, and their shields dazzled.

      Still Alexander slept. His companions had the greatest difficulty waking him, but when he rose, he mounted Bucephalus and rejoined the right wing, at the head of the Macedonian cavalry.

      Darius, at the center of his elite infantry—ten thousand Immortals, so called because whenever one died in the course of combat he was immediately replaced—gave the order to attack. He set the bulk of his cavalry on Alexander’s left flank and sent his chariots to thrust through the central phalanx. The king of Macedonia did not seem concerned. He led his cavalrymen toward the right, as if he wanted to skirt the front on that side, provoking, as in a mirror, the same shift in the opposing cavalry, but with the effect of severing it from the rest of the troops and stretching out the front. While Parmenion was subjected to the Persian assault, the phalanxes were preparing themselves for impact. When the chariots were no more than fifty meters away, this human hedge, bristly with lances, opened to form several aisles. At the same time, the trumpets sounded, and all the foot soldiers began to strike their iron shields with their swords. This incredible clamor spooked the teams of horses; some halted abruptly, causing the chariots to tumble, while others instinctively rushed down the lanes formed by the soldiers. Closing back in on them, the phalanx swallowed and digested them with jabs of its sarissas. It must be admitted, however, as Diodorus said, that some chariots, having avoided this defense, did terrible damage in the places where they landed. The cutting edges of the scythes and other metal fittings attached to their wheels were so sharp they brought death in a number of different ways—taking off some soldiers’ arms along with the shields they carried, cutting off others’ heads

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