Read Online Steven Pressfield by The Afghan Campaign - Free Book Online

with each other for centuries. The tribes of southern Areia have long coveted this valley, which has been held, beneath Persian sway, by their hated northern rivals. Why not let the new kickers have a crack at it? Why should we Macks spend blood and treasure to suppress the aboriginals? Let their foes do it for us.
    Alexander puts out the call, not only for masons, carpenters, and teamsters, to whom he promises work at wages unheard-of in these kingdoms, but for settlers and pioneers as well. To these he pledges land and pasturage, rights of way, warrants of exclusivity for trade and commerce. The southern tribes flood in, delirious at the prospect of lording it over their northern adversaries. Within days the construction site is overrun with every able-bodied tribesman in the region and half the respectable women, who serve as cooks and tailors, laundresses, nurses, vendors, seamstresses (a vital function, sewing tents and pack covers, ground rolls, straps, and panniers). Dispossessed females flock here too,
peshnarwan,
“those left behind,” to perform such services as their more fortunate sisters will not.
    Our king’s scheme works. What had been, days before, the site of a grisly valley-wide massacre has become a burgeoning boomtown. New arrivals have displaced the old, all owing their good fortune to Alexander. Jobs are plentiful. Pay and hopes are high. By art as much as by might, our king has brought the country to its knees.
    Those elements of the army not employed in providing security for the construction, which means us (Craterus’s brigades having marched south to overhaul Alexander and the elite elements), are kept busy on night raids, mopping up the last of the resistance. We strike downvalley, the same villages Craterus’s men devastated before, where Afghan sons who have taken to the hills return after dark to visit their wives and mothers, to have wounds tended, and to get food or news. We kick down their gates and drag them into the dark. Orders have been issued not to put captives to the sword in front of their women. Better to haul them off into the desert, leaving their ends unknown; this produces a more abiding terror because of the natives’ belief in djinns and demons. The scent of blood draws wolves, who scavenge the corpses. The packs learn to follow us. Their yellow eyes glitter in the torchlight. They cannot be driven off, even when pelted with stones.
    It is Lucas who hates this work the most. His eyes have gone dark and hollow. “Are we more civilized than the foe?” he demands one night as we young men sprawl exhausted beside some trail, trekking back from the evening’s labor. “By what definition of virtue do we call ourselves soldiers and the enemy savages?”
    Boxer warns Lucas to keep it down. Officers might hear and think he takes the Afghans’ side.
    â€œFuck the Afghans,” Lucas says. “I don’t care an iron spit for these murderous cowards. I’m talking about
us
. You and me, Boxer—and Matthias and Rags and every other young scuff thrown into this hell. What’s happening to
us?
”
    The fact is clear, though no rookie other than Lucas owns the bowels to give it voice, that we have entered a crucible of the soul, of war’s horror, and that it will change us. It has changed us already. Where will it end? Who will we be then? Myself, I feel its weight nightlong inside my skull, as spectacles of slaughter re-present themselves with such ghastliness that I dare not even shut my eyes.
    â€œPart of me is dying,” says Lucas. “Something evil grows in its place. I don’t know what it is, but I fear and hate it. I fear and hate myself.”
    Lucas calls us all on our jockeying within formation. He has seen us edge away from the fore line, where the butchery takes place. He’s right. The gruesomeness of war has hit us hard. Many can’t sleep. Others have withdrawn into silence and