A SOLDIERS STORY
People do not understand what Alexander was about. Persia's King Darius was building an army of one million to make a drive west all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and kill everyone in between. Then he was going to resettle it with Persians. They were actually using this information to enlist soldiers. They promised about 1000 acres to each man who joined their army. They had enlisted over 450,000 men when we decided that we could not let that happen. So I cut off Persian heads to prevent it.
Darius intended to take over lots of smaller nations like Egypt whose armies they would enlist. This would give them another 500,000 men. I decided to take those other countries over before Darius could and use their armies combined with our Greek army against Persia. The Greek army that went into Persia was as has been stated many times headed by 35,000 Greeks but it had another 200,000 soldiers from captured countries....including Egyptians and they had the best charioteers. Each one killed an average of 40 enemy soldiers before it could be stopped. They were the Abrams tank of the day.
Last night as I awoke I recalled the last lifetime in which I was a soldier. I know that I was in India. I was Anglo and I wore a breastplate.
We were on horseback and went by what appeared to be some men who were stripping valuables from bodies on the side of the road. They were considered to be about the lowest of the low. These were men who have given up all sense of decency and morality to strip the dead. It was a winding trail and surrounded by heavy foliage so I was concentrating on other things, like a potential ambush, than the men stripping the dead. I made it about 20 paces past the man who I could sense was the leader of these thieves.
Then I halted. I said to myself, 'this isn't right'. I turned and looked again at the man and the dead body who had been a civilian. It no longer mattered to me whether the civilian was a man, woman or child. Such was the loss of my humanity. The obvious did matter to me at that moment. The man's bloody knife was next to him on a rock and the blood was fresh. Next to the body was a pool of blood. He was lower than a thief. I casually called to the officers under my command. About 20 of them heard me, stopped and turned to look. They too saw it. These victims were all men and infants with their mothers. Some were not yet dead. One was crawling with a stub of an amputated finger and his head half bashed in. It told me the robber had done this. Knowing that he no longer posed a threat, the robber had left him lingering in death in order to hasten to his next victim.
I was exhausted and no longer recoiled at the horrors done by people in war. This was different. My men just looked at me with wide eyes. I remember one of my officers eyes showed me more than my own had seen. Horror, at what was going on. Horror that he had missed it before. Horror that the robber regarded his own safety not at all. Horror that he himself had fallen from a man of greatness and sophistication, of royalty and a master of humanities who could speak a half dozen languages, to someone who no longer cared.
Lifting up my arm, every hand went to their swords. The robber stopped, looked at us and froze. Much as any animal would before a lion. Frozen in fear, he put out something that the others sensed. They stopped but they looked at him, not at me. They gave themselves away. They were not civilians but soldiers who were trained to kill or be prepared to die. And die they must. One moved up next to the leader, his hand hidden inside his clothes on a short sword. The move of a professional soldier in defense of his superior officer. The move of a man I would have liked to have fight by my side.
My arm swung down and I could feel the fear of the men in front of me shoot immediately up. My officers charged and it was all over in seconds.
We had marched east until there was nothing left. Silt made rivers muddy and gave us more diseases than we could count. The people were uncouth and uncaring. They treated each other far worse with their castes and slavery than they treated animals. It disgusted me. Now I saw the outcome of all that came before us was to be in this disgusting place.
The empires of Persia and Bactria were glorious by comparison. Years later, I realized that we were becoming more like the monsters we had set out to destroy than they had been. So I began to destroy myself. We stopped. We all stopped. I was their leader. My power had been their strength and now I saw only visions cloaked in terrible blackness. I had justified warfare by giving it a glory it didn't deserve and that was coming back to me with a vengeance.
In my prime I was going to be destroyed. I vomited and up came the emotions of all the horrendous things that I had done. After this my strength failed and so did my men. We still walked but we had already died. Soon, I lay dying on my bed. I realized that I had been born into a royal Greek family that needed me to be a soldier. What a loss all the wars had created. I was born just to learn this lesson. I learned it. I would never again live the life of a professional warrior. My destiny fulfilled I was dead in another 12 hours. At the age of 33 Alexander the Great died of heartbreak.
The main reason for Alexander to step upon the worlds scene in the first place was because about every 100 years the Arab world would crush into the west and set it back about 80 years. The Israelies kept getting crushed worse than everybody else combined. Nobody had beat the Arabs. Nobody could stop them. Alexander put a stop to it. There was a great need at the time for one of God's helpers to do this and my soul was the most competent one that God had at that time for that sort of thing. That is why I ended up doing it. We were 40,000 and later 30,000 but 3 times we defeated armies that were ten times our size. They were armies that had not been defeated in war for the thousand years that their countries had existed. It still upsets me to think of the way it glorified war though.
Aristotle and that which was taken out of Aristotles teachings that made his and Alexanders thoughts as powerful they were.
It's strange that nobody has asked me how it was done. Alexander could face armies of hundreds of thousands and soundly defeat each one with an army of only 40,000. How it all began.
The nickname the Babylonians gave Alexander's army.
The worst situation we faced.
Typically in battles two armies of perhaps 25,000 each would charge at each other and 30 minutes later one would be the victor. Alexander would pit 5,000 against 50,000 and in four minutes the entire enemy army would be wiped out and 4,800 of Alexanders men would still be standing. It's now time to expose a few of the secrets of Alexander. One of our three main archery techniques.
We
did not attempt to kill as many enemy as possible. Our objective was to make the
enemy want to go home. They lost then. If the leaders made them stay they would
have a mutiny on their hands. If they went home they would justify their leaving
the battle to their friends and neighbors fifty different ways. All of which would
make the Babylonians never want to see war or a Greek ever again. Anything else
would inspire others to become soldiers. If we had to fight we made it as decisive
a win as possible. Then there would be no return bouts based on 'what if this'
and 'what if that'?
© 2003, 2020 John Pinil