In desert war, pursuit is everything. This is how you make kills. The chase from the Lakes goes on two months. Our sections under Stephanos are reintegrated into the battalion commanded by Bullock; we become an element, now, of a line unit.
Our charge is to pursue the foe wherever he flees. “Come back with kills,” Bullock tells us, “or don’t come back at all.” A terrible competition arises between companies of the same battalions. Sooner than return empty-handed, we bag any luckless bastard we see. Every village that aids the foe is obliterated. We take no prisoners. Every man we catch, we kill. Driving a band into the mountains, we pursue till not one soul remains. Nothing stops us. Fugitive contingents are chased across the steppe for hundreds of miles.
The instrument of counterguerrilla warfare is the massacre. Its object is terror, to make oneself an object of such dread that the foe fears to face you ever. This practice has worked for the army of Macedon across all Asia. It does not work here. The Afghan is so proud, so inured to privation, and so in love with liberty that he prefers death to capitulation. The more terror we apply, the more stubborn his resolution becomes. His dames and urchins are worse than he is. They hate our guts. For all the blood we have drained into Afghan soil, we have succeeded neither in breaking the foe’s will to resist nor severing him tribe from tribe, but have instead ignited in his breast a fierce and unquenchable defiance and united him against us in a front of a thousand once-warring tribes, clans, and khels.
When the chases at the Lakes are over, our company is in a state beyond exhaustion. The hair beneath our desert caps is so matted with dust, grease, and sweat that we can’t shear it even with a razor. The nails of our toes and fingers are busted to nubs. Our kit can’t be peeled off. We have to cut it away. We reek. We’re so dirty, rivers can’t get us clean.
Our horses are skin and bones. So are we. We can’t eat. We’ve forgotten how to sleep. We’ve been living on nazz and jute for so long, we can’t keep down so much as a turnip. Wine when we get it runs through us like water. Speech has become superfluous. Who needs it? Flag knows what I’m thinking. At the gallop I glance to Lucas across a hundred feet of steppe. He knows. Even our horses know.
We have kept Tower’s and Pollard’s ashes. One night, on an eminence north of the Lakes, a likely spot presents itself. Our urns are leather sacks. We inter them not within cairns, which the foe will sniff out and desecrate, but beneath stones marked underside with our names and unit. We offer the Hymn for the Fallen. Stephanos composes these lines:
Hunting for Baz
The boys need their nazz.
Lacking soap, dope, and hope; coochless, moochless,
We achieve the unachievable, sustained by belief in the unbelievable.
Lucas has been keeping a notebook. He won’t tell anyone what’s in it. Finally this night he breaks it out.
He calls it Letters I Never Sent Home.
The document tells what we do in a day. No story. Just a list.
“When we first marched out from Macedon,” says Lucas, “trekking was our life. It was all we did. We thought nothing of it. You remember.
“Now we get up in the morning and we kill people. We kill them all day, and the next day we kill some more. That’s our life. It’s so ordinary to us, we think nothing of it.”
He rattles off the chases we’ve run in the last two days. Already the others call him to quit.
He won’t.
“How do you know how far-gone you are? When you write letters home. Try to tell your people what you’ve been doing. You can’t. Not even your old man, a decorated vet himself. He can’t understand; no words can make him. So you write in this crazy prose that says less than nothing.”
Dark laughter now. Lucas doesn’t smile.
“You look in the faces of your mates, boys of twenty who look fifty, and you know that’s how you look too. But you’re not fifty. You’re twenty. You’re twenty and fifty. Things you thought you’d never do, you’ve done, and you can never tell anyone…”
Dice lobs a fist of pebbles. “Sack it, Lucas.”
“…never tell anyone except your mates. Only you don’t need to tell them. They know. They know you. Better than a man knows his wife, better than he knows himself. They’re bound to you and you to them, like wolves in a pack. It’s not you and them. You are them. The unit is indivisible. One dies, we all die. Individual mind? It doesn’t exist anymore. We’ve become incapable of independent thought or any thought at all except when is the next mooch, the next bonze, the next chop. Where is the foe? One day we chase him into the mountains, next day over the plains. That’s all we know. That’s all we do. That’s all-”
This is enough. Even I tell Lucas to stop.
He looks up. “Why doesn’t some correspondent write about this? Stephanos, you’re a literary fellow. Why don’t you set some of this to stanzas?”
Our leader stands above the circle. He tells Lucas his harangue has gone on long enough. “You’re tired, my friend.”
Lucas’s eye glitters in the firelight.
“You have no idea,” he says, “how tired I am.”
33
The army reaches Maracanda on Daesius 28, midsummer. A letter is waiting for me from my brother Philip at Bactra City.
Elias has died.
His woman Daria poisoned him. I know, I can’t believe it either. She was caught introducing aconite into the rations of others in the hospital. Apparently she’d been dosing Elias in small quantities all winter. I have his ashes. I shall send them home to Mother. I won’t leave him out here.
I am struck dumb to read this. It can’t be true! I strain at the letter, to make certain the handwriting is Philip’s. How can Elias be dead? He was well! I saw him just ninety days ago!
Forgive me, brother, for communicating this unhappy report by post. But you must know at once. Army regulations permit a brother to escort his brother’s remains home. You must do this, Matthias. I have set the process in motion through Headquarters Bactra City. I am certain that approval will not be withheld.
Home? I know at once that this is out of the question. I cannot leave Lucas and Flag and Stephanos. I cannot leave my mates.
I have to sit. The letter has been delivered by pouch rider, along with everyone else’s mail, in camp on the Many Blessings. I pass the letter to Flag. He scans it in silence and hands it on. Everyone reads it.
My mates are as shaken as I. Not just by Elias’s death (he was a favorite of all), but by its manner. Suddenly the war seems more un-winnable than ever.
Worse news comes by verbal report. There’s a reason our patrols have not encountered Spitamenes all summer. The Desert Wolf has been raiding in our rear. He crossed the Oxus two months ago, heading south with six thousand Daan, Sacae, and Massagetae horse, despite our saturation coverage of the region. He has captured Bani Mis and both Bactra-region freight compounds, constructed last winter. More massacres. Our general Craterus is defending central Afghanistan with four brigades; he has chased the Wolf but lost him, as usual, north in the steppe country.
I respond at once to Philip, declining his offer with respect.
Elias.
Must I speak of my brother now in the past tense? Must I say “was”?
Elias was Mother’s darling; how will she endure his loss? How will our sister Eleni? Will Philip inform them of Daria?
The next ten days pass like a hundred. Grief has overhauled me. I have ducked it for so long. Since Father. Tollo. Rags, Flea, Knuckles, Torch and Turtle, Tower and Pollard.
Now Elias.
It all catches up to me.
I saw my brother last just before the Big Push stepped off. He was in the officers infirmary at Bactra City. A wound of the foot, got not in action but from stepping on a nail on his way to the latrine. This is a grand joke to him. The surgeons bled him to defend against lockjaw. It works. I visit him twice. He seems in fine spirits. I spend six weeks in the field, training. When I get back, a note tells me Elias has been moved from the hospital to a private home. I go straight over.