Steven Pressfield Read Online Free PDF Page A

sheep, pistachio beer, eggs, meat, cheese. What do the lads crave most? Fresh onions. Back home onions go to flavor a stew. Out here you eat ’em raw. They taste sweet as apples. A man’ll give half a day’s pay for a good onion. They keep your teeth from falling out.
    I have a fiancée at home. Her name is Danae. On the march I write letters to her in my head. I talk about money, not love. When we get married, Danae and I will need the equivalent of six years’ pay to make an offer on a farm, since neither of us wish to be beholden to our families. I will volunteer for Forward Operations, first chance I get. Double pay. I cannot tell Danae this. She will worry.
    There are many things a fellow cannot tell his sweetheart. Women for one. An army travels accompanied by a second army of whores and trollops, not to mention the camp wives, who constitute a more permanent auxiliary, and when these melt away in “wolf country,” enemy territory, their numbers are made up by locals. We have heard much about the Asiatic’s sequestration of his women, and no doubt this is true in normal times. But when an army as laden with plunder as Alexander’s passes through, even the most hawkeyed patriarch can’t keep watch over his daughters forever. The maids dog the column, seeking novelty, freedom, romance, and even the lamest scuff can gin them down to nothing for a quick roll-me-over. The girls’ll even stay to mend kit and do the laundry. Half the young cooches are blinkered—with child, that is—made so by our fellows passing through with Alexander months before. This doesn’t stop us from stropping them. Not me of course, or Lucas. We hold true to our girls back home, much to the amusement of our comrades.
    Tollo is the primary fig-hound. He’s sluicing the natives two at a time. “One on each hip,” he says, “just to keep warm.” Tollo’s Color Sergeant pay, counting bonuses, is four drachmas a day (four times my packet). You can buy a house for that here, or hire half a village to do any labor you want.
    The army has its own language. “Steam” is soldiers’ slang for women. Dish. Fig. Cooch. Hank or bert (from the native
tallabert,
“mother”) for an Afghan. The locals have their slang for us too. Mack. Scuff.
Bullah
(from their word for “stupid”). Sex is qum-qum. The enemy himself our lads call “Baz,” the most common name for an Afghan male—as in, “Baz is out there tonight.”
    Women are of two types in Areia and Afghanistan. Those beneath the protection of fathers and brothers are called
tir bazal,
“the jewel.” If you so much as glance at them, their people will slit your throat. The other type has lost the protection of the clan. Maybe their male kin have been killed in feuds or war, or the females have committed some transgression and been cast out. These are the girls we Macks take up with. They’re not tramps though. They have dignity. You have to marry them.
    Marriage here is not like back home. One of my littermates, Philotas, met a girl in a village west of Susia. By night they were married. No ceremony; you just declare it and that’s it. My mates make fun of me because I take wedlock seriously. That’s how I feel. I can’t accept these riteless, walk-away hitch-ups. They seem wrong to me.
    We get mail on the column. The post from home catches up every ten days; the troops even get letters from the army out east. This from my mother:

    You need not write me chatty notes, dear, nor do I care to learn the progress of the latest campaign. Just let me know you are well. Stay alive, my child, and come home to me.

    A letter comes from my brother Elias, ahead with Alexander’s corps in Afghanistan. It has no toll-seal. Mail from the fighting army travels free.
    All letters report the same news:
    Darius is dead.
    The king of Persia has fallen, slain by his own generals as