Steven Pressfield Read Online Free PDF Page B

individual cavalrymen; in conventional warfare, the troopers would never let you near one. Not in this theater. Out here there’s no such thing as a led horse. We are recruited, those on the books as Mounted Infantry. In the event of action, should our primary cavalry be drawn off, we will form an auxiliary of remounts to shield the column.
    On we trek. We practice cordon operations; encirclement of villages. Our companies rehearse on dummy sites across Armenia and Mesopotamian Syria, then on the real thing in the Kurdish mountains east of the Tigris. The force surrounds a farm hamlet in the dark, to be in assault position at first light. The job is carried out in strict silence. Its purpose is to let no villager escape. The formation for assault is open order,

    in three ranks. The same configuration is employed in pursuit of the foe. Its principle is the inverted swallowtail,

    in which an individual of the foe is passed through the points, attacked by the wings, and finished off by the backs.
    When the cordon rings the village, an avenue of escape is always left. Cavalry and missile troops conceal themselves on the flanks of this getaway lane. This is how we are taught to take prisoners, running them down as they flee (the highest-ranking are always first out), instead of attempting to selectively take captives in the confusion of the assault.
    We spend more time now practicing killing blows. It’s unsettling. Can we do the same to a living man?
    Will we freeze in the crucial moment?
    We are keenly aware that we are boys, not men like Flag and Tollo. We do nothing like they do. We don’t talk like them or stand like them; we can’t even piss like them. They inhabit a sphere that is magnitudes above us. We ape them. We study them as if we were children. They remain beyond us.
    The column has passed through Susia now. My father’s bones lie here in the military cemetery. We are given no time to stop. The Afghan kingdoms lie only a few marches ahead. For days our force has been tracked by “clouds” and “ghosts,” army slang for the ragged,
yaboo
-mounted tribesmen who, our guides tell us, are not Afghans but Areians and Parthians, peoples we have supposedly conquered. Lucas eyes them dubiously. “They don’t look very conquered to me.”
    Our column advances under arms at all times now, with cavalry on both wings. One thing I have not anticipated, coming out to the army, is the prodigious consumption of liquor. The boozing is breathtaking. Veterans drink themselves blind every night. They collapse like the dead. You have to kick them awake each morning, and even that doesn’t work sometimes. The column packs out in a cacophony of hacking, spewing, hawking, puking; the men are blind as ticks for the first five miles. The foe attacking at dawn would make mince of us.
    It’ll get worse, Flag says, after the first action. He advises Lucas and me to start drinking now; get our bellies used to it. “At the front, you can’t do without it.” “Pank” and “jack” are army slang for the fiery cheap bozzle that knocks a man out like a blow to the temple. Such spirits are not wine cut with water, as gentlemen imbibe at dinner to enliven the conversation, but hard liquor guzzled neat. Distillers arise from the column who know how to cook up the stuff from rice and barley, rye, beets, pistachios, date palms; they make a brew from millet and sesame, vile as rancid curd, but with such a kick that fellows stand in line for it, and flag colonels exempt the brewmasters from duty, sending them off with cavalry escorts even, to steam up their mash, which the army cannot function without. Hogsheads of rye and wheat beer, so thick with lees that you have to suck it up through a reed, are trucked to depots along the column of march. One stretch of four days in Areia, the column ran out of souse; mates were getting in knife fights just from nerves. The commanders