Tides of War Read Online Free PDF

plausible conviction. When the captain summoned witnesses from our home district who testified to the truth of the letter, Lion refused to buckle. It was not age that made a soldier, but passion and heart! Our commander cut him short. I have never seen one so inconsolable as Lion; the sight was almost comical of him slouching aboard the galley home.
    Payout for my brother’s misdemeanor fell upon me, as it should, his elder. I was fined three months’ pay and banished from line duty, assigned command of a platoon of boys, foresters. We were issued not arms but axes and packed off with the mules and logging sledges.
    You were at Potidaea, Jason. I remember you. You came in with Eurymedon in the terminal spring, the squadrons bearing the relief parties of the cavalry and the replacements for the assault troops carried off by the plague. You were lucky. You missed the winter.
    Winter in our fathers’ time was the off-season. Who even dreamt of fighting in the snow and ice? Summer was the time of war; in Sparta men didn’t even have a word for summer; they called it
strateiorion,
campaigning season. But a siege cannot be prosecuted in sunshine only. Thus a new calendar for a new kind of war.
    It was a porous siege. On the line the troops had more intercourse with the enemy than with their own countrymen. We sold food and firewood; the Potidaeans traded treasure. Gold first, then jewelry and linen. They sold their armor and their swords. From midwinter they were peddling their daughters.
    By the gods, it was cold up there. Piss steamed on the air and turned to ice before it hit the dirt. To dress in armor made the skin peel in patches where it touched the freezing bronze. The glory of dying for one’s country lost whatever pale luster it had possessed, especially to croak of plague or pestilence or some perverse mischance, a blind-luck bowshot lobbed from a battlement, only to have the campaign decidedin spring by treaty and everyone suddenly allies again. We camped there, frozen and miserable, while the city of the Potidaeans loomed at the neck of the promontory, frozen and miserable as we.
    The three northern gates, those that gave out upon the landward side, stood barred only in daylight. With nightfall they became avenues of skimmers, scavengers, and scum. You could see their tracks in the snow, broad as boulevards. Our company was commanded by a bribe-commissioned captain named Gnossos. Here is what we did. For every eight trees logged, we turned over four to the army; the other four went to the foe. They paid our captain in women. Not whores but respectable wives and daughters of the city. They were ploughing us for firewood. I refused to permit my lads to take part in these orgies, in which it was not uncommon for one female to service a dozen men before returning through and under the walls to the city. Such degeneracy, countenanced by their superior, would debase what little warrior spirit these striplings possessed. In addition, overscrupulous as this may sound from a man of my subsequent deeds, I could not bear to witness the ravagement of person this commerce inflicted on the women themselves.
    I was hauled up for this. Behind my back my bucks began calling me “the Spartan.” It was put about that I sided secretly with the foe and that my prudish intransigence was not only undermining the morale of youth but, defying as it did my commander’s ordinance, was at best insubordination and at worst treason. In a clash with my captain the word “procurer” escaped my lips. I was cashiered.
    I went for aid to Alcibiades. The army had engaged the enemy in full strength that autumn, an attempted breakout in force requiring the mobilization of our entire corps; Alcibiades had distinguished himself in this action and in fact been awarded the prize of valor, judged the bravest of the six thousand upon the field. It took several months for the crown and suit of armor to be delivered. In fact he had just received the