Virtues of War Read Online Free PDF

your mate was all it took to make first-rate soldiers, the sergeant’s chore would be no more than ‘Face about and bend over!’” My father likewise knows Thebes well, having endured three years there as a hostage in his youth. Of course the Sacred Band is not pairs of lovers. How, after the youth’s first beard? What the band is, is the boldest and most athletic of Thebes’s noblest families, including, this day, six Olympic champions and scores of prizewinners from Greece’s lesser games. The expenses of the regiment are borne by the state, her members relieved of all civic obligation, save training for war. Theban maids fling themselves at the knights of the Band, in vain, alas, for these, as their countryman Pindar attests

    have taken Strife as their bride,

and to her are faithful unto death.

    The Sacred Band are all hoplites, heavily armored infantry. Their panoply is a helmet of bronze or iron (six pounds), bronze front-and-back cuirass (twelve pounds), shin guards (two pounds each), and a three-foot-across bowl-shaped shield, oak faced with bronze (twelve to fourteen pounds). In other words, thirty-four to thirty-six pounds of “pot and plate,” not counting weapons (another ten pounds), cloak and chiton, and footgear. The Greek hoplite is the most heavily armored infantryman in the world. With shields at high port and lapped, helmet crowns and eye slits alone visible above the upper rims, the Sacred Band presents to the foe a solid wall of bronze and iron.
    The Band is three hundred on the parade ground only. In the field it is twenty-four hundred. Each hoplite is complemented by seven militia infantrymen, to make a file of eight, and has reserve companies to pack it sixteen deep, a total of forty-eight hundred. The Band has no cavalry and fears no cavalry. Horse troops are useless, the Thebans believe, against the bronze-armored, densely packed, spear-bristling phalanx.
    Like all elite infantry of the southern Greeks, the Sacred Band fights in close order. The warriors’ weapons are the eight-foot spear, with which they strike overhand from behind the lapped faces of their shields, and the short Spartan-style cut-and-thrust sword, which they use for the close work. The Band advances to the cadence of the flute, and has no call for retreat. Its code is Stand and Die. Its men are beyond question the finest infantry of Greece and, the ten thousand Immortals of Persia not excepted, the elite armored corps of all the world.
    This day I will destroy them.
    Here is how I learned the job was mine. At Pherae in Thessaly, the final staging stop before Philip’s army pushed south to Chaeronea, my father commanded a full-dress run-through. The exercise was supposed to strap up at dawn, but the day had passed without orders, midnight had come and gone, and only then, well into the third watch of the night, did the word come down to bring the troops on line, in the dark, amid a cacophony of groans, gripes, and sergeants’ bellowing. Of course Philip had planned it so. He wanted the men tired and hungry, half-pissed and disordered. It would more closely simulate the disarray of battle. Now at the last minute he arrived himself, with half the Companion Cavalry, a thousand Light Horse of Thessaly and three hundred Thracian lancers. The mass of horse threw the field into even greater disorder. A waxing moon stood over; the plain, freshly drenched by an unseasonable downpour, glistened slick and treacherous in a still-misting drizzle. “Plugs off! Skin ’em back!” Philip commanded via the brigade master sergeants, meaning the corps was to strip the cornel caps and oiled-fleece covers from the warheads of its eighteen-foot sarissas
.
    At once it felt like a fight. Honed iron emerged to the wet. Now an infantryman must take care and not jostle, for with the slightest mishandling, these whetted edges could dice a comrade’s ear or put out his eye. Philip ordered shields