The Rear Guard, a Short War Story from Xenophon's Anabasis
Ariston carried a sling, one lead bullet and no supper, and his company was sent to the rear of a marching square that was coming apart.
Fiction. An original short story by C.F. Cedar. The narrator and his friends are invented; the march, places and dates come from Xenophon's Anabasis as summarized in our review.
I
Most of the company sat in the dark that night without lighting a fire. Five of our generals had gone out to a parley with Tissaphernes under a truce, and they had not come back. We were more than a thousand miles from Hellas. Nobody could say who gave us orders now, only that the men who had given them before were in Persian hands.
I had my sling wound twice around my right hand and one lead bullet in the pouch at my belt. The bullet was gray and heavier than it looked. Lykon and I had signed on in the same week, and we had both believed the march would be short. He sat beside me with his knees drawn up, saying nothing about his stomach, which said everything.
The cold came up through the ground and into my cloak. Somewhere down the line a man was singing a song about a woman who had left him, very softly, and then he stopped, as if someone had asked him to.
In the morning the army voted on a thing that made no sense to me until it was done. The argument was that the baggage train would end up as our general. Xenophon, who had come along as a friend's guest and held no command, got the army to vote for burning the wagons and the tents. So we burned them on open ground. I watched my blanket catch on a tent pole and lay its smoke low over the plain. Nobody cried or cheered.
"They want us light," Lykon said, "so we can run faster from the next thing."
II
The captains sent us after a band of Persian archers that afternoon. We ran hard, our legs hot and our breath short. The archers kept their distance and shot at us, and when we turned back we had gained nothing but dry throats.
By evening word came down the line that the man who had come as a friend's guest had admitted the fault to Cheirisophus. Some men blamed him for the chase. Most said nothing, which in our company was the same as forgiving him.
The enemy shot and slung farther than our Cretan archers could answer. That night the captains called for slingers, and two hundred of us were enrolled. We were given no new equipment, only a name and a place in the rear. Lykon put his name down beside mine without asking me first. Afterward we practiced at a stake driven into the ground, throwing until our arms shook. My first three throws went wide. The fourth struck the stake with a crack I felt in my teeth, and Lykon laughed until the captain told us both to be quiet.
The claim going round the fires that were lit was that Rhodian lead bullets flew twice as far as the Persian stones. Nobody I knew had measured it. I had thrown stones since I was small, and I wanted to know what lead could do.
"Then we will both find out how far twice is," Lykon said, and he showed me how he had wound his thong.
III
Next morning the army marched in its square. Six companies of a hundred, ours among them, had the job of falling back to the rear whenever the flanks closed on us, and of filling any gap when the flanks opened. Our captain, a heavy man with a bandaged thumb, had walked us through the move twice on open ground. Drilling a thing on open ground is not the same as doing it at a bridge.
The road narrowed where it came down to a stream. The bridge over the stream was wide enough for two men side by side and no more, and the square came apart there like a rope with a worn strand. The left side pressed inward, as if something had shoved it from behind. The right pulled away into the reeds. The captain shouted for the rear.
We fell back through the mud. The stream's cold came up off the water into my boots, and we carried nothing now but our weapons and what we had in our belts. Behind us the Persian slingers had found their distance. Their stones came down on the road with a noise like hail on a roof, and then a duller sound when they struck something softer.
Lykon was at my shoulder, and then he was not. He had gone down on his knees in the road with his hands pressed to his belly, the way men go when hunger finally catches them. I thought about the rule that put the back companies at the rear. It had not been written for a man on his knees. I turned back.
The captain shouted again for the rear to hold. I heard him and kept my feet long enough to get Lykon's arm over my neck and haul him up. Then I swung the sling. The lead went out low over the road, and I did not see where it landed. I saw the slinger on the rise lower his arm and step back out of sight.
Then the right side opened, the way the captain had said it would. Our companies filled the gap with a noise of boots and breath, and I came up into it with Lykon's weight on my shoulder. We crossed the bridge at the back of the company, which was where the rule had put us, and nobody was left on the stones.
IV
On the far bank the captain counted us, touching each man on the shoulder as he passed. A man from another company came by with his arm bound in a strip torn from his cloak, and nobody asked how. When the captain reached Lykon he stopped. Lykon was still gray in the face, and his hands shook as he took the dried figs I had kept in my pouch. He ate them in three bites and asked how far my lead had gone.
"I did not see it land," I said.
"Then the claim still stands," he said, "and nobody can prove it wrong."
We sat in the wet grass with our backs to the bridge and lit no fire. That afternoon the army formed up again on higher ground, and we marched in the square once more without speaking. My pouch held no lead that night, and I did not ask for another bullet for a long time.