Meantime, the experienced Hephaestion had run a pontoon bridge across the Indus; no mean achievement, for it would bear an army across a wide and powerful stream. Alexander, reunited with his lover and (though not for long) with his bride, was received by King Omphis of Taxila with such a huge parade, complete with war elephants, cavalry, drums and gongs, that it looked like an advancing army, and a dreadful misunderstanding was averted just in time by Omphis’ riding out in front unarmed. Alexander reciprocated; friendly signs sufficed till the arrival of the interpreters.
Nearchus, Alexander’s admiral and one of his exiled boyhood friends, wrote a monograph on India, from which it seems that the Macedonians made contact chiefly, perhaps only, with the Aryan conquerors from the north, who still preserved traditions of their ancient nomadic life. The Nyseans were so fair they were not known to be Indians; the men of the Punjab are described as very tall. Community of race, however, had not kept the Punjab kingdoms, any more than the Greek states, from chronic war; a fact Alexander already knew and had exploited. Alliance with Omphis meant the enmity of his powerful neighbour Porus, whose land lay east of the next river arm, the Hydaspes. Alexander, after putting on an impressive parade, began to prepare for battle.
He made a point, however, of visiting the local ascetics, or naked philosophers as his men called them. Buddhism was now two centuries old, and though its sphere was further east, its influence may have inclined these Hindus towards the “middle way”; they did not practise crippling mortifications, but lived without possessions, fed by the community, in detachment from worldly desires. Arrian (who generally uses Nearchus for descriptive passages on India, Ptolemy for war) says that in rebuke of Alexander’s ambition they struck their feet upon the ground, meaning that only the earth under his soles could be his for all his restlessness. He admired their independence, and persuaded one of them to join his court, despite the others’ reproofs. Known to the Macedonians as Calanus, he was in his sixties; Strabo says that he had taken in his twenties a forty-year vow which had now expired, and was free to do as he chose. It is a great pity we have no record of what he and Alexander discussed together. The strange friendship lasted, as its dramatic end was to prove.
A formal request for Porus’ allegiance produced the expected defiance. Alexander mobilized with Omphis; paying little heed to the entrance on the scene of a more insidious foe, the monsoon rains.
He was realistic about human enemies; unlike Demosthenes he never underrated them. This good judgment failed him more than once in respect of weather. His rigorous training by Leonidas in childhood may have conditioned him to think of it in terms of hardship to be put up with, rather than real strategic threat. Someone must have told him how long and heavy the rains would be; he would have replied that soldiers must expect to get wet sometimes, and they all knew he would get wet with them. They had had rest time after their hard fights in the hills (Hephaestion’s army had had some too, passed over almost in silence by Ptolemy, who gave his own exploits generous coverage). Any further delay would look like weakness. Through a growing downpour, Alexander led his men to the Hydaspes. It was beginning to rise. Hephaestion had had his pontoons carted from the Indus; but it was already too late to use them except as rafts. Opposite, at the easiest crossing point, King Porus and his army waited, with two hundred war elephants.
For months Alexander had been fighting on foot; but for a pitched battle he must use cavalry, and horses were terrified of elephants. In the field they could be dealt with; the point of crucial danger was the moment of landing. If they were on the bank, the horses would plunge off the rafts in panic, and be swept away.
No operation of Alexander’s better displays his many-sided military genius than the battle of the Hydaspes: war psychology, cool nerve, swift reaction in emergency, resource, organization, and the leadership by which total trust is inspired. Day after day, in pouring rain and thunderstorms, with the river steadily rising, he played an elaborate game of bluff. He made large troop movements to likely crossing points, launching boats and rafts in suggestive ways. He built up ostentatious stores, making it known that he thought of sitting out the floods till their winter fall. He kept Porus guessing not only at his plans, but at his quality. He showed every sign of irresolution. He marched his army by night along the bank, to blow trumpets and yell war cries till Porus and all the elephants had marched to meet him; then he retired, leaving the enemy to wait in the wet till morning. He did it night after night. Porus, a warrior of towering stature, began thoroughly to despise him, and stopped moving elephants each time he made a noise. Alexander was now ready.
He chose an upstream bend, where a headland and wooded island would screen him. The rafts were brought by stealthy land portage. Craterus was left in camp with a strong contingent, to cross when the elephants were engaged elsewhere. Under cover of a violent thunderstorm, Alexander reached his crossing point. Among his officers, besides Hephaestion and Perdiccas, were Ptolemy, Lysimachus and Seleucus, three future kings. With the rafted horses they stole ashore. There was a bad moment when they found the bank had been cut off by a flood channel, but they just managed to ford it. A fascinating detail here reveals the average height of the Greek war horse: the men were chest deep in water, and the horses could just keep their heads above. No elephants appeared.
Too late, Porus’ scouts alerted him. He sent one of his sons with a flying column of chariots and horsemen. They were cut to pieces, a loss he could ill spare; his infantry superiority was enormous, about 30,000 to Alexander’s 6,000; in cavalry he was weak; he had now lost half (his son, who was killed, as well) and was left with 2,000 to the Macedonian 5,000 or so. He disposed his huge force on the most solid ground he could find, the cavalry on the wings, the infantry in the centre, and in front the wall of elephants, 100 feet apart.
Alexander was never a general to fight his last war over again. He did not attempt the tactics of Gaugamela. His usual right-wing station happened to suit his plan; but when his weary infantry came struggling up through the mud, he rested them till it was time for the decisive thrust. Viewing the portentous line of elephants with their weapon-bristling howdahs, he planned how to make them fight for him.
At first he let them alone. He set his horse archers (mostly Thracian) to harass and confuse the left-wing cavalry, which he then charged with his own cavalry wing. The Indian right-wing cavalry galloped round to meet the threat. They were attacked from the rear by Coenus, a reliable commander of whom more will be heard. Alexander pressed his assault. The cavalry retreated among the infantry, behind the elephants. Now the horse archers shot down their mahouts, and turned their arrows on the bewildered beasts; as they started milling, the phalanx, its moment come, fell on them with javelins and sarissas. (The sufferings of this intelligent and loyal creature in the service of man’s aggression is one of history’s shameful tragedies.) In pain and panic, bereft of their guides and friends, they flailed and trampled the troops around them, as the Macedonians cordoned the confused and desperate mob in ever-narrowing ground. The Indians had just forced a gap and started to pour out of it, when Craterus, who had meantime crossed the undefended river, arrived with his fresh troops and cut them off. The scene stuns imagination: the great horde of men and beasts, the drumming rainstorms, the neighing, trumpeting and yells, the war horns and gongs counterpointed with thunder; the deepening bog stinking of blood and elephant spoor and river slime; dark faces and fair alike inhuman with mud and rain. Allowing for the chroniclers’ usual licence, the Indian casualties were terrible, the Macedonians’ light. It was Alexander’s last pitched battle; and, as he would have wished, it was his masterpiece.