I have circled in blue the land of the Taochians.
Finally Cheirisophus, commanding the vanguard, just attacks one of the fortified places because he needs the food. The Greeks are driven back by a hail of stones, until at last the whole army has come up before the walls. Once Xenophon and the rear guard are there, the two generals consult and determine that the stones are survivable in the heavy armor, and once they are expended there are too few behind the walls to put up any effective further defense. Therefore, they begin passing an area to draw the fire with the clear plan of making their enemies run out of ammunition.
It turns out to be a fun game.
Callimachus hit upon a pretty contrivance--he ran forward from the tree under which he was posted two or three paces, and as soon as the stones came whizzing, he retired easily, but at each excursion more than ten wagon-loads of rocks were expended. Agasias, seeing how Callimachus was amusing himself, and the whole army looking on as spectators, was seized with the fear that he might miss his chance of being first to run the gauntlet of the enemy's fire and get into the place. So, without a word of summons to his neighbour, Aristonymous, or to Eurylochus of Lusia, both comrades of his, or to any one else, off he set on his own account, and passed the whole detachment. But Callimachus, seeing him tearing past, caught hold of his shield by the rim, and in the meantime Aristonymous the Methydrian ran past both, and after him Eurylochus of Lusia; for they were one and all aspirants to valour, and in that high pursuit, each was the eager rival of the rest. So in this strife of honour, the three of them took the fortress, and when they had once rushed in, not a stone more was hurled from overhead.
The fun stops when they gain the fortress, however. Expecting the severe treatment that has caused them to adopt such a hard way of life, the women atop the fortress hurl their infants to their deaths, and then leap to their own. The men of the fortress follow suit. One Greek officer, Aeneas the Stymphalian, tries to grab one of the men to keep him from suicide, but the man wraps him up and carries him off the cliff down to the crags below, killing them both.
They recover a large flock of sheep from this endeavor, as well as cattle and asses. This is helpfully mobile food for an army, and the prize that it turns out the people were defending with their lives.
The army has come through the worst of the mountains now, as you can see from the map. They gain a guide at the next city, who promises them that he can lead them to the sea. The land he takes them through is undergoing a war of its own, and they end up having some skirmishes with forces arrayed to fight another set of invades.
Yet on the fifth day, when Xenophon and the rearguard hear shouting before them as the army climbs atop a mountain, it is not as he first thinks the sound of combat. The Greeks are shouting with joy.
"THE SEA! THE SEA!"
[W]hen they had reached the summit, then indeed they fell to embracing one another--generals and officers and all--and the tears trickled down their cheeks. And on a sudden, some one, whoever it was, having passed down the order, the soldiers began bringing stones and erecting a great cairn, whereon they dedicated a host of untanned skins, and staves, and captured wicker shields, and with his own hand the guide hacked the shields to pieces, inviting the rest to follow his example. After this the Hellenes dismissed the guide with a present raised from the common store, to wit, a horse, a silver bowl, a Persian dress, and ten darics; but what he most begged to have were their rings, and of these he got several from the soldiers.
The sight of the sea is one of the most memorable parts of the Anabasis. These men, hardened now by difficulty, war, and the terror of seeing true horrors, are filled with joy to tears. They have not reached the sea, but they can for a moment see it, and they know for certain now how much further they have to go until they can hope to find ships for home.
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Many years (even decades now) ago I read a book by Harold Coyle ("Team Yankee") called "The Ten Thousand". The book was set in the near future (at the time) after a break-up of the USSR at the end of the Cold War. It was kicked off by the US seizing, by airborne coup de main, some nuclear weapons held in Ukraine by a rouge element of the Russian armed forces (IIRC, memory refreshed by the linked summary). The weapons are transported to a US base in a re-unified Germany whereupon a secretly neo-Nazi German Prime Minister (as opposed to the recent not-so-secretly Communist one) tries to seize them as bargaining chips to force a breakup of NATO. In order to extract the weapons and US forces, the US administration implements a plan roughly based on Xenophon's march though they feign the US commander has 'gone rouge' and is acting without orders or coordination rather than the force's leadership being killed. There are a couple of fantastic elements including the German Air Force disabling itself by a combination of sabotage and insubordination (obviously necessary because even a small number of planes could make mincemeat of a ground force without air cover and only limited AA capablity) and an ex-Speznatz officer who leads a group of American paratroopers on Brandenburger-style actions dressed in German Army uniforms. The action roughly parallels starting from Xenophon taking command and adopting the hollow-square formation with the two sides initially engaging only in non-lethal harassment while the politicians try to resolve things. Eventually there is a lethal incident, I'm remembering a helicopter collision or warning shots that don't miss, and of course when talks break down and force gets closer to the North Sea the Germans loyal to the PM get increasingly desperate to stop them.
Well, as Quentin Tarantino said of his own work, one way to make a great story is to steal from the best. A lot of versions of Xenophon's story have been written over the years.
There is a lot here. It's a story of hardship and sacrifice. It's a story of brave men, of a disciplined army. But it's also a story about how even brave and virtuous men can cause significant harm -- to the Kurds, to these poor people in today's reading. They intended to steal from these people because otherwise they would starve and die themselves. They might have meant to enslave some of them -- women and boys, like with the Kurds. They didn't, I think, intend to provoke the mass suicide and murder of babies. The horrors of war they provoked accidentally must have been haunting.
The Ancient Greeks wrote many tragedies, and it is the mark of tragedy that it is usually virtue or duty being fulfilled that results in it. They generals have a duty to the army; the soldiers have a duty to each other. They are pulling through against all odds and in the face of tremendous hostility. Yet it is in the performance of this act of courage and discipline that they are causing real tragedies to innocents along the way.
That part often gets left out of the fictionalized accounts.
Another fictional account that is similar in some respects is Glen Cook's Black Company series. He doesn't model the story after Xenophon, but some of the themes are similar. I think he probably also drew on the Italian condottieri.
It is military fantasy. The Black Company is a mercenary army in a medieval-ish world. They are hired by an empire having trouble with an insurgency. They end up defeating the insurgency and other enemies of the empire only to be betrayed and have to march their way out of the empire under constant attack. They do recognize the irony of having killed almost everyone who could have helped them escape, and of having lost a good number of their own while saving imperial units now arrayed against them.
Cook was a corpsman w/ Force Recon in Vietnam and does not shy away from either the atrocities or tragedies in his stories. The story is told from the point of view of the Black Company's physician, which also brings out the humanity of their story.
As I recall Coyle did touch on the impact of the operation to the German population, with the initial avoidance of armed conflict motivated in part by the desire of both sides to avoid civilian casualties. He had some of the German population directly aiding the US troops as (realistically) not all of them were supportive of the PM's actions, and I think the troops did pretty quickly resort to barely disguised theft of fuel and other supplies. The WWII grenade attack incident that opens the book, as described in the summary, is reprised near the end as a young German boy watches a duel between an M1 and a German tank destroyer with the concussion from the gun blast shattering the window he's looking from and the glass shards seriously wounding him.
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