An army is caught up in a struggle against guerrillas behind the lines. Out of patience, its troops target nearby villages to hunt down the fighting men they harbor.
Vietnam, you say?
In this case, it was Central Asia in the 4th Century B.C.
The army’s commander was the Macedonian king Alexander the Great, leading 30,000 men. His march of conquest was slowed by guerrillas in Sogdia, an ancient Iranian civilization in present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Alexander had ended Persian control of the region, but Sogdians found life was harder now. The king’s troops were stealing rice, looting flocks, seizing horses, and punishing natives who stood in their way. Nomad skirmishers on horseback fired up the natives with talk of resistance, and nearby Bactrians joined the cause. In 329 B.C., with this widening challenge to his authority, Alexander turned his men loose on rebellious villages. Thousands of local fighters were slaughtered.
Another rebellion broke out behind the Sognia lines. Scythian nomads were attacking Alexander’s garrison in Samarkand. He sent 2,000 mercenaries there in a failed bid to break the siege, keeping the great bulk of his force in a settlement he was building on the Jaxartes River. From the opposite bank of the river, angry Scythians taunted Alexander. He decided to shut them up.
The Macedonian troops frightened their foes with arrow-shooting catapults and crossed the river to press the attack. They were up against Scythian horsemen who felt they had a surefire way to victory: Encircle the enemy at a gallop, shooting arrows as they passed.
Like a scene in a Wild West movie.
Alexander knew the tactic and outmaneuvered the Scythians, as British historian Robin Lane Fox wrote in his 1973 book Alexander the Great. First, Alexander lured the Scythians into battle “with a deceptively weak advance force; then, as they tried to encircle, he moved up his main cavalry and light-armed infantry and charged on his own terms.”
The Scythians lost a thousand men. The rest fled into the hills, Alexander on their heels for eight miles. When he got sick from drinking bad water, he called off the chase.
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Raiding villages that harbored guerrillas. Letting arrows fly while circling the enemy on horseback. Even over the course of 2,000 years, some ways of war hadn’t changed.
David Venditta 