Not me. I was cut down twice, both times by those terrifying silver apples that could knock a man unconscious right through a good helmet. Both times, my men pulled me out of the fighting.

When I came to the second time, I was woozy and I vomited, over and over, and my head felt soft and spongy and there was a lot of blood in my hair.

My taxeis was standing in the river, and the Persians were standing on the far bank, jeering at us, and my men weren’t even pretending to push forward. Once in a while, a Persian officer would lean out with a bow and shoot one of my officers or file leaders. But that was better than trying the ramp of dead again.

Isokles was holding my shoulders, and Marsyas was holding my hair.

I drank a lot of wine from Polystratus’s canteen. As in, the whole canteen.

Hope you’re getting the picture.

Polystratus leaned in close. ‘Things are going to shit by the hypaspitoi,’ he said.

So I mounted his horse and rode about a hundred feet, my head pounding and my limbs uncertain.

It was like watching a dyke break when a river floods.

I don’t know where they came from, but there were thousands of Greek mercenaries, and they’d broken through, and they were coming into Perdiccas’s flank. And Perdiccas’s men had had enough. They were running. I couldn’t see the hypaspitoi. I didn’t know that Alexander was, even then, trying to kill Darius, or that he’d broken the enemy line. All I saw was dust and the collapse of our centre.

And let me tell one thing from where Perdiccas stood. He says he never knew how Greeks penetrated our line. His men were stuck in like mine, and unable to break through, just like mine, and suddenly they were struck in the flank by a battering ram of well-formed infantry. It was so bad that most of his front-rankers died. Virtually a generation of leadership in a veteran phalanx, dead in heartbeats. My namesake, Ptolemy son of Seleucus, died there. Parmenio’s bastard son Attalus died there. We lost good men at the rate of water draining from a pool.

I rode back to my taxeis – just a few horse lengths, and lost in the battle haze.

Thank the gods for the horse.

‘Back-step! March!’ I bellowed.

Back-stepping is when the hoplite backs from the enemy but with his face still looking the enemy in the eye. Only the best troops, like the best horses, can do it. But my lads were only too happy to leave the killing zone between the banks of the river. And we’d worn both banks to ramps. I’m sure it was bad enough, backing up the near bank, but they got it done.

When the right file leader (the one who should have been next to me) was at my left foot, I ordered ‘Halt!’

Isokles came running out of the haze of dust.

His was the rightmost company.

‘Form to the right,’ I said. ‘We’re about to be hit in the flank.’

I’d backed the taxeis far enough that he could simply wheel his thirty files to the right. Then Marsyas marched – the Spartan way – by files to the right and reformed his front – to Isokles’ left. Wrong place in the line, but we had practised this – and every other possible disaster. Thanks to Isokles.

‘Go to Parmenio and get a squadron of cavalry,’ I said to Polystratus. ‘I don’t care who they are. Tell him the whole centre is going to collapse and Perdiccas is already gone.’

And then the Greeks hit Isokles.

That’s all the time we had. Perhaps the time a man takes to make a speech in the Assembly. But all those brave men – Meleager son of Neoptolymus, Parmenio’s bastard; Ptolemy of Selucus and Leon son of Amyntas and all of them – they died to buy us those fleeting heartbeats, and we honoured their deaths by using the time as best we could.

The Greeks hit us, and Isokles’ men gave way ten paces. Marsyas’s men went back far enough that they disordered Pyrrhus’s company where they stood ready.

There were so many Greeks. I remember my heart falling as I realised that we had lost the battle.

I dismounted and ran to the rear of Pyrrhus’s right file.

‘About face!’ I roared. Maybe I squeaked it. But they brought their sarissas upright and faced about – a terrible muddle – fighting all around us, and Marsyas’s rear files being pushed in among us.

‘Follow me!’ I yelled. Pyrrhus was ten men away, and his men were not in any order at all, but the Greek formation was wider than ours by half as many again, and I was determined to fight the turning motion of the overlap with an attack of my own.

As it turned out, all of Pyrrhus’s men and all of Cleomenes’ assumed the order was for them, and the whole lot of them – more than five hundred men – followed me into the Greeks, leaving no onefacing the Persian guards across the river.

Nor were we in any order at all. We were a mob.

But victory disorders as thoroughly as defeat, and the Greeks had been victorious twice, once against the hypaspitoi and again against the flank of Perdiccas, and they were spread over a stade of ground, and suddenly . . .

It was all man to man. Vicious, brutal and utterly devoid of tactics. Had these been Memnon’s men, we’d have been dead. Praise Ares, the only veterans of Memnon’s were in myranks, at myback.

I remember crashing into a very young Greek, knocking him flat with my greater weight, and putting my spear into him. That never happens in a line fight. But here – it was every man for himself in the dust.

The sarissas were useless, and most of my veterans simply dropped them for their swords. The sarissa is a fine team weapon, but has no use at all man to man.

Then it was just fighting.

We lost.

They seemed to have an inexhaustible number of Greeks and Ionians. It was incredible – slow, almost nightmare-like. The initial shock of the open, confused fighting gave way to a gradual, almost glacial collapse into a line fight.

We lost, but we lost slowly. Cleomenes quite wisely sent his mounted messengers down the line to Craterus to tell him what was happening, and we lost ground, step by step, and the Greeks kept pushing our flanks and driving south, away from the river, trying to turn us.

We died.

Let me tell you how war works. I had, at the start of the day, about eight hundred veterans of Memnon’s and about nine hundred Macedonian recruits. At the end of the day, I had about seven hundred veterans of Memnon and about three hundred Macedonian recruits. The young die, and the old fight on.

Back and back we went.

Praise to Ares, some of Perdiccas’s men – and he himself – joined us on our southern flank. But every time we tried to stand, we were pushed back by numbers.

Over the next hour, we lost two hundred paces.

But now I’ll tell you what didn’t happen.

The Persian guards didn’t charge us in our exposed flank. I don’t know if they didn’t want to get their feet wet, or they didn’t know what was happening, or they were worried for their own king, who even then was being hunted like prey by Alexander – but they had it in their power to win the battle – one killing blow at us, and the centre was gone.

That man – the commander of Darius’s foot guards – lost Issus.

I was wounded – really wounded, a thrust from a spear that went through the top of my thorax and lodged in my breastbone – about the time that Craterus arrived with the rear files of his taxeis to try and steady mine. It stillwasn’t enough. But his timing was good, because about twenty heartbeats after he slapped my shoulder and told me the king was coming, I was on my face in the blood and sand.

And that, for me, was the end of the Battle of Issus.

I suspect you know what happened, but here it is – Alexander launched his blow at the first roar of the trumpets, smashed through the line facing him and made straight for Darius, intending to kill him. Say what you will, it was a fine plan. It was a fine plan because it mostly worked.