The more the historian is removed from the facts, the more he imposes a pattern on their disorder: contemporaries would soon describe a battle

* Major General J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great (1958) p. 178. 236 rich in about-turns and flanking manoeuvres,

and within twenty years their details had been muddled and elaborated by a literary historian. By a Roman, four hundred years later, these various narratives were clumsily intertwined and now, two thousand years afterwards, men draw maps to reconcile differences which ought to be left to conflict. To participants, a battle is neither tidy nor explicable; the earliest accounts of Gaugamela tell more of the mood of Alexander's court after victory than of events on the field itself. Romance and flattery singled out what suited them; though one coherent document, the Persians' order of battle, was captured among the spoils, even this cannot be believed unreservedly. It may only have been one copy among many, never enacted in practice.

Among the dust and disorder, one crucial movement is agreed, all the more credible for being a habit. On sounding the final advance, a mile, perhaps, from the enemy line which comfortably overlapped him, Alexander advanced obliquely, as his men had long learnt from Philip, thrusting his Companions forward on the right, holding Parmenion and the Greeks behind on the left. But when he came closer, he began to lead the whole line briskly to the right, a sideways movement which was made possible by the wedged shape of his units. Parmenion and the left were now exposed to a still more serious encirclement, but if Alexander could ride out beyond the Persian left, he would have saved his own attacking cavalry wing from being outflanked; to cover him, the Persians would probably shift to the left, and in their hurried surprise a gap might open in their front, which was not neatly ordered in wedge-shaped triangles. On the far right, to which he now headed, the ground was rough and unsuited to scythed chariots, and it was well away from the stakes and snares which had been laid against a conventional head-on charge. The line of advance was a sound one, but it was partly defeated by the Persians' swift adjustments.

Darius, too, could move horsemen quickly to the left, and although this was to cost him control of the battle, it was not long before his furthest cavalry were riding parallel to the units on Alexander's right, outpacing them and once more regaining the outside position. By this mad gallop, Alexander's spurt to the right was halted before he reached the rough ground, and at once, two thousand or so heavy armed Scythian and Bactrian horsemen began their expected charge to outflank and encircle. They had not prepared for an intelligent retort by the Macedonians' mobile flank guards. First, the seven hundred or so leading mercenary cavalry provoked them into a direct attack which diverted them from the rear by the promise of an easy victory; then, when they were engaged beyond recall, the rest of the flank-guards were loosed to repulse them, first, the mounted Paeonians, then the several thousand veteran mercenaries concealed in between. 'If each unit of cavalry were to contain infantrymen,' Xenophon had written in a pamphlet on cavalry command, 'and if these were to be hidden behind the horsemen, then by suddenly appearing and coming to blows I think they would work for victory all the more.' The manoeuvre had been used by the Theban generals whom Philip had often copied; Alexander, who had also read his Xenophon, felt likewise, and the Scyths, entangled among what had seemed a simple enemy, were in turn outnumbered and forced to retreat.

As the Scyths recoiled on the extreme flank, the rest of the Persian left poured out to back them up; on the inner wings and centre, the scythed chariots hurtled forwards while the going was still smooth. Again in the manner of Xenophon, they had been anticipated. In front of the Companion cavalry, some two thousand Agrianians and javelin throwers had been placed to shoot them down at long range; their volley was accurate, and such charioteers as continued soon found themselves being hauled off their platforms by the bravest units in Alexander's army, while their horses were hacked with long knives. Those who survived this double assault were received by the Companions behind: ranks had been parted wide, and the chariots bolted harmlessly through into the baggage camp in the rear, where they were given a final mauling by the grooms and royal Squires. To be effective, a chariot must charge in a straight line without interruption: Alexander knew this; first he interrupted them and then, as Xenophon had suggested and he had practised against Thracian wagons four years earlier, he cleared an open path down which their scythed wheels would whirl to no purpose. According to the Macedonian officers, the chariots 'caused no casualties'; others, with a taste for drama, said that 'many arms were cut in half, shields and all; not a few necks were sliced through, as heads fell to the ground with their eyes still open and the expression of the face preserved'. On the centre and the far left, where the greater part of the chariots charged with unknown effect, this may have been true. However, many shins were grazed, the dust must surely have been stirred and the battle must have begun to be obscured.

Round Alexander the decisive manoeuvre was remembered and recorded. 'The whole art of war', wrote Napoleon, 'consists in a well-reasoned and circumspect defensive followed by a rapid and audacious attack'; Scyths and chariots had been circumspectly countered, and whatever was happening on the extreme left, which nobody described clearly, the mass attack on the right was being valiantly held by an outnumbered flank-guard, so that speed and audacity could begin to come into play. The hectic movements of the Persian left, first riding to one side to match

Alexander, then racing forwards to outflank him, had opened a gap where the left wing met the left centre; this, the site of Darius's own chariot, invited penetration. 'The second principle of strategy', wrote Clausewitz, master of its theory, 'is to concentrate force at the point where the decisive blows are to be struck, for success at this point will compensate for all defeats at secondary points.' Anticipating both Clausewitz and Napoleon, Alexander formed the Companion cavalry into their customary wedge and showed the nearest foot brigades the way to an offensive against a Persian centre, exposed, disordered and not too heavily his superior in immediate numbers. Like a skilled wing forward on the football field, his first moves had drawn the defence far off to the right; now, he halted, changed direction and plunged back into the centre, heading for the goal of the Great King himself and neatly avoiding the stationary elephants.

The Companions charged, came to rest among spearmen and then shoved and hustled; the Shield Bearers followed up with the three right-hand brigades of the Foot Companions, who marched at the double, 'thick and bristling with sarissas', and raising their cry of alalalalai.In fine Homeric style, Alexander is said to have thrown a spear at Darius, missed, and killed the charioteer beside him; certainly, Immortals and Royal Relations were much discomforted by this piercing attack, and as corpse piled upon corpse, Darius reversed his chariot and slipped south-cast through the covering dust-cloud to the safety of the Royal Road. Some 3,000 Companions and 8,000 infantry had indeed turned the battle by concentrating at a point of weakness. But secondary positions were still in danger, and the main prize, Darius, would not be easily detected or overtaken.

As history centres on Alexander, who is even said to have 'meant to settle the whole issue', all million men of it, 'by his own heroics', events elsewhere in the line are left more or less unexplained. On the right, as Darius fled, a massive force of Iranian cavalry had begun to charge down a flank-guard whom they vastly outnumbered, and yet the entry of the 600 or so mounted sarissa-bearers into the battle is said to have turned them promptly to flight; on the left, Parmenion can only have been exposed to every possible threat of encirclement by the units under Mazaeus, but the only result was an outflanking charge by some 3,000 enemy horsemen who rashly continued into the baggage-camp behind the lines, where they are said to have tried to free the prisoners and the Persian queen mother. 'Not a word fell from her lips; neither her colour nor her expression changed, as she sat immobile, so that onlookers were uncertain which course she preferred.' Before she could make up her mind her rescuers had vanished from the story, perhaps because they heard of Darius's flight, perhaps because the reserves had returned to harass them.