The trumpets sounded before dawn as Alexander had ordered, but the cooks had alrady been on their feet for some time and had prepared breakfast – steming pots of maza, semi-liquid oatmeal enriched with cheese. The officers instead had a type of flat bread, sheep's cheese and cow's milk.
At the second fanfare the King mounted his horse and took his place at the head of the army, near the eastern gate of the camp, accompanied by his personal guard and by Perdiccas, Craterus and Lysimachus. Behind him came the phalanx of the pezhetairoi, preceded by two units of light cavalry and followed by the Greek heavy infantry and the Thracian, Triballian and Agrianian auxiliaries, all flanked by two lines of heavy cavalry.
The sky was turning red in the east and the air was filling with the chirping of sparrows and the whistles of blackbirds. Flocks of wild doves rose from the nearby woods as the rhythmic noise of the march and the clanking of the weapons woke them from their slumber.
Phyrgia lay there before Alexander, with his rollling landscapes covered with fir trees, small valleys
crossed by clear flowing streams along which greu rows of silver poplars and shimmering willows. The flocks and the herds came out to pasture, guided by their sheperds and watched over by the dogs; life seemed to be proceeding peacefully along its daily path as if the threatening sound of Alexander's army on the move might just blend in perfectly with the bleating of the sheep and the lowing of the cattle.
To the right and the left, in the valleys parallel to the army's forward movement, groups of scouts, without insignia, camouflaged, also mover forward. Their job was to keep persian spies as far away as possible. But this was in fact a pointless precaution because any one of the sheperds or peasants might have been an enemy spy.
At the rear of the column, escorted by half a dozen Thessalian horses, came Callistenes, together with Philotas and a mule with two panniers full of papyrus scrolls.
Every now and then, when they stopped, the historian pulled out a stool, took a wooden board and a scroll from the panniers, and sat down to write under the curious gaze of the soldiers.
News had soon got round that the official chronicler of the expedition was to be this bony young man with the knowing air, and everyone hoped to be immortalized in his words at some stage. On the other hand no one was bothered about the very ordinary stories of daily life recorded by Eumenes and the other officers who had the job of keeping a tallt of the various stage of the expedition.
They stopped to eat around midday and then later, very close to the Granicus by that time, they stopped once more on direct orders from Alexander below a range of low hills, to wait for darkness to fall.
From the book: The sands of Ammon. By Valerio Massino Manfredi. Translated by Iain Halliday
