Alexander’s Tactics

 Alexander’s Tactics

Eratosthenes, you’d lean and squint:
“No man outruns an elephant’s hint.
This is only praise in battle dress—
A king made wise by scribal excess.”

But watch him now. He sees the line:
The tusked front, the fatal spine,
The gaps where infantry waits to kill—
And says at once, “Not there. Be still.

The center’s death. I take the side.
I’ll make them turn before they ride.”
He counts his horse, he marks their own,
And sees where speed may break the stone.

“Coenus,” he says, “take your band.
Circle wide by the farther hand.
When they are drawn to meet my blow,
Strike from behind and overturn the flow.”

Then still he keeps the foot in place,
Unloosed as yet from battle’s pace.
First come the horse-archers, a thousand bows,
Whose arrows darken where the left wing goes.

They sting, they scatter, they test, they wound;
They make confusion on the ground.
Then Alexander’s Companions ride
Into the shaken, opening side.

Before the Indians can fully form,
The hooves come down like sudden storm.
No tusked front, no center’s snare—
He strikes where strength is thinnest there.

So doubt the cave, Eratosthenes.
Doubt the mountain and old stories.
But a general who knows what not to fight,
Who shuns the center’s waiting night,
Who wounds the flank, then drives it through—
Needs no myth to make it true.

The plain itself became his page,
And tactics wrote the opening stage.

Prose:
Porus had made the center of his army deadly with elephants and supporting infantry. Alexander saw immediately that to charge there head-on would be ruin. So he used his cavalry superiority instead. He threatened the Indian left, sent Coenus wide to work behind the other wing, held his infantry back until disorder began, and first loosed horse-archers to weaken the line. Only then did he launch the Companion cavalry. His plan was not blunt force, but controlled disruption.