contact | review quotes | excerpt

Buy the book: Hardcover | Paperback | eBook

CLICK HERE for an article by Mr. Pressfield -- "Alexander the Great in Iraq" -- that appeared on military.com in May. The article compares the U.S.'s challenges and responses in contemporary Iraq with Alexander's actions in the same place during the campaign of 331 B.C.

or CLICK HERE for an interview with Mr. Pressfield about this book.



Contact Steve with questions or comments about The Virtues of War
Message:


Your e-mail address:

To respond we need your entire email address. For our readers using AOL, we need your entire email address which is your screen name with @aol.com after it. So if your screen name is Bookreporter, you need to enter Bookreporter@aol.com as your email address above.



NOTE: Mr. Pressfield reads all e-mails and tries to respond personally to as many as he can. He hopes his correspondents will understand, however, if time-constraints of work, travel, research, and family prevent him from answering every one.


Simply superb. [Pressfield's] best book to date, even eclipsing his best-selling Gates of Fire.

Its expert pace, its vivid detail, its bone-crunching action, and its occasional piercing insights of sad eloquence make it an absolutely gripping read.
-The Seattle Times


Fascinating ... a gut-clenching battle story [brought] to bloody, dusty, exhausting and frightening life. The great battles are described in such painstaking detail that the reader can almost feel the fear of man and horse, the grit of dust and the exhausted relief when the outcome is clear. As Alexander charges across the pages of new books, TV screens and movie theaters, his incarnation in The Virtues of War may be among the most memorable.
-USA Today


Splendid … Acclaimed historical novelist Pressfield turns his attention to the ever-fascinating life of Alexander the Great. The rapidly paced first-person narrative is distinguished by Alexander's own matter-of-fact voice. The mighty warrior and king candidly relates his amazing exploits in spellbinding detail. The inevitable gore and glory of the many battle scenes ring especially true as one of the greatest military tacticians in recorded history chronicles both his martial successes and failures. Being treated to a firsthand look inside Alexander's mind, the reader is quickly made aware of the multiple contradictions, ambitions, and passions that contributed to the complex sum of the entire man. This splendid fictional biography is calculated to appeal to antiquarians, Grecophiles, and fans of a darn good read.
-Booklist


… sure to be a hit … Pressfield's exceptionally vivid prose evokes the period, and his play-by-play descriptions of the weapons, formations, strategies, and individual bouts should please the most meticulous military history buff.
- Library Journal


Fair warning to all readers of The Virtues of War: This book is so powerfully written and so epic in scope that those who turn the first page will quickly find they are eyewitnesses to history, as it happens.
-Leatherneck, "The Magazine of the Marines"


Esteemed historical novelist Steven Pressfield crawls inside the brave heart of Alexander the Great in this chronicle of the king's bloody and extraordinary accomplishments and boundless ambition … Alexander's voice swoops from high-minded rhetoric to earthy vernacular as he regales [his listener] with bloody battle scenes and stories of horror and triumph. For devotees of Alexandrite military history-and there are many-this is a sympathetic … portrait of a man who knew no doubt: "Fame imperishable and glory that will never die: that is what we march for!"
-Publishers Weekly


Pressfield writes the narrative of Virtues of War in the first person through Alexander himself. The effect is that you are not just reading the diary of Alexander but are actually inside his mind, watching him think and act.

Pressfield takes his readers beyond Alexander's brilliance and shows them his flaws.

Virtues of War works as military fiction. Its account of Alexander--part real, part imagined by the author--is, in effect, an imaginative tutorial for the serving officer in battlefield leadership. Marines should look to Virtues of War as they would The Red Badge of Courage or Fields of Fire--a good story of valor, fear, camaraderie, and courage
-Marine Corps Gazette


An exhilarating chronicle … elevated into a study of leadership.

A lesser writer would have turned the subject matter into a one-dimensional adventure story filled with the hack and slash of pulp literature. Instead, Pressfield has crafted an engaging character study that is relevant to us today. A Hollywood treatment of Alexander the Great will be in theatres soon but it is unlikely that it will meet the standard that Pressfield has set.
-Enter Stage Right


I have hated historical novels. Loathed them.

I have since changed my mind

Virtues of War is at least as good as Gates of Fire. Indeed, it may even be better. I won't know until I've re-read it (which I rather intend to do, just as soon as I get done writing this review).

… a work of art; a beautifully written, delicately and expertly crafted, perfectly structured testament to the ability of an author to imagine a subject, and to share it with his readers. . Suffice it to say, for the first time in something like four years, I have read a novel (other than Gates of Fire) that actually moved me in the reading. The best novels stay with you in your dreams and in your waking moments when you finish. I have dreamed of Virtues every night since I picked it up.
-T. Crown's Musings


A page-turner … Top notch historical fiction.

If you want to understand [Maneuver Warfare] … read the standards: Bill Lind's Maneuver Warfare Handbook, John Boyd's Patterns of Conflict, Marine Corps Doctrine Pub 1, Warfighting, and then pick up The Virtues of War to experience how it was practiced by one of its earliest and greatest masters.
-Defense and the National Interest



EXCERPT

The following is the first chapter of "Virtues of War." The heading preceding it is "Book One The Will to Fight."

1. A SOLDIER

I have always been a soldier. I have known no other life. The calling of arms, I have followed from boyhood. I have never sought another.

I have known lovers, sired offspring, competed in games and committed outrages when drunk. I have vanquished empires, yoked continents, been crowned as an immortal before gods and men. But always I have been a soldier.

From the time I was a boy I fled my tutor to seek the company of the men in the barracks. The drill field and the stable, the smell of leather and sweat; these are congenial to me. The scrape of the whetstone on iron is to me what music is to poets. It has always been this way. I can remember no time when it was otherwise.

One such as myself must have learned much, a fellow might think, from campaign and experience. Yet I may state in candor: all that I know, I knew at thirteen and, truth to tell, at ten and younger. Nothing has come to me as a grown commander that I did not apprehend as a child.

As a boy I instinctively understood the ground, the march, the occasion, and the elements. I comprehended the crossing of rivers and the exploitation of terrain; how many units of what composition may traverse such-and-such a distance, how swiftly, bearing how much kit, arriving in what condition to fight. The drawing up of troops came as second nature to me; I simply looked; all showed itself clear. My father was the greatest general of his day, perhaps the greatest ever. Yet when I was ten I informed him that I would excel him. By twenty-three I had done so.

As a lad I was jealous of my father, fearing he would achieve glory on such a scale as would leave none for me. I have never truly feared anything, save that mischance that would prevent me from fulfilling my destiny.

The army it has been my privilege to lead has been invincible across Europe and Asia. It has united the states of Greece and the islands of the Aegean; liberated from the Persian yoke the Greek cities of Ionia and Aeolia. It has brought into subjection Armenia, Cappadocia, both Lesser and Greater Phrygia, Paphlagonia, Caria, Lydia, Pisidia, Lycia, Pamphylia, both Hollow and Mesopotamian Syria, and Cilicia. The great strongholds of Phoenicia--Byblus, Tyre, Sidon (and the Philistine city of Gaza)--have fallen before it. It has vanquished the central empire of Persia--Egypt and nearer Arabia, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Media, Susiana, the rugged land of Persia herself--and the eastern provinces of Hyrcania, Areia, Parthia, Bactria, Tapuria, Drangiana, Arachosia, and Sogdiana. It has crossed the Hindu Kush into India. It has never been beaten.

This force has been insuperable not for its numbers, for in every campaign it has entered the field outmounted and outmanned; nor for the brilliance of its generalship or tactics, though these have not been inconsiderable; nor for the proficiency of its supply train and logistical corps, without which no force in the field can survive, let alone prevail. Rather this army has succeeded because of qualities of warriorship in its individual soldiers, specifically that property expressed by the Greek word dynamis, the will to fight. No general of this or any age has been so favored by fortune as I, to lead such men, possessed of such warlike spirit, imbued with such resources of self-enterprise, committed so to their commanders and to their call.

Yet now what I have feared most has come to pass. The men themselves have grown weary of conquest. They draw up on the bank of this river of India, and they fail of passion to cross it. They have come too far, they believe. It is enough. They want to go home.

For the first time since I acceded to command, I have found it necessary to constitute a unit of the army as Atactoi--Malcontents--and to segregate them from the central divisions of the corps. Nor are these fellows renegades or habitual delinquents, but crack troops, decorated veterans, many trained under my father and his great general Parmenio, who have become so disaffected, from actions or words taken or omitted by me, that I can station them in the battle line only between units of unimpeachable loyalty, lest they prove false in the fatal hour. This day I have been compelled to execute five of their officers, homegrown Macedonians all, whose families are dear to me, for failure to promptly carry out an order. I hate this, not only for the barbarity of the measure, but for the deficiency of imagination it signalizes in me. Must I lead now by terror and compulsion? Is this the state to which my genius has been reduced?

When I was sixteen and rode for the first time at the head of my own corps of cavalry, I was so overcome that I could not stay myself from weeping. My adjutant grew alarmed and begged to know what discomfited me. But the horsemen in their squadrons understood. I was moved by the sight of them in such brilliant order, by their scars and their silence, the weathered creasing of their faces. When the men saw my state, they returned my devotion, for they knew I would burst my heart for them. In strategy and tactics, even in valor, other commanders may be my equal. But in this none surpasses me: the measure of my love for my comrades. I love even those who call themselves my enemies. Alone meanness and malice I despise. But the foe who stands with gallantry, him I draw to my breast, dear as a brother.

Those who do not understand war believe it contention between armies, friend against foe. No. Rather friend and foe duel as one against an unseen antagonist, whose name is Fear, and seek, even entwined in death, to mount to that promontory whose ensign is honor.

What drives the soldier is cardia, heart, and dynamis, the will to fight. Nothing else matters in war. Not weapons or tactics, philosophy or patriotism, not fear of the gods themselves. Only this love of glory, which is the seminal imperative of mortal blood, as ineradicable within man as in a wolf or a lion, and without which we are nothing.

When my father took Athens's surrender in my eighteenth year, he sent me, with his senior general Antipater, to address the Athenian Assembly. I stood upon the Hill of the Pnyx, with the Acropolis and the splendor of Athens before me, and my heart broke for that proud people, whose hour of greatness had so clearly come and gone. It was our time now, Macedon's time. That was little over ten years ago. Has my nation's glory failed so fast? Has mine?

When I was small a sergeant named Telamon befriended me. He was the first to set me, out of sight of my tutor, on the back of a full-grown horse. That sergeant is a general today; I have made him rich beyond emperors. Yet even he will not follow me across this river.


Excerpt

[More and different excerpts will be posted between now (January '04) and publication date in the fall. But this one will be, I hope, a representative start, that will make sense on its own, even read out of context.

It comes from Chapter 20, called "Maxims of War," about halfway through the book. Alexander's army is in India. A crisis of command -- troops becoming disaffected and disgruntled -- has compelled Alexander to look within himself, seeking a remedy. He speaks in this chapter, as in the whole book, to one of his Royal Pages, named Itanes, who is his bride Roxanne's younger brother. [There was an actual historical Itanes, who was indeed Roxanne's brother and did serve with Alexander.] Throughout the book Alexander has been employing Itanes as a sort of sounding board, someone he can unburden himself to. But in the progressing story, the youth (he's eighteen) will soon be given his first command and will lead men in battle. In this chapter Alexander addresses him with this in mind:]

... It has been your privilege, these months since Afghanistan, to attend upon commanders of such genius as warfare has seldom seen. The officers whose meat you carve and wine you pour--Hephaestion and Craterus, Perdiccas, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Coenus, Meleager, Lysimachus, not to say Parmenio, Philotas, and Nicanor, Antigonus One-Eye and Antipater, whom you have not had the fortune of knowing--each stands in his own right with the great captains of history. Now I require of you the same obedience I demand of them. You must incorporate the conventions and principles by which this army fights. Why? Because once battle is joined, I shall be where I can control nothing beyond the division immediately under my hand, and, in the inevitable chaos, will barely be able to direct even that. You must command on your own, my young lieutenant, but how you do so cannot be random or idiosyncratic; it must follow my thought and my will. That is why we talk here nightlong, my generals and I, and why you and the other Pages attend and listen. That is why we rehearse fundamentals over and over, until they become second nature to us all.

I have asked Eumenes, my Counsel at War, to make correspondence of mine available to you. Study these letters as if they were lessons in school, but bear this always in mind: the pupil may differ with his tutor, the cadet never. What I set in your hands this night is law. Follow it and no force can stand against you. Defy it and I will not need to settle with you, for the foe will already have done so.

ON PHILOSOPHY OF WAR

To Ptolemy, at Ephesus:
Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend makes them timorous. If I learn that an officer of mine has assumed a defensive posture in the field, that officer will never hold command under me again.
To Ptolemy, in Egypt:
When deliberating, think in campaigns and not battles; in wars and not campaigns; in ultimate conquest and not wars.
To Perdiccas, from Tyre:
Seek the decisive battle. What good does it do us to win ten scraps of no consequence, if we lose the one that counts? I want to fight battles that decide the fate of empires.
To Seleucus, in Egypt:
It is as important to win morally as to win militarily. By which I mean our victories must break the foe's heart and tear from him all hope of contesting us again. I do not wish to fight war upon war, but by war to produce such a peace as will admit of no insurrection.
ON STRATEGY AND CAMPAIGN

To Coenus, in Palestine:
The object of campaign is to bring about a battle that will prove decisive. We feint, we maneuver, we provoke to one end: the compel the foe to face us in the field.

What I want is a battle, one great pitched clash in which Darius comes out to us in the flower of his might. Remember, our object is to break the will to resist, not only of the king's soldiers, but of his peoples.

The people of the empire are the real audience of these events. They must be made to believe by the scale and decisiveness of our triumphs that no force on earth, however numerous or well-generaled, can prevail against us.
To Perdiccas, at Gaza:
The object of pursuit after victory is not only to prevent the enemy from reforming in the instance (this goes without saying), but to burn such fear into his vitals that he will never think of reforming again. Therefore pursue by all means and don't relent until hell or darkness compel you. The foe who has been a fugitive once will never be the same fighter again.

I would rather lose five hundred horses in a pursuit, if it prevents the enemy from reforming, than to spare those horses only to lose them--and five hundred more--in a second fight.
To Seleucus in Syria:
As commanders, we must save our supreme ruthlessness for ourselves. Before we make any move in the face of the enemy, we must ask ourselves, free of vanity and self-deception, how the foe will counter. Unearth every stroke and have an answer for it. Even when you think you have thought of everything, there will be more work to do. Be merciless with yourself, for every careless stroke is paid for in our own blood and the blood of our countrymen.
ON GENEROSITY

To Parmenio, after Issus:
Cyrus the Great sought to detach from his enemy disaffected elements of the latter's forces, or others serving under compulsion. To this end he showed the Armenians and Hyrcanians honor and spared no measures to make their condition happier under his rule than under the Assyrian's. In Cyrus' view the purpose of victory was to prove more generous in gifts than the enemy. He felt it the greatest shame to lack the means to requite the generosity of others; he always wished to give more than he received, and he amassed treasure with the understanding that he held it in store, not for himself, but for his friends to call upon in need.
To Hephaestion, also after Issus:
Make generosity our first option. If an enemy shows the least sign of accommodation, match him twice over.

Let us conduct ourselves in such a fashion that all nations wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.
ON TACTICS, BATTLES, AND SOLDIERS
No advantage in war is greater than speed. To appear suddenly in strength where the enemy least expects you overawes him and throws him into consternation.

Great numbers are not necessary. The optimal size of a fighting corps is that number which can march from one camp to another and arrive in one day. Any more is superfluous and only slows you down.

All tactics in conventional warfare seek to produce this single result: a breakthrough in the enemy line. This is as true of naval warfare as it is of war on land.

A static defensive line is always vulnerable. Once penetrated in force at any point, every other post on the line becomes moot. Its men cannot bring their arms to bear and in fact can do nothing except wait in impotence to be overrun by their own comrades fleeing in panic as our penetrating force rolls them up from the flank.

Be conservative until the crucial moment. Then strike with all the violence you possess.

Remember: we need win only at one point on the field, so long as that point is decisive.

Every battle is constituted of a number of sub-battles of differing degrees of consequence. I don't care if we lose every sub-battle, so long as we win the one that counts.

We fight with a holding wing and a striking wing. The purpose of the former is to paralyze in place, by its advance and its posture of threat, the enemy wing opposed to it. The purpose of the latter is to strike and penetrate.

We concentrate our force and hurl it with utmost violence upon one point in the enemy line.

I want to feel as if I hold a lightning bolt. By which I mean that blow, poised beneath my command, which when hurled against the enemy will break his line. As the boxer waits with patience for the moment to throw his knockout punch, the general holds his decisive strike poised, careful not to loose it too early or too late.

Don't punch, counterpunch. The purpose of an initial evolution--a feint or draw--is to provoke the enemy into committing himself prematurely. Once he moves, we counter-move.

We seek to create a breach in the enemy's line, into which cavalry can charge.

The line soldier need remember only two things: keep in ranks and never abandon his colors.

An officer must lead from the front. How can we ask our soldiers to risk death, if we ourselves shrink from hazard?

War is academic only on the mapboard. In the field it is all emotion.

Leverage of position means the occupation of that site which compels the enemy to move. When we face an enemy marshaled in a defensive posture, our first thought must be: what post can we seize that will make him withdraw?

The officer's charge is to control the emotion of the men under his command, neither letting them yield to fear, which will render them cowards, nor to give themselves over to rage, which will make them brutes.

Entering any territory, capture the winestocks and breweries first. An army without spirits is prey to disgruntlement and insurrection.

Use forced marches to cross waterless territory. This minimizes suffering for the men and animals. For a march of two days I have found it an excellent method to rest till nightfall before setting out, march all night, rest through the heat of the next day, then march again all night. By this scheme we compress two days' marching into a day and a half, and, if we find ourselves still shy of our goal with the second day's sun, it is easier for the men and horses to push on in daylight, knowing water and rest are near.
ON CAVALRY
The strength of cavalry is speed and shock. A static line of cavalry is no cavalry at all.

A horse must be a bit mad to be a good cavalry mount, and its rider must be completely so.

Cohesion of ranks, paramount with infantry, is even more crucial with cavalry. An enemy on foot may stand his ground against scattered horses of any number but never against squadrons attacking "boot to boot."

Cavalry need not work execution in the assault. Just break through. We can kill the enemy at leisure once we put him to flight.

It takes five years to train a trooper and ten to train his horse.

Green cavalry is worthless.

What I want in a cavalry mount is "push," or as the riding masters call it, impulsion.

The skills of mounted warfare require constant practice. Even a brief furlough can put a horse and rider "off their stuff," until they regain their sharpness by a return to training.

A cavalryman's horse should be smarter than he is. But the horse must never be allowed to know this.