Ancient Alexander's Indian campaign
The Battle of the Hydaspes, 326 BC
| Battle | the Hydaspes |
|---|---|
| Date | 326 BC, usually placed in May, with the rains come early and the river in flood |
| War | Alexander's Indian campaign |
| Location | The Hydaspes river, now the Jhelum, in the Punjab, in modern Pakistan |
| Belligerents | Macedon and its Greek and Indian allies vs the kingdom of Porus |
| Commanders | Alexander III of Macedon vs King Porus, wounded and captured, and then restored to his own kingdom |
| Strength | Around 40,000 under Alexander; Porus with about 30,000, including chariots and over a hundred war elephants |
| Outcome | Macedonian victory, and Alexander's last major battle. Porus was reinstated as a satrap, and within months the army refused to march further east |
| Macedonian losses | Between 200 and 1,000, depending on the account |
| Indian losses | Arrian gives 20,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry killed; Diodorus gives 12,000 killed and 9,000 taken. Some 80 elephants died |
The Account
By 326 BC Alexander had taken the Persian empire whole and kept marching east, over the mountains and down into the Punjab, in what is now Pakistan. The kings there could submit or fight. Porus fought. He brought his army and more than a hundred war elephants to the far bank of the Hydaspes, the river now called the Jhelum, to stop Alexander at the water. It was May, the rains come early on a river already high with snowmelt off the mountains.
The river was the enemy before Porus was.
The Hydaspes in the monsoon is not a river in the sense you probably picture. It is a moving field of brown water, wider than it was a month before, running fast, with the far bank held by a king who knew exactly where the crossings were. Alexander sat on the near side and could not get over, and Porus sat on the far side and did not have to do anything at all.
So Alexander lied to him for weeks. He marched detachments up and down the bank by day, noisily, in different directions, so that Porus’s scouts spent every night reporting a crossing that never came, until the reports stopped meaning anything. He had grain brought up in quantity to suggest he meant to sit out the whole monsoon. And then, on a night with a storm loud enough to cover the noise of an army moving, he took a picked force upstream to a bend screened by an island and a wooded spur, and crossed in the dark, in the rain, in boats and on stuffed hides.
Porus sent his son to contest the landing. It was not enough, and the son was killed, and by the time the main Indian army arrived the Macedonians were across and formed.
Then the elephants, which were the whole problem and everybody there knew it. Horses will not close with them, which took Alexander’s best arm out of the fight in front, and a phalanx that keeps formation gets trampled while a phalanx that breaks formation gets killed. So they did the only thing that works, and it is horrible: open the ranks to let the animals through, then close and go for the beasts rather than the men. Pikes into the eyes and the trunk. Axes to the legs. Get the driver off the back and an elephant becomes a panicking animal in a crowd, and a panicking animal does not distinguish between the army it belongs to and the one in front of it. By the end of that day a good deal of the damage those hundred beasts did was done to the Indians standing behind them.
Arrian says twenty thousand Indian foot and three thousand horse died. Diodorus says twelve thousand dead and nine thousand taken. Alexander lost somewhere between two hundred and a thousand, and that spread of eight hundred men is the whole of the attention his own side’s dead have ever received.
Porus was wounded and did not leave. He was a very large man on an elephant and he stayed on the field until his army was gone from around him. When he was finally brought in, Alexander asked him how he expected to be treated, and he said: as a king. And Alexander gave him his kingdom back and added to it, which is either magnanimity or the cheapest way to hold the Punjab, and was probably both.
The horse died.
Bucephalus had carried him since he was a boy of twelve or thirteen, when he was the only person who worked out that the animal was shying at its own shadow and turned it to face the sun. Whether the wounds of this battle killed him or whether he was simply thirty years old and had finally finished is disputed, and Plutarch reports both and does not choose. What is not disputed is what Alexander did next: he founded a city on that river and named it Bucephala, and it is probably the modern town of Jhelum, and there are men in this Account with no graves at all whose king built a city for a horse.
I am not going to sneer at that. It is one of the few honest acts in his life.
And then the army stopped. Not here, but because of here. They had just fought the hardest battle of the entire campaign, in the rain, against animals, and when they reached the Hyphasis and heard there were larger kingdoms and more elephants beyond it, they refused. Not a mutiny with violence in it. They simply would not go, and he raged in his tent for days, and it changed nothing, and he turned around.
He never fought another battle like this one. Three years later he was dead in Babylon at thirty-two.
I did not take him here, and men have spent two thousand years explaining that with words like fortune and destiny and divine favour. There is no such thing. There is occasionally a person I decline to interrupt, and it is not mercy, because the reprieve is always temporary and I always know the address.
Something else went in his place. That happens more often than you would think, and almost never to a king.
Twenty thousand of Porus’s men stayed on that ground, and a thousand of Alexander’s, and the horse. Your accounts give me the numbers and one name, and the name is the animal’s. I took the rest of them one at a time, in the rain, and I have them still.
Behind the Song
The Song
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Why Hydaspes
The Ancient record needed a song where she reaches for someone and does not take him. The Agincourt track on the Medieval record does that with an anonymous archer; here she does it to Alexander, and the difference is that with Alexander she can name the address instead.
It is also the right battle to close the record’s fighting on, because it is where Alexander stopped. He won comprehensively, it was the last major battle he fought, and his army refused to go further east within months of it.
The mode is monsoon atmosphere, weather as character, and two structural things follow from it: the chorus is so dense with action that it does the work of a second verse, and the point of view shifts from she in the verses to I in the final bridge, when she steps forward personally.
The song, against the history
Verse 1 is the crossing. “Monsoon rains fall heavy, Hydaspes swells with storm” is tactical rather than atmospheric: the river was in flood, and the flood is why the crossing had to be a deception. “Crossing through the midnight” is the night march upstream under cover of a storm. “Porus guards the shore, elephants stand ready” names the battle’s real subject in the fourth line.
Verse 2 is the fighting and it is technically exact. “Sarissas thrust upward, beasts begin to scream” is the counter-elephant method: the sarissa is the Macedonian pike, and upward is correct, because the answer to elephants was to open ranks, let them through, and work on the animals from below rather than hold a line against them. “Drivers goading them hard” puts the mahouts in, who were the actual target.
The second pre-chorus carries the day’s grimmest attested fact in five words: “trampled by their own kin.” Once the elephants were maddened and their drivers killed, a large share of the Indian casualties were inflicted by their own animals turning back into their own line.
The two choruses differ, which is unusual in this catalog. The first is the battle at full speed. The second opens somewhere else entirely, on “riderless horses adrift in the shallows trailing rein”, and that image is placed deliberately: it is the after, arriving early, and it sets up a song whose ending belongs to a horse.
Verse 3 is where she reaches for Alexander, and where the song makes its one real decision. He leads from the front, as he always did. And then “lances find the stallion, bearing all the brunt, the king falls in the churned mud, death is at his side, his own men close around him, lifted back to ride.”
The horse takes it. Alexander goes down, is surrounded by his own men, and is put back up. All three of those are in the record: Arrian preserves a tradition in which Alexander’s horse is wounded in the first charge against Porus’s line and the king comes off in the press and is saved by his attendants. It is not the version Arrian himself prefers, and it is not invented either. The song rides the attested variant, and the fall does not require Alexander to have been wounded at all, which is what makes it work.
The final bridge states what the verse implied, and it is the best ending on the record:
I put my hand out for the one they’ll name the Great, and the war-horse put himself between us instead.
The sources on the horse. Bucephalus died at or just after the Hydaspes, and the ancient accounts give two causes: wounds taken in this battle, or old age at around thirty. Plutarch reports that most authorities say wounds; Onesicritus, who was on the campaign, said age. The song takes the majority tradition, which is the stronger ground of the two. What is not disputed is the consequence: “in days I’ll write Bucephalus among the kings” is Alexander founding the city of Bucephala on that river in the horse’s name, which is a king’s honour given to an animal, and which is thought to be the modern town of Jhelum.
The third pre-chorus does the arithmetic before the bridge collects it. “Twenty thousand found her, in a single day” is Arrian’s figure for the Indian infantry killed, exactly. “The one she was gathering rose and turned away” is Alexander getting back on. And “India lies open” is the strategic truth of the evening, made bitter by what happened next, since the road east was open and the army would not walk down it.
That is also what licenses the chorus line “every soul that fell in vain,” which in almost any other song would be her passing a verdict she has no standing to pass. Here it is the ledger. Hydaspes was the costliest victory of the campaign, and its cost is part of what broke the army’s willingness at the Hyphasis weeks later. The ground those twenty thousand died for was given up almost immediately, and Porus was handed back the kingdom he had just lost. She is not moralising about waste. She is stating what the gain turned out to be.
And that restoration is the one place in the catalog where she comes close to admiring somebody. She does it in the only currency she has, which is bodies that never reached her: a conqueror who beat a king and then gave him his kingdom back is a conqueror who declined the massacre she had every reason to expect. Alexander’s greatness is measured here in the killing that did not happen, and in the men and the horse who put themselves between him and her.
Then the last two lines, unchanged from every version of this song: “one man slipped my grasp today, Babylon awaits him.” Alexander died in Babylon in June 323 BC, three years later, at thirty-two. The reprieve is acknowledgement rather than mercy, and it is temporary, and “his rider’s debt stands unpaid on the road ahead” is her saying so with the invoice already written.
Lyrics
[Verse 1] Monsoon rains fall heavy, Hydaspes swells with storm, Alexander waits in darkness, Marshaling to form, Crossing through the midnight, Porus guards the shore, Elephants stand ready, Trumpeting for war,
[Pre-Chorus] Thunder rolls the distance, Lightning splits the black, Macedonian columns, Ready for attack, She watches from the shadows, Marking who will fall,
[Chorus] Warriors drive through monsoon darkness chasing breaking rain, Steel is torn asunder, Spears and tusks tear through the line and fill the ground with slain, Glory breaks like thunder, Death moves cold through rising waters claiming all who fall on blood-soaked plain,
[Verse 2] Dawn breaks through the tempest, Phalanx meets the charge, Elephants crash forward, Drivers goading them hard, Sarissas thrust upward, Beasts begin to scream, Blood mixes with the rainfall, Death walks through unseen,
[Pre-Chorus] Cavalry sweeps wider, Closing Porus in, Bodies fill the river, Trampled by their own kin, She moves among the dying, Claiming left and right,
[Chorus] Riderless horses adrift in the shallows trailing rein, Fury splits the heavens, Every distant shore remembers armies breaking, Stormlight crowns the fallen, All the world recalls the river taking every soul that fell in vain, at the Hydaspes
[Verse 3] Alexander pushes forward, Leading from the front, Lances find the stallion, Bearing all the brunt, The king falls in the churned mud, Death is at his side, His own men close around him, Lifted back to ride,
[Pre-Chorus] Twenty thousand found her, In a single day, The one she was gathering, Rose and turned away, India lies open, He escaped her call,
[Final Chorus] Warriors drive through monsoon darkness chasing breaking rain, Steel is torn asunder, Spears and tusks tear through the line and fill the ground with slain, Glory breaks like thunder, Death moves cold through rising waters claiming all who fall on blood-soaked plain, Fury splits the heavens, Every distant shore remembers armies breaking, Stormlight crowns the fallen, All the world recalls the river taking every soul that fell in vain, at the Hydaspes
Warriors drive through monsoon darkness chasing breaking rain, Steel is torn asunder, Spears and tusks tear through the line and fill the ground with slain, Glory breaks like thunder, Death moves cold through rising waters claiming all who fall on blood-soaked plain, Fury splits the heavens, Every distant shore remembers armies breaking, Stormlight crowns the fallen, All the world recalls the river taking every soul that fell in vain, at the Hydaspes
[Final Bridge] I put my hand out for the one they’ll name the Great, and the war-horse put himself between us instead, In days I’ll write Bucephalus among the kings, his rider’s debt stands unpaid on the road ahead, One man slipped my grasp today, Babylon awaits him
Part of Ancient The Ancient Chronicles All battles, in order