Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [100]
This tremendous army—its horses, elephants, men, and followers, all of them led by the king himself—pursued the forces of Kublai Khan until it was just three days’ journey away, and there the troops pitched their tents to gather strength for the battle to come. The Mongol general Nescradin led an army of just twelve thousand horsemen, whom he exhorted to do their utmost in battle. He tried to convince them that the soldiers serving the king of Mien and Bengal, though overwhelming in number, were “inexperienced in arms and not practiced in war.” Therefore, he said, the Mongol troops “must not fear the multitude of the enemy but trust in their own skill that had already been tried in many places [and] in so many enterprises that their name was feared and dreaded not only by the enemy but all the world.” If they lived up to their valorous reputation, they would win a “certain and undoubted victory.”
According to Marco, Nescradin could be as shrewd as he was eloquent. He took care to station his men on a great plain beside a dense jungle—too dense for the king’s elephants to enter. If by chance the beasts approached, Nescradin planned to send his Mongol troops into the jungle “and shoot arrows at them in safety.”
EUROPEANS habitually dismissed elephants as ineffective and dangerous in battle, even though they were the largest animal on land. But in Asia, tamed elephants had played a role in military conflicts for thousands of years. They carried heavy loads for armies on the march; in battle, they charged at fifteen miles per hour, although they had difficulty coming to a halt. A herd of stampeding elephants could crush enemy forces, who found themselves defenseless before the onslaught. Elephants terrified horses and camels, which turned and ran away. Their size afforded a great advantage to soldiers stationed on top of them; javelin throwers and archers could hurl their weapons from a great height into fleeing enemy forces on the ground. They did have drawbacks—a badly wounded elephant could thrash about wildly and menace its own army—but they were more than a match for the boldest Mongol horsemen.
THE TWO SIDES took each other’s measure for several days, while Mongol military intelligence went to work. Mongol spies learned the length of the arrows used by the enemy, and made sure that their own warriors’ arrows were shorter, so as to be incompatible with the enemy’s in battle. That way, the enemy would be unable to reuse them in bows designed for a longer weapon.
The Mongol arrow combined aerodynamic elegance with surgical precision. It was three feet long and perfectly balanced, with three rows of feathers at the butt for stability in flight. On occasion, the Mongols poisoned the tips, or dipped them in salt or another substance designed to inflict maximum pain. The deadly missile symbolized the Mongols’ mastery of military technology, and, coupled with their horsemanship, foretold success in combat.
With the battle about to begin, both sides approached within a mile on an open plain, where the enemy king “posted his battalions of elephants and all the castles and the men above well armed for the fight.” Behind them were thousands of soldiers on horseback, which he had arranged “very well wisely, like the wise king that he was,…leaving a great space between. And there he began to inspire his men, telling them that they should determine to fight bravely because they were sure of victory, being four to one, and had so many elephants and castles that the enemy would not be able to look at them, having never fought with such animals.”
The instruments signaling the commencement of battle sounded, and the king himself took off on horseback in the direction of the waiting enemy.
The Mongol forces observed the king and his troops approaching,