O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [81]
“Darius debarked and set up a perimeter, then uploaded and assembled his forces, pitched tents. He planned a march to open ground, where he would engage the enemy with his cavalry of longbowmen and make mud of the Greeks. Fact was, no one could stand against his horsemen on open ground.
“It was a mistake from the beginning,” Zach concluded.
“How so?”
“Darius’s leisurely unloading of his army gave the Greeks under Miltiades time to organize a defense, round up allied militia, set up ambushes in the passes, lay trees down across the mountain roads, and get a runner down to Sparta for help.”
“Would the Spartan forces arrive in time?” Ben asked.
“No. The Spartans were involved in a pagan ceremony and would not move their troops until after a full moon passed. However, the Athenians maneuvered the oncoming Persian army away from open ground, so that Darius was flanked on one side by the sea, had a swamp at his back, and was stuck with one of his flanks in the foothills of Mount Ethos. It was not the maneuvering ground Persia wanted.”
“Having dictated the battle site, Miltiades used his smaller numbers to outfox the enemy.”
“Normally,” Zach went on, “the center of an Athenian line was held by a phalanx of long spearmen, ten deep. Miltiades thinned the center out to four deep and gave it fallback positions and put his best forces on the flanks.
“Conversely, Darius put his best troops, the ‘Immortals’ and other elites, in the center, and the Persian flanks were turned over to conscripts from around the empire.
“. . . the Persians caused the Greek phalanx in the center to retreat to secondary defensive positions, as the Greeks had planned.
“. . . Athens stood off a weak attack on her flanks, wheeled and executed a double envelopment of the Persians, an absolutely perfect pincer movement, for the first time in history.
“. . . the Persians were squeezed inside of a circle with no maneuvering room and effectively unable to use their longbowmen. The Greeks were winging spears, taking target practice. Their archers’ strength nullified and in jammed disarray, the Persians fled into the swamp and back to their boats. Darius lost seven to nine thousand men, and Miltiades fewer than two hundred.”
Ben Boone was very impressed. “If Persia had won, we would be looking over Xerxes Bay right now instead of Narragansett, speaking Farsi instead of English, and going to church in a Zoroaster temple. What happened, Zach? The Persian bowman was the finest in the world. He was well supplied. The Spartans were out of the action. Why did he fail? What have we learned from Marathon? After all, it was the might of an empire thrown at a weaker force.”
Zach needed time to consult with himself.
“The makeup of the Persian force and their battle mentality were unsuited for the occasion. They’d usually burst in with the best cavalry archers in the world, then set siege to their goal. It had worked everywhere else. The Persians were hill and mountain men who never developed chariot forces, but there are two main reasons I can see.”
“That’s interesting.”
“This may be conjecture, but Darius had to conquer Athens because the place was a hotbed of ideas that went against the very nature of royalty. Athens had the idea that kings or royal personages were not demigods on earth with divine rights but mere mortals. Athens, as a democracy, had made man flourish in thought, art, literature, in a manner not believed possible. It proved the idea that an imperial force could not defeat free men.”
Ben wondered why he had never come to that conclusion, even though his own life was an amalgamation of free thought. Lord, he’d have to give that one some scrutiny.
“That’s very esoteric, Zachary. How about a bread-and-butter military conclusion?”
“The nature of amphibious warfare is to attack, take your objective, and hold it till reinforced. Darius was not offensive-minded enough. He chose to make a soft landing, picking a place away from the