Alexander : a history of the origin and growth of the art of war from ...

FEELING AGAINST ADVANCE. 579say so much. It was with his satraps, not his generals, thatAlexander had trouble. Whatever orders he issued were carriedout. Marches were doubled, the most difficult mountainsand rivers and deserts were crossed, toil ofthe most grievousundergone, the all but impossible accomplished, but Alexander'slieutenants were always on time as ordered.Perhaps nocaptain ever got from his subordinates such unequivocal obedience.But for all that, the army exercised its rights andwagged its tongue.There had been growing for many months a spirit of unusualrestlessness under Alexander's hungry schemes of territorialacquisition.This sort of dissatisfaction had really beenat the bottom of the several conspiracies of Philotas, thepages, and Callisthenes, but now it had expanded into a differentphase. There was a manifest determination among allconcerned, not to disobey or mutiny orconspire, but to exerttheir free-born right to check the king in his ceaseless forwardmarches by a refusal to be led farther from home.There is nothing to prove that the Macedonian common soldierhad rights anything like those which our own republicanvolunteers possessed as citizens ; but there is a gi-eat dealwhich looks as if the chiefs of the Macedonians and Greekallies had much to say with regard to what they should do orwhere they should be led.These rights, whatever they were,now came to be exerted.The feeling against further advance existed in the wholearmy, even to the warmest friends of Alexander, and the expressionof it had taken the foi-m of many meetings at whichthe matter had been openly discussed.The army, under theMacedonian unwritten law, may be said to have constituted,in its commanding officers, a sort of popular assembly, withundefined powers, to be sure, but none the less wielding somethinglike a right of decision. We have repeatedly seen