12
The resulting military force was so vast that it stretched farther
than the eye could see.  Provisioning it with food and equipment took
four years and the resources of an entire continent.24   Whenever the
Persian host marched to a fresh campsite, it literally ate every available
bit of food and drank every potable drop of water in expanses dozens
of square miles in size.  Says Herodotus, "There was not a nation in
Asia" the Persians didn't take with them.  And "save for the great rivers
there was not a stream... [their army] drank from that was not drunk
dry."25    The  folks  they  were  marching  to  conquer  couldn't  come
anywhere near this logistic sophistication.
But the barbarians the Persians considered beneath contempt
won the war.  They were called the Greeks.  In the 490's B.C., years
before the first major Persian-Greek war, when he was informed that
the burning of Sardis had been pulled off by a landing party of
Athenians, the exasperated Persian emperor Darius had been forced to
ask, "Who are the Athenians?"26  Now, presumably, he knew.
One hundred and fifty years later a Greek who even his fellow
Greeks called a barbarian would conquer the entire Persian Empire.
His name was Alexander the Great.
The whole thing was as unlikely as the Vietnamese turning
around and conquering the U.S.  But it happened.  In fact, in history it
happens over and over again. It happened in 1870 when the French
were forced to fight a country which just a few years earlier had been a
disorganized clutter of rag-tag mini-states ruled by comic opera
princes.  The land of Napoleon was rated by every armchair general as
the mightiest military force on the Continent.  But France lost.  Its army
was chopped up like ground round.  Its glorious capital, Paris, faced
the humiliation of a foreign army marching down its streets.27  The
upstart nation that had brought France to its knees was... Germany.
An equally surprising fate occurred to England when it trained
its guns on the superpowers of its day in two world wars.  When the
smoke had cleared, two backward nations of Johnny-come-latelies
ended up dominating the world.  These countries, whose inhabitants
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