Alexander then sulked like Achilles in his tent for three days, refusing to admit even his most trusted soldiers, the Companions, hoping the withdrawal of his affections would bring the men around. He must have been stunned when this last resort also failed. At last, the pragmatist in him won out. He seized upon bad omens to announce that the army would return home. The men surged around his tent, cheering, weeping and calling down blessings upon him for giving in to their wishes. It was the only defeat Alexander had ever suffered.

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If the men thought they were about to embark on a peaceful march, they were mistaken. Alexander ordered a prompt return to the Hydaspes, where he commanded the building of a large fleet to descend the Indian rivers south to the sea. From its shore, the army would march home. But there was a rub. The army would have to conquer its way to the sea.

The fleet first followed the Hydaspes to the Acesines (Chenab), which in turn fed into the Indus. The larger part of Alexander’s forces paralleled the fleet on either side of the river. At the river junction, he halted the fleet for repairs and concentrated his forces coming by land. They were on the borders of two hostile peoples — the Mallians (Mahlavas) immediately to the east of the Acesines, and the Oxydracae (Ksudrakas) to their east across the Hydraotes (Ravi) River. Both peoples were led not by kings but by Brahmin elites. They had put aside their bitter mutual enmity to ally against the foreigners. Rumors put the strength of the Mallians alone at 90,000 infantry, 10,000 horse and 900 chariots. They were also reputed to be the most warlike of the Indians in those regions.

Alexander was anxious to strike before the two peoples could unite, but he was too late. The joint Mallian-Oxydracae force had gathered behind the shelter of the waterless Desert of Sandar to the east of Alexander’s camps. But Alexander’s luck held, as the two peoples could not agree on a single leader and had broken up. Nevertheless, Alexander’s spies reported that the Mallians were still concentrated in the area. They expected Alexander to continue down the Acesines to where it was joined by the Hydraotes, which sheltered the city of Multan.

Alexander was the last man ever to give an enemy the favor of doing the expected, but he would feed the Mallians’ expectations by sending the fleet and most of the army south. Alexander himself would strike east across the Desert of Sandar to the Hydraotes. The Mallians assumed the desert to be an effective obstacle, but they had not met the Macedonian commander yet.

Five days before he marched, Alexander ordered his trusted general Hephaestion to lead one contingent south along the east bank of the river to intercept any of the enemy who fled before his advance. Three days after Hephaestion departed, a second contingent, commanded by Ptolemy, was to follow him, to gather up any Mallians who doubled back to escape. A third contingent, under Craterus, paralleled the first two on the western bank of the Acesines.

Alexander selected for his own strike force half the Companion Cavalry, commanded by Perdiccas, as well as the Guards, foot archers, the superb Agrianian light infantry, a brigade of the phalanx and all the Scythian Danae mounted archers. It was the typical force Alexander normally chose for separate operations under his own eye — one that combined flexibility, speed and shock. The Scythians were the newest addition to his elite units, having demonstrated their worth at the Hydaspes. As usual, Alexander’s intelligence of the terrain was excellent. The strike force advanced a half day’s march to the Ayek River, where he rested the men and ordered them to fill every possible container with water. At night he struck out across 50 miles of desert. Alexander was one of the few commanders of antiquity to exploit the night. It concealed the movement of his forces and in this case also sheltered them from the sun’s heat.

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