The Science of Formations

On the first morning at Kurukshetra, Yudhishthira looked north at eleven armies drawn up against his seven and found that he was thinking about a stick in the dust.

The stick had belonged to Drona. In the practice yard at Hastinapura, before any of them had killed anything larger than a bird, the teacher used to sit on his heels in the dry ground and draw.

"One chariot," he said, scratching a mark. "One elephant. Three horses. Five men on foot. That is a patti. It is the smallest thing in war that is not a man. Learn it, because everything above it is only this, multiplied."

"Multiplied by what?" Arjuna asked.

"By three, and then by three, and then by three again, all the way up. Three pattis make a senamukha. Three senamukhas a gulma. Three gulmas a gana, three ganas a vahini, three vahinis a pritana, three pritanas a chamu, three chamus an anikini. And ten anikinis," Drona said, and here he stopped drawing, "are one akshauhini."

"How many men is that?" said Yudhishthira, who liked numbers.

"Twenty-one thousand eight hundred and seventy chariots. The same again of elephants. Sixty-five thousand six hundred and ten horsemen. One hundred and nine thousand three hundred and fifty on foot. That is one akshauhini. Kings speak of them the way farmers speak of fields."

The boys had laughed at the size of it, because a number is a small thing while it is being drawn in sand.

It was not small now. Eighteen of them stood on this plain. The grass had been walked off the ground before the fighting even began. Where the Kaurava elephants were massed the earth had a colour Yudhishthira had never seen earth have, and the sound coming off them was not a sound made by anything in particular, only the noise a very great number of living things make by existing in one place.

Somewhere out in that mass, in the third rank of somebody's left wing, stood one patti. One chariot, one elephant, three horses, five men. It was still the smallest unit in war that was not a man, and there were a hundred and ninety-six thousand eight hundred and thirty of them on that field.

"An army in a line," Drona used to say, "is a crowd standing in a row. An army in a vyuha is an animal."

He meant it precisely. A vyuha is an army given a shape, and the shape is always described as a body, because a body was the only thing anyone had ever seen that moved ten thousand parts at once without arguing with itself.

So a formation has a mouth, which is the point where it goes into the enemy, and the mouth is given to the man who can be spent and cannot be swallowed. It has eyes, which are the scouts and the light horse, and eyes are useless if they are brave. It has a neck, and a formation dies at the neck, so the neck is packed with the heaviest chariots in the army. It has two wings and two flanks folded behind them, and joints between the sections, and every joint is a hinge and a weak place at the same time. It has a tail, which nobody wants to stand in until the day the shape has to reverse. And it has a heart, deep and screened, where the commander stands and where the king stands, because when the heart stops the animal is only bodies again.

"Who commands the arms?" Arjuna asked.

"Nobody commands the arms in the moment. There is no time to. Drums command them. Conches, banners, the colour of a flag going up on a chariot the whole left wing can see. You give the beast four things it can be told, you drill it until being told and doing are the same act, and on the day you tell it one of the four."

"And if it is told the wrong one?"

"Then ten thousand men do the wrong thing beautifully, all together, at exactly the same instant," Drona said. "You will see it happen. Everybody sees it once."

At Kurukshetra it was seen daily. Bhishma set his arrays with the palm banner standing at the mouth of them, and for ten mornings the animal he built turned when the old man turned his head.

The shapes had names, and the names were not decoration. A name told a commander what the thing wanted to do.

The Suchi is the needle: a narrow column with all its weight behind one point, built for a single purpose, which is to go through. It is thin at the sides, and it knows it.

The Krauncha is the heron: a long beak, a broad body, two wings held out and back, made to receive an enemy and fold around him while he is occupied with the beak.

The Garuda is the eagle, which is the heron made cruel. Beak, two wings, a tail, and the commander himself standing in the beak, so that the army strikes wherever he is looking.

The Sagara is the ocean, wide and level and apparently shallow, and what walks into it learns the depth afterwards.

The Mandala is the wheel or the circle. It faces every direction at once, and it is what a commander builds when he can be come at from anywhere, or when he intends to be surrounded and would rather choose the ground for it himself.

The Vajra is the thunderbolt: three hard prongs driven forward together, so that an enemy who turns one is taken by the other two.

The Padma is the lotus, ring closed inside ring inside ring, built to keep something at the centre from being reached.

And then there is the Chakravyuha, the turning wheel, which is less a shape than a machine: rings revolving against each other around a door that opens inward and does not open outward, and what it did on the thirteenth day to a boy of sixteen has its own telling elsewhere on this site.

"Teach us that one," Arjuna said in the practice yard.

"I will teach you to enter it," said Drona. "Coming out of it again is a separate lesson, and there are perhaps four men alive who have been given it."

He drew each of them in the dust with the same stick and rubbed each one out with the same bare foot, which was the part of the lesson the boys did not notice at the time.

The other half of the science is the half nobody sings about. For every array there is a counter-array, and a great deal of that war was decided in the grey hour before the fighting, by men squinting at dust.

"Name me a shape," Drona said, "and I will name you its enemy. The needle wants to pierce, so you answer it with a circle, which offers nothing to pierce toward. The circle wants to hold, so you answer it with the thunderbolt, which does not care what holds. The ocean wants to swallow, so you go at it as a wedge and refuse to spread out where it is deep. The crocodile is answered by the hawk. The heron is answered by the half-moon, which is only a heron that has learned what herons do."

"Then whoever chooses second always wins," said Yudhishthira.

"Whoever chooses second always chooses under a shorter sky," Drona said. "On the day, you will not have until noon. You will have from first light on the dust to the moment the conches go, and inside that time somebody must ride out, read the enemy's shape, come back alive, describe it correctly, and be believed by a man who does not want to hear it."

That is exactly how the mornings went. Scouts went out while it was still half dark. A commander stood in his chariot and watched a mass of men a mile away slowly acquire an outline, and knew from where the elephants were thickening what was being built, and turned and gave one word to his marshals, and eighteen thousand chariots moved.

Bhishma made a circle and was answered with a thunderbolt. Bhishma made an ocean and was answered with a wedge that had Bhima in the point of it. Drona built the crocodile and was answered by the hawk; built the eagle and was answered by the half-moon; and once, on the thirteenth morning, built a turning wheel against which no answer had been prepared at all, because the only two men who could unmake it had been drawn away south by a challenge from the Trigartas.

The day was often lost before a single arrow left a bow.

None of this was visible from inside it.

A man on foot in the third rank of a wing did not know that he was in a wing. He knew the back of the man in front of him, the smell of the elephant on his right, the weight of a shield he had been carrying since before dawn, and one drumbeat that meant walk and another that meant stop. Nobody had told him the plan. He was not owed the plan. He was one scale on the wing of the eagle, and the eagle does not consult its scales.

When the wing was ordered to fold, he folded, and the folding was somebody's clever answer to somebody else's clever shape, and for him it meant that the ground in front of him suddenly had Madra spearmen standing on it. When the shape broke, it broke first as a rumour: the drums saying one thing and the men to his left doing another. He had perhaps ten heartbeats to understand that the animal he belonged to had died, and after that he was simply a man alone in a field with strangers running at him.

Seen from above, though, the eighteen days are a conversation. Circle, thunderbolt. Ocean, wedge. Eagle, half-moon. Needle, and a wall of elephants set to receive a needle. Two teachers out of the same school arguing in geometry across a plain, each sentence an answer to the last sentence, morning after morning, and every sentence in that argument paid for in men.

And not one of the shapes survived the war it was built for. The wheel that killed Abhimanyu did not save Jayadratha the following evening. The arrays that held Bhishma's front for ten days ended with Bhishma on the ground. By the eighteenth dusk there was no formation anywhere on that field, no mouth, no wings, no heart, only wreckage lying in the pattern that wreckage makes.

Yudhishthira walked out over it at the end and thought again about a stick in the dust, and about a teacher who was by then also dead.