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Extra info for Army Badges and Insignia of World War II: Bk. 2 (Colour)

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King Porus rode an elephant, but did not use a howdah. He wore a remarkable suit of armor and did not need the extra protec­ tion o f a tower. Arrian implies that elephants with wooden howdahs were placed at the wings because A lexan der had more than one thousand THE HORROR 35 horse-mounted archers. Porus wanted his archers in the elephant towers to keep the G reek horse archers from threatening the flanks. A lexander spent hours devising a plan while his men rested. If his horses would not confront the elephants, what good would his five thousand cavalry be?

M acedonian scouts saw som ething that worried them, and when A lexander heard their reports, he did som ething com pletely unexpected. He hesitated. THE ELEPHANT MYSTERY 27 N ever a cautious man, the pause of A lexander deserves discussion. T he vast numerical superiority of the Persian army cannot have been his concern, since he had faced a similar situation at Issus and took no pause. 8 However, A lexander and his captains would recognize that traps would harm the Persians more than the Greeks.

Perhaps in disbelief, the high-ranking entourage found an overlook point to see the enemy positions. BEAUTY AND THE BEASTS 17 T he W esterners had thousands of elephants, with a rider on each one! King Stabrobates was astounded and speechless. O ne of the Assyrian defectors was dragged before the king and ordered to tell the king his story. T h e soldier must have said something like this: Two years ago, the queen ordered that every dark-haired ox found in the empire be butchered and the hide sent to Babylon.

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