HOWZAT

Has any cavalryman ever gone off to mock-battle with such a pedigree? “A rebel on horseback...” Only now do I discover the allusion lurking in those words. In the early 1980s Stone made his name with his first great film, Salvador, which ended with an emotional scene of his left-wing guerrilla heroes galloping on horseback against an array of repressive American tanks. It was too much for some of the critics, but now he had his chance to redress the political balance. He could send an Old Etonian on horseback through the dust clouds in pursuit of a mirage of antiquity’s greatest king.

We embarked on what would become a thrice-weekly quiz game late at night. Hollywood and Oxford University are in different time zones, and so after his lunch Stone would ring me in the evening in the Cotswolds and bombard me with questions, not many of which I could answer.

Did Alexander’s men ever eat melons? What did Aristotle really think about the ancient myths? What did the main god of Babylon look like? Alexander’s Macedonia was Greek, but what would his Greek language sound like to other educated ears further south in Athens? Should his star, Colin Farrell, have blond highlights in his hair? Alexander had a sexual nature, but as the film, correctly, was not going to turn him in to a “gay” from a counter-culture, how should his passionate life be handled? My colleagues told me that for historians, Stone was supposed to be like Satan, perhaps because they had seen his film of Nixon and I had not. Like the poet John Milton, I have to say I quickly became very fond of Satan. Anyway, the claim that Stone has no historical sense is completely untrue.

I was stretched, as he was, by constant consultations which were concerned to do as much justice as possible to the little evidence which we have.

Then out in Morocco, in the heat of mid-September, it was time to begin my cavalry career. I won’t give away too much of the BBC Four documentary that recorded the events on set, but I can reveal that my military trainer was the fabled Captain Dale Dye, best known for teaching the two Natural Born Killers Micky and Mallory in Stone’s notorious film. On set, the Captain wears a T-shirt, stating “Pain is weakness leaving the body”. It is a message guaranteed to terrorise a natural-born shirker from Oxford. But it was I, not he, who got on the horse and led the cavalry. He was photographed only on a camel at a slow walk.

Through clouds of dust, out there in the desert, I solved old scholarly questions: whether Alexander’s cavalrymen had shields (they did not), whether they could lance an unprotected enemy through the chest (I experimented and proved it with the willing Ibrahim) and whether they could pull out a lance from a body after death (they could, if they lanced a man in the shoulder, as I lanced a major star who spoke French).

But what the footage shows is only the beginning of an orgy of charging which later took me to Thailand and pitted me with bare legs against Stone’s elephants. In a dust cloud, horses are as stressed as men; it is also impossible for men ten paces behind a leader to see him when he signals a turn to left or right. The key people are the men immediately in front and on either side. Just like the little band of soldiers in Stone’s own masterpiece, Platoon, set in Vietnam.

I have to say that I would have died for Colin Farrell by the end, a loyalty which was widely shared. In Bangkok, in a darkened hotel room, we sat watching uncut dailies of the final emotional scenes of Stone’s film-to-be; the company were all male and muscular, but I could not stop myself from sobbing in the closing moments. Fortunately, another man could be seen in combat trousers sitting on the floor and doing the same and when the lights came on I saw that it was Farrell, equally transported by the evocation of the great Alexander whom he had had to bring to life.

Since then I have been offered a cavalry part in the proposed film of Hannibal. Naturally, I have refused, in disgust. Once you have charged for Alexander, how could you possibly charge for a one-eyed Carthaginian bandit who wandered for seven years around Italy before going to bed with any Italian woman at all — and then she was a tart?

I am happy to continue in my desert mirage of fantasy, but to return to reality I am forcing myself to re-read The Aeneid in Latin, reflecting that if Alexander had lived we would have been spared its existence.

Charging for Alexander, BBC Four, Tuesday, 8.30pm