The March of the Ten Thousand
The Ten Thousand were a band of Greek mercenaries hired by the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger to wage a civil war against his brother, King Artaxerxes II. The soldiers of fortune arrived near modern-day Baghdad in 401 B.C. and fought valiantly at the Battle of Cunaxa, but after Cyrus was killed, they were left stranded on enemy turf. The historian and soldier Xenophon later described their flight to safety in his legendary work “Anabasis.” Rather than turning on one another or surrendering, the gang of toughs elected new leaders and began an epic fighting retreat out of Persia, often doing battle by day and traveling by night. The 1,500-mile journey pitted them against bands of hostile natives and a bitterly cold winter, but after nine months of running they finally sighted the Black Sea to celebratory cries of “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (“The sea! The sea!”) Amazingly, more than three-quarters of the original mercenary army later returned home to Greece.
The Allied evacuation of Gallipoli
In April 1915, British, French, Australian and New Zealand forces launched an amphibious invasion of the Ottoman Empire via the Gallipoli Peninsula. Their landings were met with fierce resistance from Gallipoli’s Turkish defenders, and most of the Allied troops were unable to advance more than a few hundred yards past their beachheads. The campaign soon settled into a trench warfare stalemate. By the time the Allies finally began an evacuation in December 1915, they had suffered over 200,000 casualties.