The Kurukshetra War Begins
The field of Kurukshetra was vast and old, a sacred land where the earth remembered previous ages. On that plain, the armies of the two sides arranged themselves at dawn, and the scale of it was beyond the calculation of ordinary comprehension. Eighteen armies in all; eleven behind the Kaurava banner, seven behind the Pandavas'. Elephants bore their mahouts like towers of muscle and tusked fury. Chariot wheels groaned under the weight of divine weapons. The conch shells of the commanders rang out across the plain Devadatta, Panchajanya, Paundra, each one an announcement to the cosmos that the age of indecision was over.
The Bhishma Parva records the arrangements of battle formation, the assignments of generals, the chain of command on both sides, with the precision of a chronicle that knows it is describing something that will never come again. Bhishma was named supreme commander of the Kaurava forces for the first ten days. On the Pandava side, Dhrishtadyumna, Draupadi's own brother, born for this purpose commanded. The armies faced each other across the field, and between them lay only the quiet morning and the grass that would soon be red.
Arjuna's Despair
It was in this moment with the two armies arranged and the conches already blown, that Arjuna asked Krishna to drive his chariot between the two forces, so he could see who he would be fighting. Krishna drove to the centre, and Arjuna looked out at the Kaurava army and saw no enemies. He saw his grandfather Bhishma, who had held him as a child and taught him the names of rivers. He saw Drona, who had shaped his hands around the bow, and called him his greatest student. He saw cousins whose childhoods had been spent in the same courtyards, uncles who had presided over the same festivals, men whose faces were the faces of his family.
His bow, Gandiva, slipped from his fingers. His knees gave. He sank onto the floor of the chariot and told Krishna that he could not fight that no kingdom was worth the killing of these men, that victory purchased with the blood of his own people was not victory but ashes. He spoke at length, with the eloquence of a man who has never before allowed himself to speak his deepest fear aloud, and his argument was not without dignity.
But Krishna, sitting at the reins, let him finish. And then he spoke.
