The Teacher Takes Command

Drona took command of the Kaurava army on the eleventh morning, and the war changed character with the man. Bhishma had been an immovable wall; Drona was a tactician, and he fought to a purpose. He went to Duryodhana and asked what victory he wanted, and Duryodhana wanted the war’s whole knot cut in one stroke: capture Yudhishthira alive. Take the just king prisoner, and the Pandavas could be brought to terms without destroying them — or, more honestly, the dice game could be replayed and the exile imposed again, the old method tried once more.

It was a sound plan and it had one flaw, and Drona named it himself: it would not work while Arjuna was on the field, because Arjuna would never let his brother be taken. So the Drona Parva becomes a parva of misdirection — every day the Kaurava command laboured to draw Arjuna to one edge of the battle so that the centre could be broken where he was not.

The teacher leading the army against his own students gave the war its particular grief, the same grief Bhishma’s command had carried, worn differently. Drona fought brilliantly and without joy. He killed Drupada, the old friend turned old enemy whose fire-born son was on the field specifically to kill him — the quarrel from the courtyard of the Adi Parva closing one half of its circle. He drove the Pandava line back day after day. And the Pandavas could not answer him fully, because to half of them he was still the man who had taught their hands to hold a bow, and reverence and war do not share a field comfortably.

For days the design held in stalemate: Drona reaching for Yudhishthira, Arjuna always between them, the Kaurava command unable to spring its trap while the one archer who could spoil it stood guard. So Drona’s side did the thing the whole back half of the epic is made of — they arranged to remove the guard. A body of allied kings, the Samshaptakas, the “sworn ones,” took an oath to fight Arjuna to the death and not stop until he or they were finished, and on the thirteenth day they challenged him out to the far flank of the battle and held him there with a war inside the war, a duel that could not be declined or quickly ended.

With Arjuna pulled to the edge of the field and pinned, Drona formed his army into the Chakravyuha — a spiral battle-array, a maze of soldiers folding inward on itself, that few living men knew how to enter and fewer how to come back out of. The trap was set, the guard was drawn off, and the centre of the Pandava army stood in front of a formation it could not break — except by one boy who had learned, before he was born, how to get in, and had never learned how to get out.