As both armies drawn up for battle awaited the dawn, a dust storm arose which wrapped everything in darkness. When the air cleared and each party could see the other, as well as hear the blare of its trumpets, a sort of mutual dread seems to have afflicted them, for the warriors on either side trembled at the sight of the mighty heroes of the opposing hosts.
At this critical juncture in the fate of the world, Arjuna, by the advice of Krishna, offered a special prayer for victory to Durga. The goddess in answer to this invocation appeared in the sky and assured her votary of complete success.
As the virtuous Yudhisthira, his white umbrella borne above his head, moved about marshalling his forces, he was attended by a crowd of Brahmans and Rishis hymning his praises and praying for the destruction of his enemies. Of course the pious king could do no less, even at such a busy and anxious moment, than bestow upon these saintly allies of his what, indeed, they, with their habitual proud condescension, were there to receive,—rich presents of kine, ornaments, clothes and gold.
When the armed millions were finally ranged for immediate hostilities, in all the pomp and glitter of approaching battle, Arjuna desired Krishna to place his chariot in the open space between the two armies. Surveying the embattled hosts from this position, Arjuna appears to have been dismayed at the thought of the unparalleled slaughter of kinsmen, which a struggle between such colossal armies would inevitably lead to; and, in view of this deplorable issue, hesitated to join battle with his foes, doubtful whether any personal consideration whatever could justify an appeal to arms under such circumstances.
Krishna undertook to remove his doubts, and succeeded in doing so, the dialogue between them, known as the “Bhagavatgita,” or divine song, which is introduced into the great epic at this stage of the narrative, forming, from a religious point of view, one of its most important parts.[96]
When Arjuna, convinced of the lawfulness of entering into the contest, had taken up his bow, Gandiva, in readiness for the fray, his followers raised a joyful shout, and the gods with the Gandharvas, the Rishis and the rest, crowded to the spot eager to witness the impending battle.
But there was still another interruption. Yudhisthira, suddenly laying down his arms and divesting himself of his armour, advanced eastward towards the opposing forces. Although filled with astonishment at this proceeding, his dutiful brothers immediately followed him, themselves unarmed and unprotected by armour. What was the mission the king had undertaken? Was he bent on making a final effort to effect a reconciliation, or was he, terror-stricken by the superior numbers of his adversaries, going to offer an unconditional surrender? No, it was neither the one object nor the other which stirred the heart of the virtuous king to this strange performance in presence of the two armies drawn up for deadly strife. He, pious soul, was only going to crave the permission of his elders and preceptors in Dhritarashtra’s army to engage in battle with them; to solicit, with childlike trustfulness, their blessing in the coming contest with themselves; and, if possible, to induce them to tell him how their own destruction might be compassed by him! The leaders he went to propitiate, though resolved to fight to their utmost for the king whose cause they had espoused, were very affable to the pious son of Dharma; they received him with affection and dismissed him with honour. The conduct of the Pandavas on this occasion excited universal admiration, and met with the hearty approval of all, and we learn that, “in consequence of this, the minds and hearts of everyone there were attracted towards them, and the Mlecchas and the Aryas[97] there, who witnessed or heard of that behaviour of the sons of Pandu, all wept with choked voices.”
The battle of Kurukshetra, which closed the golden age of India, lasted for eighteen consecutive days.
During the first ten days Bhisma commanded Dhritarashtra’s forces, while Karna held aloof in sullen indignation. A goodly volume is devoted to the incidents of these ten days, each of which seems to have had its own special heroes, who, under the influence of a sort of divine fury, like that attributed by the Norsemen to their Berserkers, carried everything before them. In picturing the events of these battles the Hindu bards have allowed their imaginations to run riot in a most incomprehensible way. Not only the demigods, but the merely human leaders (very little inferior to the demigods in martial qualities) in both armies, perform the most astonishing feats of arms, and display the most wonderful indifference to wounds. Sometimes a hero will shoot at his adversary arrows enough to envelop him completely and shroud him from view, or to darken the whole sky; but his antagonist, well skilled in the art of self-defence, will, with the greatest composure, stop those myriads of arrows[98] in mid-air with an equal or superior number of shafts from his own bow;[99] or, as Cikhandin did, cut in pieces with his dexterous sword the shower of arrows poured upon him. Sometimes a heavy mace, hurled by a powerful arm with well-directed aim, will whiz through the air towards some leader of men; but as it is hurtling along it will be cut into many fragments by crescent-headed arrows discharged at it with unerring skill, by the hero for whose destruction it was intended. Sometimes standards are brought down by sharp arrows, sometimes the bow is severed in a warrior’s hand by the shaft of an opponent, while horses and elephants, though cased in mail, fall easy victims to the archer’s skill. Occasionally, in pressing emergencies, superhuman weapons are called into requisition, and mantras or spells are employed to give them more destructive force. Nor are the powers of producing strange illusions to terrify or baffle the foe neglected by those who possess them, namely, the Rakshasas in either army.[100] These terrible beings, capable of assuming any shape at will, and able to deceive their foes by strange illusions, would at one time raise up a spectral host of demons to terrify their opponents, and at another time, perhaps, paralyze them by producing before their startled eyes a false picture of their friends and allies lying cruelly slaughtered around them, or in headlong flight before the enemy.
Notwithstanding their inimitable skill in the arts of attack and defence the heroes do not get off unscathed. In a single fight one of them might be pierced with any number of arrows, from one or two to five hundred or a thousand[101] as the case might be, yet, usually, the chiefs seem hardly the worse for the punishment. Indeed the poets love to depict their dauntless favourites bristling with arrows and streaming with blood, when they resemble in beauty blossoming kincukas in spring-time, or “clouds tinged with the rays of the sun.” One warrior with three arrows fixed in his forehead is likened to Mount Meru with its triple summits of gold; another, with a circle of sharp arrows lodged in his ample breast, resembles “the sun with his rays at mid-day.” Odds are of no account when the heroes are once carried away with ungovernable fury, roaring tremendously, and “licking the corners of their mouths like lions in the forest.” Bhima on foot with his club in his hand, is, under such conditions, a match for whole armies, through which he rages, with leonine roars, crushing chariots and horses under his blows and smashing luckless elephants and their riders by thousands, himself bespattered with the blood, fat and marrow of his slaughtered foes; resembling, as the poet tells us, the Destroyer himself, with wide open mouth, as he appears at the end of the yuga. Similarly Arjuna, when attacked simultaneously by forty thousand charioteers and hemmed in by them, kills the entire number of his rash assailants with arrows from Gandiva. When Yudhisthira, ordinarily cold-blooded, blazed up with wrath on the battle-field, “the thought that arose in the minds of all creatures was that this king excited with rage will to-day consume the three worlds.” Bhisma, too, and Drona, and many another hero semi-divine or only mortal, seems, in his turn, quite irresistible, and carries everything before him when excited to mad (Berserk) fury.