The author is missing some other things that alexandar's men would not have seen on their journey from greece to india.
[1] crocodiles
[2] tigers
[3] monkeys
[4] venomous snakes
( this is a major problem for moving at night)
[5] mosquitoes
[6] diseases ( with so much life, comes diseases )
He says alexandar would have won the war easily if he had attacked two months earlier. He had no idea about the heat in april and march. His horses don't stand a chance in the punjab heat. They would have lost more easily if they went two months earlier.
Alexander was accustomed to fight in temperate regions and deserts, where horses are very effective. Where as india is either tropical or sub-tropical, where horses don't do very well. What was once his weapon, has become his weakness.
Actually, the author is right. In Punjab, June and July is peak summer. April is quite pleasant comparatively. In the Southern part of India, April and May are horrible (I live there).
There was an unprecedented failure of correlation vs causation and it was based on crocodiles. The whole idea was that the Indian Ocean was a lake and they would circumvent it, reach the top of the Nile and then sail to down to return to the Greek territory. Unfortunately this geographical mistake was based on the assumption that crocodiles (and lotus plants) they saw in India existed only in upper Egypt only so the two regions were somehow connected.
Regarding Alexanders army, most of it was disbanded after he took the 4 main persian cities and then it was mostly local former persian empire subjects and officers (heteroi - εταιροι) with Macedonian Generals. They probably had a fair knowledge of the situation. The Persians said that they had already occupied some part of Indian territory but there are no Archeological evidence of sustained Persian presence after the Khyber Pass.
[1] crocodiles [2] tigers [3] monkeys [4] venomous snakes ( this is a major problem for moving at night) [5] mosquitoes [6] diseases ( with so much life, comes diseases )
He says alexandar would have won the war easily if he had attacked two months earlier. He had no idea about the heat in april and march. His horses don't stand a chance in the punjab heat. They would have lost more easily if they went two months earlier.
Alexander was accustomed to fight in temperate regions and deserts, where horses are very effective. Where as india is either tropical or sub-tropical, where horses don't do very well. What was once his weapon, has become his weakness.