How Few Remain (10 page)

“Well, if the war’s not over and done with before you catch up to it, I expect we’ll be able to do that,” Rosecrans said. “You’ll have to move sharp, though, because we ought to lick the Rebs in jig time, or Bob’s your uncle.”

Although Schlieffen knew he was missing some of that—the English spoken in the United States at times seemed only distantly related to what he’d learned back in Germany—the root meaning remained pretty clear. “You believe you will win so quickly and easily, then?” He did his best to keep the surprise he felt out of his voice.

“Don’t you?” Rosecrans made no effort to hide his own amazement. Very few Americans, as far as Schlieffen could see, had even the least skill in disguising their thoughts and feelings: indeed, they took an odd sort of pride in wearing them on their sleeves. When Schlieffen didn’t answer right away, Rosecrans repeated, “Don’t you, sir? The plain fact of the matter is, they’re afraid. It’s plain in everything they do.”

“I am nothing more than an ignorant stranger in your country,” Schlieffen said, a stratagem that had often given him good results. “Would you be so kind as to explain to me why you think this is so?”

Rosecrans swelled with self-importance. “It strikes me as an
obvious fact, Colonel. The government of the United States told Richmond in no uncertain terms that there would be hell to pay if a single Confederate soldier crossed over the Rio Grande. Not a one of ’em has done it. Q.E.D.”

“Is it not possible that the Confederate soldiers have not yet moved only because their own preparations remain incomplete?” Schlieffen asked.

“Possible, but not likely,” Rosecrans said. “They put a large force of regulars into El Paso a couple of weeks ago—that was before we warned ’em we wouldn’t stand for any funny business in Chihuahua and Sonora. And since that day, Colonel, since that day, not a one of the stinking sons of bitches has dared stir his nose out of their barracks. If that doesn’t say they’re afraid of us, I’d like to know what it does say.”

Schlieffen thought he’d already told General Rosecrans what it said. To the American, evidently,
preparations
meant nothing more than moving troops from one place to another. Schlieffen wondered if his own English was at fault again. He didn’t think so. The problem lay in the way Rosecrans—and, presumably, President Blaine—saw the world.

“If you fight the Confederate States, General, will you fight them alone?” Schlieffen tried to put the concept in a new way, since the first one had met no success.

“Of course we’ll fight ’em alone,” Rosecrans exclaimed. “They’re the ones who suck up to foreigners, not us.” That he was speaking with a foreigner did not cross his mind. His voice took on a petulant tone, almost a whine, that Schlieffen had heard before from other U.S. officers: “If England and France hadn’t stabbed us in the back during the War of Secession, we’d’ve licked the Confederates then, and we wouldn’t have to be worrying about this nonsense now.”

“That may be true.” Schlieffen felt something close to despair. Rosecrans was not a stupid man; Schlieffen had seen as much. But it was hard to tell whether he was more naive than ignorant or the other way round. “Could your diplomacy not try to keep Great Britain and France from doing in this war what they did in the last, or even more than they did in the last?”

“That’s not my department,” Rosecrans said flatly. “If they stay out, they stay out. If they come in, I suppose we’ll deal with ’em. Stabbed in the back,” he muttered again.

“You have, I trust, made plans for fighting the Confederate
States by themselves, for fighting them and Great Britain, for fighting them and France, and for fighting them and both Great Britain and France?” Schlieffen said.

Rosecrans gaped at him. After coughing a couple of times, the American general-in-chief said, “We’ll hit the Rebs a couple of hard licks, then we’ll chase ’em, depending on where they try to run. Whatever they try themselves, we’ll beat that back, and … Are you all right, Colonel?”

“Yes, thank you,” Schlieffen answered after a moment. He was briefly ashamed of his own coughing fit—was he an American, to reveal everything that was in his mind? But Rosecrans apparently saw nothing more than that he’d swallowed wrong. As gently as he could, Schlieffen went on, “We have developed in advance more elaborate plans of battle, General. They served us well against the Austrians and later against the French.”

“I did enjoy watching the froggies get their ears pinned back,” Rosecrans agreed. “But, Colonel, you don’t understand.” He spoke with great earnestness: Americans weren’t always right, any more than anyone else was, but they were always sure of themselves. “Can’t just go and plan things here, the way you do on your side of the Atlantic. The land’s too big here, and there aren’t enough people to fill it up. Too much room to maneuver, if you know what I mean, and that’s hell on plans.”

He had a point—no, he had pan of a point. “We face the same difficulty when we think of war with Russia,” Schlieffen said. “There is in Russia even more space than you have here, though I admit Russia has also more men. But this does not keep us from developing plans. If we can force the foe to respond to what our forces do, the game is ours.”

“Maybe,” Rosecrans said. “And maybe you’re smarter than the Russians you’d be fighting, too. The next general who’s smarter than Stonewall Jackson hasn’t come down the pike yet, seems to me.”

“I do not follow this,” Schlieffen said, but then, all at once, he did. His own ancestors must have gone off to fight Napoleon with that same mixture of arrogance and dread. Comparing a backwoods Confederate general to the great Bonaparte, though, struck him as absurd—until he considered that Rosecrans and his ilk were hardly a match for Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Blücher.

“But we will lick ’em.” Suddenly, Rosecrans was full of bluff confidence again. “We outweigh ’em two to one, near enough,
and that’s plenty to make any general look smarter than he really is—even an old ne’er-do-well like me.” The grin he sent Schlieffen had a self-deprecating charm to which the German military attaché could not help responding.

And Rosecrans was right. An army with twice the men and guns of its foe went into a war with an enormous advantage. As Voltaire had said, God was always for the big battalions. Even Frederick the Great, facing odds like those, had been at the end of his tether during the Seven Years’ War till the opportune death of the Tsarina and her abrupt replacement by a successor who favored the Prussian king made Russia drop out of the war.

“I repeat the question I asked before,” Schlieffen said again: “What will you do if England or France or both of them at once should enter the war on the side of the Confederate States?”

“The best we can,” Rosecrans answered.
Brave
, Schlieffen thought,
but not helpful
. But then the American Army commander looked sly. “Between you, me, and the wall, Colonel, I don’t think it’s going to happen. The reports we’re getting from London and Paris say both governments over there are sick to death of the Confederacy keeping niggers as slaves, and they won’t lift a finger unless the Rebs say they’ll turn ’em loose. Now I ask you, sir, what are the odds of that? Biggest reason they fought the war was on account of they were afraid the United States government would make ’em do something like that. If they wouldn’t do it for their own kith and kin, why do you think the stubborn bastards’ll do it for a pack of foreigners?”

“This may be an important point,” Schlieffen said. It was, at any rate, a point interesting enough for him to take it up with Minister von Schlözer when he got back to the brick pile on Massachusetts Avenue. He concerned himself with politics as little as he could. Political considerations could of course affect military ones, but the latter were all that fell within his purview. Civilians set policy. He made sure the armed forces could do what the leaders required of them.

Rosecrans said, “If you’ll excuse me, Colonel, I do have a deal to see to here, just on the off chance the Confederates get frisky after all.”

“I understand.” Schlieffen rose. So did Rosecrans, who came around the desk to shake hands with him again. “One more question, General?” the attaché asked. “In case of war, you are rather vulnerable to the foe while here in Washington. What would the
signal be for shifting your headquarters up to Philadelphia, which is less likely to come under attack?”

“It had better not,” Rosecrans exclaimed. “Soon as the first shell falls, we all pack up stakes and head north. Everything will go smooth as clockwork, I promise you. We aren’t fools, Colonel. We know the Rebs will shell this place.”

“Very good,” Schlieffen said. As he left the War Department, he wondered whether both of Rosecrans’ last two sentences were true.

    Black smoke—and showers of sparks—pouring from her twin stacks, the
Liberty Bell
steamed down the Mississippi toward St. Louis. When he’d boarded the sternwheeler in Clinton, Illinois, Frederick Douglass had taken her name as a good omen. With every mile closer to the Confederate States he drew, though, his doubts increased.

He stood on the upper deck, watching farms and little towns flow past. He was the only Negro on the upper deck, the deck that housed cabin passengers. That did not surprise him. But for one of the men who fed wood to the fire under the
Liberty Bell’s
boiler, he was the only Negro aboard the steamboat. He was used to that, too. Over the years since the War of Secession, he’d grown very used to being alone.

“Look,” somebody not far away said. “Look at the nigger in the fancy suit.”

Douglass turned. He was, he knew, an impressive man, with handsome features whose leonine aspect was enhanced by his silvery beard and mane of hair. That silver, and his slow, deliberate motions, told of his age. He thought he was sixty-four, but might as easily have been sixty-three or sixty-five. Having been born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he had, to put it mildly, not been encouraged to enquire into the details of his arrival on the scene.

Two young white men, both dressed like drummers or cheap confidence men (there sometimes being little difference between the two trades) were gaping at him, their pale eyes wide. “May I help you gentlemen?” he asked, letting only a little irony seep into his deep, rich voice.

Despite his formidable presence, despite the rumbles of oratorical thunder audible in even his briefest, most commonplace utterances, the whites were unabashed. “It’s all right, it’s all right,”
one of them said, as if soothing a restive child—or a restive horse. “Dick here and me, we’re from St. Paul, and ain’t neither one of us ever got a good look at a nigger before.”

“I can see as much,” Douglass said. “I also discern that you have never had occasion to learn how to speak to a Negro, either.”

That went right past the two men from St. Paul. They kept on staring, as if he were a caged monkey in a zoo. He’d had that feeling too many times in his life already. Seeing they
would
be rude, no matter how unintentionally, he turned his back, set both hands on the rail, and peered out over the Mississippi once more.

Ain’t neither one of us ever got a good look at a nigger before
. His fingers clamped down on the white-painted cast iron with painful force. He’d heard that, or variations on it, hundreds of times since the war.

He let out a long sigh punctuated by a couple of short coughs. Before the Southern states left the Union to form their own nation, he had been a spokesman for one man in eight in the United States. Now, ninety percent of the Negroes on the North American continent resided in a foreign country, and most of the white citizens of the USA were just as glad it was so. They might have been gladder yet had the figure been one hundred percent. As often as not, they blamed the relative handful of blacks left in the United States for the breakup of the nation.

And if a Negro, tormented beyond endurance, tried to flee from, say, Confederate Kentucky across the Ohio into the United States and freedom, how was he greeted? With congratulations for his love of liberty and a hearty welcome to a better land? Douglass’ laugh was sour. If a U.S. Navy gunboat didn’t sink his little skiff or raft in midstream, white men with guns and dogs would hunt him down and ship him back over the river to the CSA. Why not? As an inhabitant of a different nation, he had no claim on the United States.

Douglass laughed again—better that than weeping. Before the war, the Fugitive Slave Act had been a stench in the nostrils of most Northerners. Now, though the law was no longer on the book, slavery having at last become extinct in the USA, fugitive slaves found less sympathy than they had a generation earlier. Did calling them foreigners make such a difference? Evidently.

Not wanting to know whether the two white men had finished their examination of him or whether others, equally curious and
equally rude, had taken their place, Douglass looked ahead. The dark cloud of smoke and haze blowing west across the Mississippi was not a reflection of his mood. It was a reflection of the soft coal St. Louis, like so many Western cities, burned to heat its homes, cook its food, and power the engines of its factories. The
Liberty Bell
would be landing before long.

Past the northern suburb of Baden steamed the sternwheeler. Over there, black roustabouts carried cargo off barges and small steamers. Douglass warmed to see men of his own color once more, even if those men were doing labor of a sort their brethren still in bondage might have performed at lonely little landing stations along the Confederate-held reaches of the southern Mississippi.

Then across the water came the ingenious curses of the white men who bossed those roustabouts. Douglass’ mouth tightened into a thin, hard line. He’d had curses like those fall on his own head back in the days when he was property, before he became a human being of his own. He’d also known the lash then. That, at least, these bosses, unlike the overseers still plying their trade in the CSA, were forbidden. Perhaps the prohibition made their curses sharper.

Other Negroes floated on the Mississippi in rowboats. Douglass watched one of them draw a fish into his boat: the day’s supper, or part of it. Blacks and whites both plied larger skiffs, in which they went after the driftwood that always fouled the river. They would not make much money from their gleanings, but none of them, it was likely, would ever make, or expect to make, much money till the end of his days.