How Few Remain (2 page)

Custer jerked his mount to an abrupt halt by Burnside’s tent. An orderly came over and held the horse’s head. Custer sprang down. He ran to General Burnside, who was standing outside the tent, a telescope in his hands. “Damn it, General,” Custer said, running a hand through his hair, “I’ve lost my hat.”

Burnside shielded his own bald crown from the elements with a tall hat that gave him something of the look of a policeman. The whiskers sprouting luxuriantly on his cheeks and upper lip made his round face rounder yet. “I trust the nation will survive,” he said. “What word from General McClellan?”

“Sir, you are to hold your position at all hazard,” Custer answered.

“I shall do everything in my power.” Burnside’s frown deepened the dimple in his clean-shaven chin. “They are pounding us hard, though.” As if to underscore his words, a Rebel shell screamed down and exploded perhaps fifty yards from the tent. Custer’s horse let out a frightened whinny. It tried to rear. The orderly wouldn’t let it.

“You must hold,” Custer repeated. “If they get around your left, we are ruined. Also, General McClellan said, you must not fall back any farther. If Jackson’s corps is able to bring its artillery
to bear on the bridge over the Susquehanna, our line of retreat is cut off.”

“General McClellan should have considered that before offering battle on this side of the river,” Burnside said tartly.

“This is where we met the Confederates—this is where we fight them.” For Custer, that was an axiom of nature.

Burnside stared gloomily at the sun. Through the clotted smoke, it looked red as blood. “Two hours till nightfall, perhaps a bit more,” he said, and frowned again. “Very well, Captain. I have my orders, and shall essay to carry them out. You may assure General McClellan on that point.”

“I’ll do it.” Custer started back toward his horse. He was about to mount when the drumroll of musketry from the battle front suddenly got louder, fiercer. “Wait,” he told the orderly, his voice sharp.

Burnside was peering through the shiny, brass-cased telescope. Custer had no such aid, but did not need one, either. Men in blue were streaming back toward him. Now and then, one of them turned to fire his Springfield muzzle-loader at the foe, but most seemed intent on nothing more than getting away from the fight as fast as they could.

“What in blazes has gone wrong now?” Custer demanded of the smoky air. The whole campaign had been a nightmare, with Lee getting up through Maryland and into Pennsylvania almost before McClellan learned he’d left Virginia. Never a fast mover, Little Mac had followed as best he could—and been brought to battle here, in this less than auspicious place.

Custer vaulted lightly into the saddle. He set spurs to his horse and sent it at a fast trot, not back toward General McClellan’s headquarters, but in the direction from which the retreating Federals were coming.

“Go back, sir,” one of them called to him. “Ain’t no more we can do here. D. H. Hill’s men are over Yellow Breeches Creek and on the Susquehanna. They’re a-rollin’ us up.”

“Then we have to drive the sons of bitches back,” Custer snarled. Libbie Bacon, his fiancée, wanted him to stop swearing. He hadn’t been able to make himself do it, much as he loved Libbie.

He rode forward again. A few men cheered and followed. More, though, kept right on back toward that one precious bridge.

Craack!
A Minié ball zipped past him. Another cut his sleeve, so that he wondered if someone had tugged at his arm till he glanced down and saw the tear.

He yanked an Army Colt out of his holster and blazed away at the Rebels till the six-shooter was empty. He wore another, piratically thrust into the top of one of the big, floppy boots he’d taken from a Confederate cavalryman he’d captured. He emptied that pistol, too, then yanked out his saber.

The sun sparkled from the glittering steel edge. Custer urged his mount up into a caracole. He felt the perfect picture of martial splendor.

“Get out of here, you damn fool!” a grimy-faced corporal yelled. “You reckon you’re gonna slaughter all them Rebs with your straight razor there?” He spat on the ground and trudged north toward the bridge.

Suddenly, Custer realized how alone he was. The horse dropped down onto all fours. Custer spurred it through and then past the soldiers from Burnside’s beaten left. Behind him, Rebel yells rose like panther screams.

Rebel artillery thundered. Splashes in the Susquehanna said the guns were reaching for that one bridge offering escape from the gray-clad, barefoot fiends of the Army of Northern Virginia. Screams from the bridge said some of the guns were finding it.

As he had in front of Burnside’s tent, so Custer leaped down from his horse in front of General McClellan’s. Like General Burnside, Little Mac, so hopefully called the Young Napoleon, stood outside. He pointed south, toward Burnside’s position. “I hear the fighting building there, Captain,” he said. “I trust you conveyed to General Burnside the absolute necessity of holding in place.”

“Sir, General Burnside listened, but Stonewall Jackson didn’t,” Custer answered. “The Rebs are on the river on this side of Yellow Breeches Creek, and I’m damned if I see anything between there and the bridge to stop ’em.”

McClellan’s handsome face went pale, even with that ruddy sunlight shining down on it. “It is the end, then,” he said in a voice like ashes. His shoulders sagged, as if he had taken a wound. “The end, I tell you, Captain. With the Army of the Potomac whipped, who can hope to preserve the Republic intact?”

“We’re not whipped yet, sir.” Even in Custer’s own ears, the brave words sounded hollow, impossible to believe.

“Fire!” somebody shouted off in the distance. “Jesus God, the bridge is on fire!”

“The end,” McClellan said again. “The Rebs have outnumbered us from the start.” Custer wondered about that, but held his peace. McClellan went on, “We are ruined, ruined, I tell you. After this defeat, England and France will surely recognize the Southern Confederacy, as they have been champing at the bit to do. Not even that buffoon in the White House, the jackass who dragged us into this war, will be able to pretend any longer that it has any hope of coming to a successful resolution.”

Custer, a staunch Democrat, had if anything even less use for Abraham Lincoln than did McClellan. “If that damned Black Republican hadn’t been elected, we would still be one nation, and at peace,” he said.

“After the disaster his party has been to the Union, it will be a long time before another Republican is chosen to fill the White House,” McClellan said. “I take some consolation in that—not much, I assure you, Captain, but some nonetheless.”

Another of McClellan’s officers galloped up from the northwest. “Sir,” he cried, not even dismounting, “Longstreet is pounding our right with everything he has, and General Hooker—General Hooker, sir, he won’t do
anything
. It’s as if he’s stunned by a near miss from a shell, sir, but he’s not hurt.”

McClellan’s mouth twisted. “In his California days, Joe Hooker was the best poker player the world ever knew,” he said heavily, “till it came time to raise fifty dollars. Then he’d flunk. If he flunks now—”

As it had on the left, a great burst of musketry and cannon fire told its own story. “General McClellan, sir, he just flunked,” Custer said. He reloaded his pistols—not a fast business, with ball and loose powder and percussion cap for each chamber of the cylinder. After one Colt was charged, he lost patience. “By your leave, General, I’m going to the fighting before it comes to me.”

“Go ahead, Captain,” McClellan said. His posture said he thought all was lost. Custer thought all was lost, too. He didn’t care. Fighting in a lost cause was even more splendid and
glorious than battle where victory was assured. He sprang onto his horse and rode toward the loudest gunfire.

He looked back once. McClellan was staring after him, shaking his head.

I

1881

Buffalo bones littered the prairie south of Fort Dodge, Kansas. Colonel George Custer gave them only the briefest glance. They seemed as natural a part of the landscape as had the buffalo themselves a decade before. Custer had killed his share of buffalo and more. Now he was after more dangerous game.

He raised the Springfield carbine to his shoulder and fired at one of the Kiowas fleeing before him. The Indian, one of the rearmost of Satanta’s raiding party, did not fall.

Custer loaded another cartridge into the carbine’s breech and fired again. Again, the shot was useless. The Kiowa turned on his pony for a Parthian shot. Fire and smoke belched from the muzzle of his rifle. The bullet kicked up a puff of dust ten or fifteen yards in front of Custer.

He fired again, and so did the Kiowa. The Indian’s Tredegar Works carbine, a close copy of the British Martini-Henry, had about the same performance as his own weapon. Both men missed once more. The Kiowa gave all his attention back to riding, bending low over his pony’s neck and coaxing from the animal every bit of speed it had.

“They’re gaining on us, the blackhearted savages!” Custer shouted to his troopers, inhibited in language by the pledge his wife, Libbie, had finally succeeded in extracting from him.

“Let me and a couple of the other boys with the fastest horses get out ahead of the troop and make ’em fight us till the rest of you can catch up,” his brother suggested.

“No, Tom. Wouldn’t work, I’m afraid. They wouldn’t fight—they’d just scatter like a covey of quail.”

“Damned cowards,” Major Tom Custer growled. He was a
younger, less flamboyant version of his brother, but no less ferocious in the field. ‘They bushwhack our farmers, then they run. If they want to come up into Kansas, let ’em fight like men once they’re here.”

“They don’t much want to fight,” Custer said. “All they want to do is kill and burn and loot. That’s easier, safer, and more profitable, too.”

“Give me the Sioux any day, up in Minnesota and Dakota and Wyoming,” Tom Custer said. “They fought hard, and only a few of them ran away into Canada once we’d licked them.”

“And the Canadians disarmed the ones who did,” Custer added. “I’ll be—dashed if I like the Canadians, mind you, but they play the game the way it’s supposed to be played.”

“It’s cricket,” Tom said, and Custer nodded. His younger brother pointed south. “We aren’t going to catch them on our side of the line, Autie.”

“I can see that.” George Custer scowled—at fate, not at the family nickname. After a moment, the scowl became a fierce grin. “All right, by jingo, maybe we won’t catch them on our side of the line. We’ll just have to catch them on theirs.”

Tom looked startled. “Are you sure?”

“You’d best believe I’m sure.” The excitement of the pursuit ran through Custer in a hot tide. Whatever consequences came from extending the pursuit, he’d worry about them later. Now all he wanted to do was teach the Kiowas a lesson even that sneaky old devil Satanta wouldn’t forget any time soon. He shouted over to the regimental bugler: “Blow Pursuit.”

“Sir?” the bugler said, as surprised as Tom Custer had been. Then he grinned. “Yes,
sir!”
He raised the bugle to his lips. The bold and martial notes rang out across the plain. The men of the Fifth Cavalry Regiment needed a moment to grasp what that call implied. Then they howled like wolves. Some of them waved their broad-brimmed black felt hats in the air.

From long experience, the Kiowas understood U.S. horn calls as well as any cavalry trooper. Their heads went up, as if they were game fearing it would be flushed from cover.
That’s what they are, all right
, Custer thought.

As often happened, Tom’s thoughts ran in the same track as his own. “They won’t duck back into their lair this time,” his younger brother said. Now that the decision was made, Tom was all for it.

They pounded past a farmhouse the Kiowas had burned in a
raid a couple of years earlier. Custer recognized those ruins; they meant he was less than a mile from the border with the Indian Territory. Up ahead, the Kiowas squeezed still more from their ponies. Custer smiled savagely. That might get them over the line, but even those tough animals would start wearing down soon. “And then,” he told the wind blowing tears from his eyes, “then they’re mine, sure as McClellan belonged to Lee twenty years ago.”