How Few Remain (53 page)

Henry Welton didn’t say anything for fully five minutes after that. One of the lamps burned out, filling the room with the sharp stink of kerosene and throwing new dark shadows across his face. When at last he spoke, it was from out of those shadows and in a meditative tone suited to them: “I wonder, Colonel, what the old generals and captains who had fought so long and so well under Philip of Macedon thought when Alexander gathered them together and told them they were going to go off and conquer the world. Alexander would have been about the age you are now, I expect.”

Roosevelt stared. Nothing he could say or do sitting down seemed thanks enough. Forgetting his aches and pains, he sprang to his feet and bowed from the waist. “I can’t possibly live up to that.” Now he felt the whiskey; it put him at risk of sounding maudlin. “God made only one Alexander the Great, and then He broke the mold. But a man might do much worse than trying to walk as far as he can in his footsteps.”

“Yes. So a man might.” Welton paused again, this time to light a cigar. When he had it going, he chuckled self-consciously.
“In vino v
eritas, or so they say. Lord only knows what they say about whiskey from a Fort Benton saloon.” He suddenly seemed to notice the lamp had gone out. “Heavens, what time has it gotten to be?”

“It’s a little past ten, sir,” Roosevelt said after looking at his watch.

“I didn’t mean to keep you gabbing here till all hours,” Colonel Welton said. “You must be about ready to fall over dead. Let me gather you up and take you off to the bachelor officers’ quarters for the night.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m fine,” Roosevelt said, and, to his surprise, it was true. “Much better than I was when I first rode into the fort. Must be the excellent company and the equally excellent restorative.”

“If you don’t get some rest now, you won’t be fine in the—” A knock on the office door interrupted Welton before he could finish the sentence. “Come in,” he called, and a soldier did,
telegram in hand. Welton raised an eyebrow. “It must be after midnight back in Philadelphia. What’s so important that it won’t keep till daybreak?”

“It’s not from Philadelphia, sir,” the soldier answered. “It’s from Helena, from the Territorial governor.”

“All right, what’s so important in Helena that it won’t keep till daybreak?” Welton took the wire, read it, growled something vile under his breath, crumpled up the paper, and flung it across the room. “God damn that lazy bastard!”

“What’s wrong, sir?” Roosevelt asked.

“You may have heard they booted Abe Lincoln out of Utah Territory for interfering with the military governor? No? Well, they did. He turned up in Helena preaching the power of labor, and started a riot down there. Now he’s on his way up to Great Falls, probably to preach on the same text. I’m supposed to help keep order there, and I’d have had a hell of a lot better chance of doing it if His idiotic Excellency hadn’t waited till the day before Lincoln was getting into Great Falls before bothering to tell me he was on his way. He’s talking there
tomorrow night.”

“Sir, whomever you send, send me, too!” Roosevelt exclaimed. “I’ve always wanted to hear Lincoln.”

“I’m not sending anyone,” Welton said. “I’m going myself. You’re welcome to ride along if you like.” He waited for Roosevelt’s eager nod, then went on, “And now I will put you to bed, and put myself to bed, too. We have a busy day ahead of us tomorrow, and likely a busier night.”

“Good!” Roosevelt said, which made Henry Welton laugh.

    As far as Frederick Douglass knew, he was by at least twenty-five years the oldest correspondent crossing the Ohio with the second wave of invaders—no, of liberators—entering Kentucky. He’d wondered how much trouble he would have in getting permission to see the action at first hand.

He’d had no trouble at all. The officer in charge of granting such permissions was Captain Oliver Richardson. Instead of being difficult, General Willcox’s adjutant had proved the soul of cooperation. When the process was done, Douglass had said, “Thank you very much, Captain,” with a certain amount of suspicion in his voice, hardly believing Richardson wanted to be helpful.

And then the captain had smiled at him. “It’s my pleasure, Mr.
Douglass, believe me,” he’d said, and the smile had got wider. That wasn’t pleasure; it was gloating anticipation.

He thinks he’s sending me off to be killed
, Douglass had realized.
He hopes he’s sending me off to be killed
. Worst of all, the Negro journalist couldn’t say a word. Richardson had only done what he’d asked him to do.

And now, along with a raft—actually, a barge—full of nervous young white men in blue uniforms, a nervous elderly black man in a sack suit set out across the Ohio to go into the Confederate States of America for the first time in his life. On his hip was the comforting weight of a pistol. He didn’t expect to do much damage to the Rebels with it. It would, however, keep them from ever returning him to the life of bondage he had been fortunate enough to escape.

U.S. artillery opened up, thunderous in its might. As had happened before the direct assault on Louisville, the southern bank of the Ohio disappeared from view, engulfed in smoke. If all went according to plan, the bombardment would leave the Confederates too stunned to reply.

If all had gone according to plan, Louisville would have fallen weeks before, and this second assault would have been unnecessary. Douglass did his best not to dwell on that.

At the rear of the barge, the steam engine began hissing like a whole nestful of snakes. “Here we go, boys!” shouted Major Algernon van Nuys, who commanded that part of the Sixth New York Volunteer Infantry crammed aboard the awkward, ugly vessel. The soldiers cheered. Douglass wondered whether they were outstandingly brave or outstandingly naive.

No matter what sort of noises the engine made, the barge wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. It crawled away from the wharf and waddled south toward the Kentucky shore of the Ohio, one of many boats and barges in the water. As’ soon as they started moving, shells started falling among them. “We’ve been hoaxed!” somebody near Douglass exclaimed. “They said they were gonna knock all these Rebel guns to kingdom come. They lied to us, lied!” He sounded comically aggrieved.

One of his friends, a youngster with a more realistic view of the world, replied, “Likely they said that to the fellows who went over the Ohio the first time, too. You think they were right then, Ned?”

Ned didn’t answer; a shell that came down very close to the
barge drenched everyone and set all the men cursing and trying to dry off. Douglass decided, too late, that the occasion was probably informal enough for him to have escaped criticism even if he hadn’t worn a cravat and wing-collared shirt.

How slowly Kentucky drew near! He felt he’d been on the barge forever, with every cannon in the Confederate States of America taking dead aim at him and him alone. The logical faculty he so prized told him that was an impossibility: it had been bare minutes since he’d set out from the northern bank of the river. With death in the air, though, logic cowered and time stretched like saltwater taffy.

“Once we land, we’ll have to step lively,” Major van Nuys called, cool as if his men were going onto the parade ground for drill, not into enemy territory to fight for their lives. “We’ll form columns of fours and advance southwest in column till we meet the enemy, then deploy into loose order and sweep him aside. Our shout will be ‘Revenge!’ “

His men raised another cheer for that. Only a handful of them were old enough to remember the War of Secession, but the scars from that defeat had twisted the national countenance ever since. Even the young soldiers knew why they wanted revenge. Douglass would have preferred
Liberty!
for a shout, or perhaps
Justice!
—but
Revenge!
would do the job.

The
Queen of the Ohio
had gone aground far harder than the invasion barge did. The steamboat had been going far faster when she grounded, too. Yelling fit to burst their throats, the soldiers of the Sixth New York swarmed off the barge. They swept Douglass along, catching him up in their resistless tide. He counted himself lucky not to be knocked down and trampled underfoot.

“Get the devil out of the way, you damned old nigger!” somebody bawled in his ear. The soldier, whoever he was, didn’t sound angry at him for being a Negro so much as for being an obstruction. Whichever his reason, Douglass could do nothing to accommodate it. He had no more control over his own movement than a scrap of bark borne downstream by a flood on the Mississippi.

And then, suddenly, he spun out of the main torrent of men and realized the muddy ground on which he was standing was not just any muddy ground but the muddy ground of Kentucky, of the Confederate States of America. He had carefully planned what he would do when at last he bestrode enemy soil. Shaking his fist
toward Stonewall Jackson in Louisville, he cried out,
“Sic semper tyrannis!”

“‘Thus always to tyrants,’ “Major van Nuys echoed. “Well said. But do you know what, Mr. Douglass? That is the motto of the Confederate state of Virginia.”

“Oh, they are great ones for taking a high moral tone, the Confederate States,” Douglass said. “Taking a high moral tone costs them nothing. Living up to it is something else again.”

Van Nuys did not linger to argue the point. He waved his sword to draw the attention of the men under his command—about the only use a sword had on a battlefield dominated by breechloaders and artillery. Disembarking from the barge had mixed the soldiers promiscuously. Officers, sergeants, and corporals screamed like madmen to get them into some kind, any kind, of order and moving forward against the foe.

A few bullets cut the air. Even as the Sixth New York began its part of the U.S. flanking assault against Louisville, a man fell with a dreadful shriek, clutching at his belly and wailing for his mother and someone named Annie. Sister? Sweetheart? Wife? Whoever she was, Douglass feared she would never set eyes on her young hero again. He hoped his own Anna would see him once more.

When the soldiers began to march, the Negro journalist discovered that, with the best will in the world, a man in his sixties had a hard time keeping up with fellows a third his age. He did his best, stumping along heavily and managing to keep the tail of the column in sight.

Panting, he muttered, “The faster they go, the better I like it.” If the men of the Sixth New York and all the other regiments thrown into the fight moved swiftly, they did so because the Confederate defenders had not the strength to withstand them. No one going straight into Louisville had moved swiftly.

Two shells burst up ahead. A man flew up into the air, limp and boneless as a cloth doll tossed away by a girl who didn’t feel like playing with it any more. Others were simply flung aside. Still others screamed when shell fragments sawed into their tender flesh.

“Come on, lads! Keep it up. Come on!” Major van Nuys called. “We can’t play these games without paying a little every now and then. Believe you me, whatever it costs us, the Rebs will pay more.”

More cheers rose from the Sixth New York. Van Nuys then ordered them into open echelon, which suggested to Douglass not only that they were already in the zone of combat but that they were liable to pay more than a little. How much the Confederates were paying was anyone’s guess.

One thing was plain: the CSA had not resisted this thrust as they had the one aimed straight at Louisville. That the U.S. soldiers were advancing and not entrenching to save their lives from devastating Confederate fire proved as much. Douglass hoped that meant the Rebels were at full stretch to contain the USA in Louisville itself, and had little left to resist elsewhere.

The countryside was pretty: farms with belts of oaks and elms between them. After a moment, Douglass revised his first impression. The countryside had been pretty, and might one day be pretty again. War was rapidly doing what war did—making ugly everything it touched. Shell craters scarred meadows and fields. A couple of farmhouses and barns were already burning, smoke from their pyres staining the morning air. Several small cabins near a farmhouse also burned. For a moment, Douglass simply noted that, as any reporter would. Then he realized what those smaller buildings were.

“Slave shanties,” he said through clenched teeth. “Even here, so close to the Ohio and freedom, they had slave shanties. May they all burn, and all the big houses with them.”

A few minutes later, a couple of U.S. soldiers with long bayonets on their Springfields led half a dozen or so Confederate prisoners back past him toward the river. A couple of the Rebs were wounded, one with his arm in a sling made from a tunic, the other wearing a bloody bandage wrapped round his head. All of them were skinny and dirty and surprisingly short: rumor made six-foot Confederate soldiers out to be runts. They did not look like invincible conquerors—petty vagrants was more like it.

“May I speak to these men?” Douglass asked their guards.

“Sure, Snowball, go right ahead,” one of the men in blue replied. “Can’t think of anything liable to make ’em feel worse, not off the top of my head I can’t.”

Douglass ignored that less than ringing endorsement. “You prisoners,” he said sharply, to remind them of their status, “how many of you are slaveowners?”

Two men in gray nodded. The fellow with the bandaged head
said,
“You
wouldn’t bring me fifty dollars. You’re too damn old and too damn uppity.”

“I can’t help being old, and I’m proud to be uppity,” Douglass said. “How dare you presume to own, to buy and to sell and to ravish, your fellow human beings?”

The captured Confederate laughed hoarsely. “You damn crazy nigger, I’d sooner ravish my mule than ugly old Nero who helps me farm.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice. “And you got a lot of damn nerve tellin’ me what I can and can’t do with my property, which ain’t none o’ your business to begin with.”

“Men and women are not property,” Douglass thundered, as if to an audience of twenty thousand. “They are your brothers and sisters in the eyes of God.”