How Few Remain (68 page)

The Fifth Camelry howled Rebel yells as their ungainly mounts bore down on the horrified U.S. forces. A few Yankees got into the saddle, but their horses wanted nothing to do with the Confederate camels. More U.S. soldiers fought as infantry, but, taken in the flank and caught by surprise, they didn’t hold out long.

A couple of rounds snarled past and over Stuart. He fired his Tredegar carbine four or five times, and thought he might have wounded one running Yankee. Then white handkerchiefs and shirts began fluttering in lieu of flags of truce. The fighting couldn’t have lasted more than half an hour.

“You damn Rebs don’t fight like you should ought to,” a disgruntled U.S. sergeant complained.

“Wouldn’t have had to fight at all if it weren’t for you people,” Stuart said, borrowing Robert E. Lee’s scornful name for the Yankees. He found himself in an expansive mood—the U.S. forces hadn’t yet sent all the captured supply wagons up into New Mexico and out of his reach. That made him add, “The way we fight is to win—and I reckon we’re going to do it.” The sorrowful sergeant did not disagree.

XV

“Redcoats!” The scouts’ cries echoed across the Montana prairie. “The redcoats are coming!”

“Come on, lads!” Theodore Roosevelt called to the men of the Unauthorized Regiment, or those troops of it that had joined him to try to impede the progress of the British column penetrating U.S. territory. “Come on!” he repeated. “The English wore red a hundred years ago, too, when we licked ’em in the Revolution. And the patriotic Continental soldiers wore blue, just as we do. They won against great odds, and so can we. Forward!”

Forward they went, with cheers on their lips. First Lieutenant Karl Jobst said, “Sir, I have to commend you. My opinion of volunteers has gone up immeasurably since we began harassing the British.”

Roosevelt noted his adjutant’s phrasing. Jobst didn’t say,
My opinion of volunteers has gone up since I joined the regiment
. He’d waited till he saw the Unauthorized troops fight before approving of them. Maybe that made him a hard man to please. Maybe it just made him an old—or rather, a young—stick-in-the-mud.

“They do grow brave men outside the Regular Army, Lieutenant,” Roosevelt said. He filled his chest with air, then let it out in a shout like the cry of a bull moose: “Close with ’em, boys, and fill ’em full of lead!”

That got another cheer. As Roosevelt rode north after the scouts, he made sure his own Winchester had a full magazine. Only the firepower his men had at their disposal let them slow down the enemy at all. Most of the British cavalry was armed with single-shot carbines much like the ones the U.S. Regulars carried. Some of the others were lancers, who but for their revolvers might have fought against Napoleon or Louis XIV or, for that matter, against Joan of Arc.

They were brave, too. He’d seen that. He hadn’t seen that it helped them much.

He pointed. Bugler’s horns cried out a warning. There ahead was the cavalry screen the British used to protect the infantry and baggage train advancing into Montana Territory. “Charge!” Roosevelt roared. He wanted to wave his sword about to help inspire his men, but in the end hung onto his Winchester instead. Knocking a few limeys out of the saddle would be the best inspiration possible.

Rapidly, the British horsemen swelled from little red specks visible across the prairie to an astonishing distance to scarlettunicked, white-helmeted men. They opened fire at several hundred yards, well beyond the reach of the Unauthorized Regiment’s Winchesters. Puffs of dirty gray smoke shot from their carbines. A horse went down. A man slid out of the saddle.

But not enough horses fell, not enough saddles were emptied, to keep the U.S. soldiers from getting close enough for their Winchesters to bite. And when the magazine rifles bit, they bit hard. A man could shoot two or three times as fast with one as with a single-shot breechloader.

As had happened several times before, the British outriders recoiled back onto the rest of the cavalry in General Gordon’s force. Before, the larger force had been enough to drive back the volunteers. Now Roosevelt had a couple of more troops than he’d been able to deploy at the last skirmish. “Keep at ’em, boys!” he shouted, and waved his hat.

Bullets sang past him. He’d been delighted to discover, not that he felt no fear in battle, but that he had no trouble keeping under control the fear he did feel. And the savage exultation that filled him almost canceled out even his controlled fear.

He raised the rifle to his shoulder and sent a stream of lead at the Englishmen who had stabbed the United States in the back. A redcoat dropped his carbine and clutched his right arm. Roosevelt whooped. He wasn’t sure that was the limey he’d been aiming for, or that his bullet had wounded the foe, but who could prove it hadn’t?

With his extra men, with his extra firepower, he drove back even the reinforced British cavalry. They in turn fell back toward the red-coated infantry. The foot soldiers shook themselves out from column into line of battle. They too fired single-shot Martini-Henrys,
but there were far more of them than troopers of the Unauthorized Regiment.

One thing coming out West had eventually taught Theodore Roosevelt: when not to raise on a pair of threes. “Back!” he yelled. A bugler always rode close by him. The order to retreat blared forth.

The British cavalry did not pursue his men when they broke off the fight and galloped off to the south. They’d learned from painful experience that they paid a high price if they got too far separated from the infantry they screened.
Lancers
, Roosevelt thought derisively.
We ‘re nearing the end of the nineteenth century, and the British still have lancers in the line
.

“Well done, sir,” Karl Jobst said, wiping sweat from his face with his sleeve. “They’ll have to go back from line into column, and that will delay them. We bought our country another hour or so there.”

“You have a cold-blooded way of looking at war, Lieutenant,” Roosevelt said.

“It’s the Regular Army way, sir,” his adjutant said. “War is your hobby; it’s my profession. Our job is not to drive the British back into Canada. We can’t, not with one regiment against a much larger force. Our job is simply to slow them down as much as we can, so they don’t get the chance to plunder anything important before reinforcements join us.”

For him, it was a chess problem. He was interposing a pawn into a rook’s threatening path so other pieces would have time to move forward and defend his king. As far as Roosevelt could tell, he would have been as happy deciding the result on a chessboard as on the plains of Montana, too.

Roosevelt said, “Such calculations have their place, but they are not the be-all and end-all of warfare. If strategy seemed to call for a long, continuous retreat, how would the soldiers ordered to make it have the spirit to fight once the time came for action?”

“That is an important point, no doubt about it.” Jobst smiled to find his superior so acute. “Men are not steam engines, to perform at the pull of a lever.” It wasn’t the chessboard analogy Roosevelt had in his own mind, but it wasn’t far removed. Jobst went on, “Persuading men to fight bravely under such circumstances as you describe is what makes war an art rather than a science. The Germans believe they can reduce it to a science, but I for one remain unconvinced.”

“Good,” Roosevelt said. “You do show signs of life after all, Lieutenant.” He watched Jobst wonder whether he ought to be insulted. His adjutant finally decided it was a compliment, and smiled instead. Roosevelt smiled, too. “Stout fellow. Having delayed the British, what do we do next?”

“What we have been doing,” Lieutenant Jobst answered. “We break away from them, we fall back to the next stream lying across their line of march, we post dismounted riflemen at the easiest fords to contest their crossing, we do our utmost to ensure that we are not outflanked, and, when we have no other choice, we fall back again. Colonel Welton is moving to our aid, as are the more easterly troops of our regiment, and as are reinforcements from outside the Territory.”

“And, if we’re lucky, we shan’t be all used up by the time all those reinforcements come up,” Roosevelt said.

“Yes, if we’re lucky,” Jobst agreed. His voice was tranquil. If you had to sacrifice a pawn to stave off the other fellow and set up moves of your own later in the game, you did it, and did it with no regrets.

Roosevelt understood that attitude, but it didn’t come easy to him. The men of the Unauthorized Regiment were a force that might delay the British, yes, but they were more than that to him. They were his comrades, they were his friends, they were—in an odd sort of way, since many of them were older than he—his children. Without him, they would not have been born as a regiment. Without him, they would not be facing danger now. Like a comrade, like a friend—like a father—he felt obligated to keep them as safe as he could.

In thoughtful tones, he said, “We haven’t seen much in the way of outflanking moves from this General Gordon of theirs. He seems to think only of going straight for what he wants.”

Karl Jobst nodded. “So it would seem, wouldn’t it, sir? I daresay it’s because of his service in China and the Sudan. With properly disciplined troops, you can go through the heathen Chinese and the bush niggers like a dose of salts. He likely expects to do the same against us.”

“Against Americans? Our blood is as fine as his—finer,” Roosevelt declared. “When we gain the numbers to make a proper fight of it, I believe we shall give his excellency Mr. Chinese Gordon a proper surprise.” He loaded with scorn the titles he had applied to the British soldier.

“Yes, sir,” Jobst said. “By what I know of Brigadier General Custer, our new commander, he fights the same way. Once everything is in place, it should be like two locomotives heading down one track toward each other.”

“We
shall survive the smash,” Roosevelt said. “I hold with this attitude myself, as you will have gathered. Admiral Nelson may have been a damned Englishman, but he spoke the truth when he said no captain could do very wrong if he placed his ship alongside that of the enemy.”

Having made that vaunting statement, he felt the irony inherent in falling back. But he also felt the need. Having splashed through some small tributary to the Marias, he left behind a couple of dozen of his best sharpshooters. He stayed behind himself, too, to see how they did what they did. So he told himself, at any rate. He kept on telling himself so, too, and almost convinced himself that wanting to take another lick at the British out of sheer personal hatred had nothing to do with why he did not ride on.

Along with his troopers, he concealed himself among the alders and birches and cottonwoods that grew by the river. He might have been hunting canvasbacks instead of redcoats. The only difference was that Englishmen, unlike ducks, were liable to shoot back.

The oncoming British neared the river after he’d been waiting about an hour and a half. They approached with caution; the troopers of the Unauthorized Regiment had stung them at crossings even before Roosevelt came galloping in with his headquarters staff to take charge of resistance. Roosevelt drew a bead on a fellow who, by the way he was waving his comrades about, was probably an officer. The redcoat had courage. He went about his business as if without the slightest notion his foes were liable to be anywhere nearby.

Knowing when to start shooting was an art in itself. Open fire too soon and the British would gallop off and ford the stream a few miles to the east or west, without giving you the chance to hurt them. Wait too long and they’d have enough men forward to overwhelm you even if they couldn’t shoot as fast.

One of his men pulled trigger a little sooner than he would have liked. An Englishman’s horse screamed shrilly and fell on him. That made the Englishman cry out, too. Roosevelt fired at the officer, who was a couple of hundred yards off. To his blasphemous disgust, he missed.

He worked the Winchester’s lever. A brass cartridge case flipped up into the air and fell to the damp ground at his feet. He fired again, and cried out in delight as the Englishman clutched at himself.