How Few Remain (78 page)

“Yes, and now we’re going to smash it all to pieces,” Tom
replied. Custer nodded, and then felt his face grow hot. What they would smash it with were breech-loading carbines—modern industry set against medieval courage. Maybe Colonel Roosevelt had known what he was talking about after all.

Custer gauged the range. “Fire at will!” he shouted. Behind him and to either side, the Springfields began to bark. He raised his own carbine to his shoulder, picked one of those lancers, and fired at him.

The man did not go down. Custer had not particularly expected him to, though he’d hoped he would. But a lot of troopers were blazing away at the Englishmen. All along the line of lancers, those big horses crashed to the ground. Men slid from the saddle or threw down their steel-shod spears to clutch at wounds. The ones who were not hit kept coming. Riders moved up from the second rank to take the places of those in the first who had fallen.

As the lancers drew nearer, Custer felt … not fear, for he had never known fear on a battlefield, but a certain amount of intimidation. The big, tough men looked ready to ride over the Fifth Cavalry and trample them into the grass and dirt of the prairie as if they had never been.

Then he shot at an Englishman and hit him square in the chest. The luckless fellow dropped his lance, threw up his hands, and slumped dead over his horse’s neck. More and more Englishmen were falling as the range narrowed, and they could do nothing to hit back. None of them wavered, though.

“Christ, they’re brave!” he shouted.

“Christ, they’re stupid,” his brother shouted back, reloading his Springfield.

A lancer thundered toward Custer. He fired at the fellow and missed. The lancehead pointed straight at his breastbone. In another couple of seconds, the British soldier would spit him as if he were a prairie chicken roasting over a campfire. He yanked out his Colt revolver and fired three quick rounds. One of them missed, too, but one hit the horse and one the rider. Custer didn’t think any of the wounds would kill, but the lancer lost interest in skewering him.

Here and there, British lancers did spear his men out of the saddle. Here and there, too, the Englishmen drew their own revolvers and blazed away at his troopers. But a lot of the horsemen in red tunics were down, and more of them fell every minute. Flesh and blood, even the bravest flesh and blood, could take only
so much. After some minutes of desperate, overmatched fighting at close quarters, the lancers broke away from the Fifth Cavalry and galloped for their lives back toward their infantry or away to the wings to shelter among horsemen whose rifles could protect them.

Custer cheered and waved his hat. “Forward, men!” he shouted—the order he always loved best. “Follow me! We’ve given their horse a good lesson. Now to deal with the foot.”

He galloped past a dead redcoat, then past a British horse with a broken back trying to drag itself along with its forelegs. Then he and his troopers thundered toward the British infantry, who waited in a two-deep firing line to receive them. A shell chewed up the prairie off to his right. Fragments of the casing hissed past his head. He shrugged and kept riding.

Every so often, along that firing line, a red-coated soldier would go down. The British held their positions as steadily—indeed, as stolidly—as any troops Custer had seen during the War of Secession. As he rode toward the British line, doubt tried to rise in his bosom. Cavalry had had a devil of a time shifting steady infantry during the last war. True, his men carried breechloaders now, but so did their foes. The British lancers had been as brave as any men he’d ever seen. Would the foot soldiers be any different?

He did what he always did with doubt—he stifled it. “Here we go!” he shouted. “For the United States of America! Chaaarge!”

As if held by a single man, all the rifles along the British firing line leveled on the Fifth. As if held by a single man, all those rifles fired at the same instant. A great cloud of black-powder smoke rose above and around the enemy. Through it, flames thrust like bayonets from the muzzles of the Englishmen’s Martini-Henrys.

Three balls snapped past Custer. Not all his men were so lucky as to have bullets miss them. The charge broke up almost as if the troopers had slammed into a wall. Men screamed. Horses screamed—louder, shriller, more terrible cries than could have burst from a human throat.

The British infantry fed more cartridges into their rifles. Precise as so many steam-driven machines, they gave the Fifth Cavalry another volley, and another, and another. The horsemen replied as best they could. Their best was not enough, not nearly. The redcoats not only outnumbered them but were also firing on
foot rather than from the bounding backs of beasts. Englishmen, many Englishmen, toppled and writhed and cursed and shrieked. The Americans, though, melted away like snow on a warm spring afternoon.

“We can’t do it, Autie!” Tom Custer shouted.

If Tom said a piece of fighting could not be done, no man on earth could do it. “We’ll have to fall back,” Custer said, and then, to the bugler, “Blow Retreat.” But no call rang out. The bugler was dead. “Retreat!” Custer yelled at the top of his lungs. “Fall back!” The words were as bitter as the alkali dust of Utah in his mouth. So far as he could remember, he’d never used them before.

Fewer of his men heard him than would have heard the horn. But they would have fallen back whether he ordered it or not. They now made the same discovery the British lancers had not long before: some fires were too galling to bear.

Then Tom shouted again, wordlessly this time. The shout ended in a choking gurgle. Custer stared at his brother. Blood poured from Tom’s mouth, and from a great wound in his chest. Ever so slowly, or so it seemed to Custer, Tom crumpled from his horse. When he hit the ground, he didn’t move.

Custer let out one long howl of pain. The worst of it was, that was all he had time for. Even without Tom—and Tom, surely, would never rise again till Judgment Day—he had to save his force. His head swiveled wildly to east and west. Did the Volunteer cavalry know he couldn’t maintain the fight? If they didn’t, they would have to face the weight of the whole British army by themselves.

But no—they were breaking away from combat, too, falling back to screen the retreat of the Regulars. That was humiliating. Even more humiliating was that the British cavalry showed no great inclination to pursue. Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment had given the limeys all they wanted and then some.

The boy colonel rode over to Custer. “What now, sir?” he asked, as if his superior hadn’t just finished feeding his own prized regiment into the meat grinder.

What now, indeed?
Custer wondered. Without Tom, he hardly cared. But he had to answer. He knew he had to answer. “We fall back on our infantry and await the British attack as the enemy awaited ours,” he mumbled. It was a poor solution—even with Welton’s infantry, he didn’t have the manpower General Gordon
did. But, battered and dazed as he was, it was the only solution he could find.

“Yes, sir!” Roosevelt, by his tone, thought it brilliant. “Don’t worry, sir—we’ll lick ’em yet.”

    “Come on, men!” Theodore Roosevelt shouted. “We’ve got to keep the damn limeys off the Regulars’ backs a little bit longer.”

First Lieutenant Karl Jobst gave him a reproachful look. “Sir, I wish you would have found a politer way to put that.”

“Why?” Roosevelt said. “It’s the truth, isn’t it? Right now, General Custer’s men couldn’t fight off a Sunday-school class, let alone the British army. You know it, I know it, and Custer knows it, too.”

His adjutant still looked unhappy. “They fought General Gordon’s men most valiantly—smashed the lancers all to bits and hurt the infantry, too.”

“That they did. They charged home as bravely as you’d like,” Roosevelt said. “So did the six hundred at Balaclava. They paid for it, and so did the Regulars. Custer’s brother’s down, I heard, among too many others. We won our part of the fight. Unfortunately, the result is measured by the whole, which here proves less than the sum of its parts.”

Off from behind him came a brief crackle of rifle fire. The British cavalry, confident he would not turn on it with the whole Unauthorized Regiment, was dogging the tracks of the U.S. force, keeping an eye on it as it retreated. Every so often, British scouts and his own rear guard would exchange pleasantries.

“Sir, do you happen to know where Colonel Welton has positioned the Seventh Infantry?” This was not the first time Jobst had asked the question. Though normally a cold-blooded fellow, he could not keep concern from his voice. The Seventh Infantry was his regiment, Henry Welton his commander, to whose rule he would return when Roosevelt went back to civilian life.

Now, though, Roosevelt had to shake his head. “I wish I did, but General Custer has not seen fit to entrust that information to me.” He rode on for another few strides, then asked a question of his own: “You being a professional at this business, Lieutenant, what is your view of Custer the soldier?”

“I told you before he came up to Montana, sir, that he had a name for impetuous boldness.” Karl Jobst started to say something
else, stopped, and then began again: “The reputation appears to be well founded.”

After a while, Roosevelt realized that was all he’d get from his adjutant. If Jobst said anything more—something on the order of, He took a perfectly good regiment and chopped it into catmeat, for instance—and word of that got back to Custer, it would blight the lieutenant’s career. No one could possibly doubt Custer’s courage. He’d done everything he could, going straight into the British. But that hadn’t been enough, and hadn’t come close to being enough, to turn them back.

Roosevelt sighed. “Well, in his shoes I might well have done the same thing. With the enemy in front of him, he could think of nothing but driving them off.”

“I do believe, sir, that you might have handled the engagement with rather more finesse,” Jobst said. Roosevelt needed a moment to realize that was praise, and another moment to realize how much. If a Regular Army officer felt a colonel of Volunteers could have done better than a Regular brevet brigadier general, that spoke well of the Volunteer indeed—and not so well of George Custer.

A few minutes later, Custer rode back to confer with Roosevelt. Even if Custer had been overeager in the attack, even if the loss of his brother left his face raw with anguish, he was handling the retreat about as well as any man could. He kept a firm rein on both his unit and the Unauthorized Regiment, and made sure he found out whatever Roosevelt’s riders could learn about British dispositions and intentions.

Roosevelt found a moment to say, “I’m sorry about your loss, sir.”

“Yes, yes,” Custer said impatiently—he was surely doing his poor best not to think of that. “Now we have to see to it that our country’s loss does not include the whole of this force.”

“Yes, sir. I wish I could tell you more,” Roosevelt said. “Their cavalry screen keeps us from finding out as much as we’d like, just as ours does to them.”

Custer gnawed at his mustache. “I wish I knew how far ahead of their infantry the cavalry’s got. Not far enough to suit me, unless I miss my guess. Infantry pushed hard can almost keep up with horsemen. Once we’ve joined with Colonel Welton, odds are we shan’t have to wait long before they attack us.”

“You don’t think they’ll simply ignore us and go on down
toward the mines around Helena, which I presume to be their goal?” Roosevelt said.

“Not a chance of it, Colonel.” Custer spoke with decision. “We shall be far too large a force for them to dare to leave us in their flank and rear. We could and would work all sorts of mischief on them.”

“That does make sense,” Roosevelt said. “And, from what I’ve heard, their General Gordon is a headlong brawler, as I believe I’ve mentioned once before.”

“Yes, yes,” Custer said again. Roosevelt bristled at the tone, even if Custer was not, could not be, quite himself. Had the general commanding U.S. forces in Montana Territory done so well, he could afford to ignore what anyone told him? The answer was only too obvious. Had the general done as well as all that, he and Roosevelt would have been riding north, not south. But then Custer showed he’d heard after all: “If he’s so very headlong, maybe he’ll run onto our sword, the way bulls do in the arena.”

“I do hope so, sir,” Roosevelt said. Custer’s response let him ask the question in whose answer both he and Karl Jobst were keenly interested: “Where has Colonel Welton set up the position that awaits us?”

“Not far from the Teton River,” Custer replied, which told Roosevelt less than he would have liked but more than he’d already known. The brevet brigadier general went on, “He has orders to pick the best possible defensive position. We should be in it, wherever it proves to be, by nightfall.”

There
was
information worth having. “If we are, we’ll fight in the morning,” Roosevelt said.

“I expect we will,” Custer said. He hesitated, gnawing at his mustache once more. That was unlike him. After a moment, he went on, “I am thinking of dismounting my men and having them fight on foot. That would leave your regiment, Colonel, as our sole force on horseback. I shall rely on you to keep the British cavalry off our flanks.”

“We’ll do it, sir,” Roosevelt promised. “That’s the sort of job Winchesters were made for.” The Unauthorized Regiment would never have got close enough to the British infantry to engage them with the repeating rifles, whose effective range was not great. With Springfields, Custer and the Fifth Cavalry had slugged it out with the foot soldiers in red—and had come out on the short end of the fight.

“I shall rely on you, as I did in the engagement farther north,” Custer said. Roosevelt didn’t mention that his part of the force had driven back their opponents. Custer already knew that. He nodded absently to Roosevelt and then trotted south, to the regiment he had long commanded.

No sooner had he gone than Karl Jobst rode over to Roosevelt, a questioning look on his face. Roosevelt repeated what Custer had said. Jobst brightened. “Colonel Welton knows how to read a field as well as anyone I’ve ever seen,” he said. “He’ll pick the best place he can find for us to make a stand.”