How Few Remain (79 page)

“Good,” Roosevelt said. A moment later, he wished his adjutant had put it a different way. Making a stand implied that defeat carried disaster in its wake. That was probably true here, but he would sooner not have been reminded of it.

As Brigadier General Custer had said, they met Henry Welton about four that afternoon. And, as Lieutenant Jobst had said, Welton did indeed know how to read a field. He’d chosen to defend the forward slope of a low, gentle rise. No one could possibly approach without being seen and fired upon from as far out as rifles could reach.

And not only had he picked a good position, he’d improved on what nature provided. His men had dug three long trenches and heaped up in front of them the dirt they’d shoveled out. The trenches and breastworks didn’t look like much from the front. Roosevelt wondered if they were worth the labor they’d cost.

So did Custer, who was arguing with Welton as Roosevelt rode up. Welton looked stubborn. “Sir,” he was saying, “from everything I saw in the War of Secession, any protection is a lot better than just standing out in the open and blazing away at the bastards on the other side.”

“All right, all right.” Custer threw his hands in the air. “Have it your way, Henry. The dashed things are dug, and you can’t very well undig them. But while you’ve been building like beavers, we’ve been fighting like fiends.”

“Yes, sir, I know that,” Henry Welton said. He nodded to Roosevelt. “And was I right about the Unauthorized Regiment?”

“They fought well, I’ll not deny it,” Custer replied. Theodore Roosevelt drew himself up straight at the praise. He thought his troopers deserved even better than that; they’d outfought the Regulars seven ways from Sunday. But, whatever else Custer might have been about to say, he didn’t say it. Instead, he stared and
pointed. “Colonel, you’ve posted all my damned”—he didn’t bother with
dashed;
he was exercised—”coffee mills in the forward trench? Don’t you think we’d be better off with riflemen there?”

“Sir, I thought we might as well use the Gatling guns, since we’ve got them,” Welton answered. Roosevelt stared at them with interest; he’d never seen one before. They did look rather like a cross between a cannon and a coffee mill. Welton went on, “If they perform as advertised, they should be well forward, I think. If they don’t, we can always bring riflemen in alongside them.”

“They’re the only artillery we’ve got,” Custer said worriedly. “That means they belong in the rear.” He looked around—probably for his brother, Roosevelt thought. He did not see Tom Custer. He would never see Tom Custer again. Not seeing him, the brevet brigadier general settled for Roosevelt. “What’s your opinion in this matter, Colonel?”

“They’re already emplaced,” Roosevelt answered, “and they’re not quite like artillery, are they, sir? If you’re asking me, I say we leave them.”

Custer yielded, as he likely would not have done with Tom to back him: “Have it your way, then. If they don’t work, it doesn’t matter where in creation they are. I reckon that likely, myself. As you say, though, Colonel Welton, we can always bring up riflemen.”

“Sir, with your permission, I’m going to throw out a wide net of cavalry pickets, to make sure the British don’t try anything in the night,” Roosevelt said. “When the real fight comes, I’ll keep them off your flanks.”

“That’s what you’re here for,” Custer agreed. “Go do it.” It wasn’t quite a summary dismissal, but it was close. Roosevelt saluted and stomped off.

Occasional rifle shots punctuated the night, as American and British scouting parties collided in the darkness. The British weren’t trying a night attack; their pickets rode out ahead of their main force to keep the Americans from unexpectedly descending on them. Roosevelt snatched a few hours of fitful sleep, interrupted time and again by riders coming in to report.

He drank hot, strong, vile coffee before sunup as he deployed his men. He commanded the right, as he had in the earlier fight against General Gordon’s army. The left wing was largely on its
own; he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep in touch with it once the fighting started.

And it would start soon. When men found targets they could actually see, cavalry skirmishing picked up in a hurry. On came the British infantry, deployed in line of battle, rolling straight toward the position Custer and Welton were defending. Roosevelt’s men tried without much luck to delay them; their British counterparts held them off.

Behind the British line, the field guns accompanying the men in red opened up on the U.S. entrenchments. Custer and Welton had nothing with which they could reply; the Gatlings couldn’t come close to reaching those cannon. In the trenches, the Regulars, infantry and dismounted cavalry alike, took what the enemy dished out. Roosevelt’s respect for them grew. That had to be harder than fighting in a battle where they could strike back at what was tormenting them.

“Once General Gordon has us properly softened up, or thinks he has, he’ll send in the infantry,” Karl Jobst said.

Gordon let the two field guns pound away at the entrenchments for half an hour, his foot soldiers pausing just outside rifle range. Then the cannon fell silent. Thin in the distance, a bugle rang out. The British infantry lowered their bayoneted rifles, as the cavalry had lowered their lances. The bugle resounded once more. The Englishmen let out a great, wordless shout and marched forward.

“What a bully show!” Roosevelt exclaimed. “Enemies they may be, but they are splendid men.” He raised his Winchester to his shoulder and tried at very long range to pot some of those splendid men.

Unlike the luckless lancers, the British infantry fired as they advanced; their breechloaders made reloading on the move, which had been next to impossible during the War of Secession, quick and easy. A cloud of smoke rose above them, thicker and thicker with every forward stride they took.

Smoke rose from the trenches where the bluecoats crouched, too. Englishmen began falling. Their comrades filled their places. No doubt Americans were falling, too, but Roosevelt couldn’t see that. What he could see was the red British wave flowing forward, steady and resistless as the tide. The redcoats drew within four hundred yards of the frontmost entrenchment, within three hundred …

“They’re going to break in!” Roosevelt cried in bitter pain.

And then, through the din of the rifles, he heard a sound like none he’d ever known before, a fierce, explosive snarl that might have been a giant clearing his throat, and clearing it, and clearing it… . Amazing puffs of smoke blossomed in the center of the U.S. front line. “The Gatlings!” Karl Jobst yelled, somewhere between astonishment and ecstasy.

Roosevelt had no words, only awe. In what seemed the twinkling of an eye and was perhaps two or three minutes of actual time, those steadfast British lines abruptly ceased to exist, in much the same way as a slab of ice will rot when hot water pours over it. For the first half of that time, the infantry kept trying to go forward in the face of fire unlike anything they’d ever met or imagined. They dropped and dropped and dropped. Not one of them got within a hundred yards of the trench. After that, the foot soldiers, those of them still on their feet, realized the thing could not be done. They also realized they were dead men if they didn’t get out of range of the terrible stream of bullets pouring from the Gatling guns.

It was not a retreat. Custer had led a retreat. It was a rout, a panic-stricken flight, a stampede. The British, surely, were as steady in the face of familiar danger as any men ever born. In the face of the snarling unknown, they broke. Some of them—Roosevelt took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes to be sure he was seeing straight—threw away their rifles to run the faster.

He spent only a little while luxuriating in amazement. Then he started thinking like a soldier again. “After them!” he shouted. “After them, by jingo! They thought they’d run over us like a train, did they? Well, they’ve just been train-wrecked, boys. Now we haul away the rubbish.”

Now his men, cheering as if their throats would burst, pressed hard upon the fleeing foe. The British horse, which had been screening an advance, suddenly had to try to screen a broken army falling back. The enemy’s field guns fired a few rounds of canister before the men of the Unauthorized Regiment, coming at them from three directions at once, overran them and killed their crews.

“Captured guns,” Lieutenant Jobst said cheerfully. “That’s the true measure of victory. Has been as long as cannons have gone to war.”

“After them!” Roosevelt shouted. “We don’t want to let even a single one get away. No, maybe one, to tell his pals up in Canada
what it means to invade the United States.” He fired at an English cavalryman and knocked him out of the saddle. “Easy as shooting pronghorns!” he exulted.

North over the prairie went the pursuit, as it had gone south the day before. The troopers of the Unauthorized Regiment took rifles away from slightly wounded or exhausted Englishmen they passed and rode on after the main body. Roosevelt didn’t think he had enough men to beat them, but they were so shaken he intended to try if he got the chance. They might all throw down their guns and give up at a show of force.

And then, from behind, he heard not one but several buglers blowing Halt. His men looked at one another in surprise, but most, obedient to the training he’d drilled into them, reined in. “No!” he raged. “God damn it, no! I didn’t order that! I’ll kill the idiot who ordered that. We’ve got ’em licked to a faretheewell.”

“Halt!” a great voice shouted: George Custer, who must have almost killed his horse catching up to Roosevelt’s men. To Roosevelt’s amazement, tears streaked Custer’s cheeks, not just tears of grief but tears of fury. To his further amazement, Custer reeked of whiskey from twenty feet away. “Halt, damn it to fucking hell!” he shouted again.

“What’s wrong, sir?” Roosevelt demanded.

“Wrong? I’ll show you what’s wrong!” Custer waved a sheet of paper. “What’s wrong is, a cease-fire with the English sons of bitches went into effect yesterday, only we didn’t know it. We just licked the boots off the shitty limeys, we just got my brother killed, in a battle we never should have fought, and now we have to let what’s left of the bastards go home. I haven’t had a drink of liquor, save for medicinal purposes, in almost twenty years—not since before I married Libbie. Do you wonder, Roosevelt, do you wonder that I got myself lit up riding after you?”

“No, sir,” Roosevelt said, and then, “Hell, no, sir.” After a moment, he added, “Is anything left in your bottle, sir?”

“Not a drop,” Custer answered. “Not a single fucking drop.”

“Too bad,” Roosevelt said. “In that case, I’ll just have to find my own.”

    Frederick Douglass got off the train in Rochester. His wife and son were the only black faces on the platform. Anna Douglass burst into tears when she saw him. Lewis folded him into a hard,
muscular embrace. “Good to have you home, Father,” he said. “Let me take your bag there.”

“Thank you, my boy,” Douglass said. “Believe you me, it is very, very good to be home again.” He gave Anna a gentle kiss, then stood up tall and straight before her. “As you see, my dear, I have come through all of it unscathed.”

“Don’t sound so proud of yourself,” she said sharply. “I reckon that was the Lord’s doin’, a whole lot more’n it was yours.”

He looked down at the planks of the platform floor. “Since I cannot possibly argue with you, I shall not even try. The Lord took me through the valley of the shadow of death, but He chose to let me walk out the other side safe. For that, I can only praise His name.”

Anna nodded, satisfied. Lewis Douglass asked the question his father had known he would ask: “What was it like, sir, coming up before Stonewall Jackson?” A frown twisted his strong features; he laughed ruefully. “If working with you on the newspaper hasn’t yet taught me the futility of asking what something is like and then expecting to feel the answer as did the man who had the experience, I don’t suppose it ever will.”

“If it hasn’t yet taught me that futility, why should it have done so with you?” Douglass returned. “What was it like? It was frightening.” He held up a hand before his son or wife could speak. “Not in the way you think, either. It was frightening because I found myself in the presence of a man both formidable and, I judge, good, but one who believes deep in his heart in things utterly antithetical to those in which I believe, and who reasons with unfailing logic from his false premises.” He shivered. “It was, in every sense of the word, alarming.”

They all walked out toward the carriage, Anna on Frederick’s arm. As Lewis put the last suitcase behind the seat, he remarked, “You have said before that it is possible for a slaveholder to be a good man.”

“Yes.” Douglass helped his wife up, then climbed aboard himself and sat beside her. “It is possible,” he went on as Lewis took the reins. “It is possible, but it is not easy. Jackson … surprised me.”

“I reckon you surprised him, too.” Anna patted her husband’s arm.

“I hope I did. I rather think I did,” Douglass said. “And I have what may be great news: in Chicago, I heard that the Confederates are—no, may be—planning to manumit their bondsmen
once the war, now suspended, is truly ended, this being a
quid pro quo
in return for their allies’ assistance against the United States.”

“Wonderful news, if true,” Lewis said. “We’ve heard the like now and again down through the years, though, and nothing ever came of it. Who told you this time, Father? Lincoln?”

“No, John Hay,” Douglass answered. “Since he was minister to the Confederate States, he should know whereof he speaks. Lincoln had other concerns.” He let out a bitter sigh. “Lincoln has had other concerns than the Negro before, which I say though he is and has always been my friend. In the summer of 1862, he drafted a proclamation emancipating all slaves within the territory of the Confederate States, then waited for a U.S. victory to issue it, lest it be seen as a measure of desperation rather than one of policy. The victory never came, and, when our straits indeed grew desperate, he let that paper languish, having been convinced it was by then too late to do any good. I shall go to my grave convinced he was mistaken.”