How Few Remain (83 page)

Sorge licked his lips. He was tempted; Lincoln could see as much. The prospect of some actual power hit the newspaperman like a big slug of raw rotgut whiskey. Playing to win was a game
very different from playing to agitate. Slowly, Sorge said, “This is not something I can decide at once. Also, this is not something I can decide alone. I shall have to talk with some men here and wire others what you propose.” He dug through the rubbish on his desk till he found a pencil. After licking the point, he scribbled for a minute. Then he said, “If I understand you, what you have in mind is …”

“Yes, that’s right, nor near enough,” Lincoln said when the Socialist had finished reading back his notes. “Off the record, Mr. Sorge, how does it strike you?”

“I am more revolutionary than you; you are right about that,” Sorge answered. “But you are also right in saying we have not done as much as we might have. Maybe—maybe, I say—this will show us the way.”

“This is how the Republican Party was born, more than a generation ago,” Lincoln said. “Antislavery Whigs, Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, even a few Northern Democrats who couldn’t stomach the extension of slavery—we all joined together to work for a common goal. I think this new coalition may do the same in regard to wage slavery.”

“I hope you are right.” Sorge gave him a keen look. “President Blaine will call you a traitor, and, when he loses the next election, he will say it is for no other reason than that you and your followers left the party.”

“President Blaine is not in the habit of listening to what I say, no matter how hard a time I have convincing people that that is so,” Lincoln said, sadly remembering John Taylor’s miscalculation. “I see no reason why I should be obliged to take notice of what President Blaine says, especially when, from this day forth, we shall no longer be members of the same party.”

Friedrich Sorge pulled open a file cabinet behind his desk. When his hand came out of the drawer, it was clutching a whiskey bottle. More rummaging in the cabinet and in his desk produced two tumblers, mismatched and none too clean. He poured a couple of hefty dollops, handed one glass to Lincoln, and raised the other high. “To Socialism!” he said, and drank.

Lincoln drank, too. The whiskey was bad, but it was strong. “To Socialism,” he said.

    Brigadier General George Custer rode along bare yards south of the forty-ninth parallel of latitude, the border separating
Montana Territory from Canada, along with a troop from the Fifth Cavalry. Bare yards north of the border, not quite in rifle range but not far out of it, a troop of red-coated British cavalrymen rode along dogging his trail. Neither side had fired a shot since General Gordon took his mutilated army of invasion back over the border. Both sides were ready. For his part, Custer was eager.

Several reporters rode along with the Fifth Cavalry. One of them, an eager young fellow named Worth, asked, “How does it feel, General, to have your brevet rank made permanent?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Charlie, it beats the hell out of going to the dentist to get a tooth yanked,” Custer quipped. Charlie Worth and the rest of the reporters laughed appreciatively. Custer held up a hand to show he wasn’t through. The newspapermen fell silent, to hear what other pearls of wisdom might fall from his lips. He went on in a serious, even a bombastic, vein: “My only regret is that the promotion comes as the result of a battle from which we could not seize the full fruits of victory because of the cease-fire’s having gone into effect. Absent that, we should have pursued to destruction the ruffians who dared desecrate our sacred soil.”

Awkwardly, the reporters scribbled as they rode. “God damn, but he gives good copy,” one of them muttered to another in admiring tones. The second man nodded. Custer didn’t think he was supposed to hear. His chest swelled with pride. Truly he was the hero of the hour.

He waved to Charlie Worth. The reporter, honored at being shown such a confidence, rode up close to him. Custer said, “Do you mind if I make another foraging run amongst your cigars, Charlie?”

“Why, not at all, General.” Worth held out a leather cigar case. Custer took a fat stogie from it and reined in so he could strike a match. He coughed a couple of times after he got the cigar going and sucked smoke into his mouth. Before the battle by the Teton River, the only tobacco he’d smoked had been in a few peace pipes handed him by the leaders of Indian tribes he’d smashed.

A reporter asked, “What is your view of the cease-fire, General?”

“I regret that it came when it did, as it prevented us from punishing the British as they so richly deserved,” Custer replied. “I also regret it even more on general principles, for it has humiliated us before the nations of the world for the second time in a space of less than twenty years.”

His stomach knotted at the thought. He had loved his country longer and more faithfully than he had loved his wife. Now, as in 1862, the United States were going down to mortifying defeat, and that despite his victory, a victory which, had he learned of the cease-fire in time, would never have happened. When he’d married Libbie after the War of Secession, he’d promised to stop cursing and stop drinking. He’d held to the promise till he learned his victory counted for nothing. He’d stayed drunk for days after that, and let out all the oaths he had in him. He was still drinking, he was still swearing, and he’d taken up smoking for good measure.

Camp that evening brought everybody up close to everybody else; men stayed near the greasewood fires for warmth. To the north, the campfires of the troop of British cavalry were a constellation of brightly twinkling stars on the horizon.

Custer and his troopers wolfed down salt pork and hardtack. Some of them crumbled the biscuits and fried them in the grease from the pork, of which there was always an adequate supply. “How do you people eat this stuff day after day, week after week, and live to tell the tale?” one of the reporters asked.

“So sorry, boys,” Custer said. “Next time you ride along with us, we’ll make sure we cater the affair from Denver.”

That got a round of laughter, as he’d hoped it would. Then one of the reporters—it was Charlie Worth, damn him—asked, “How did Colonel Roosevelt and the Unauthorized Regiment take to Army rations?”

“I’m afraid I really don’t know,” Custer answered, his voice all at once as cool as the breeze hissing down from the north. “I never discussed that with Mr. Roosevelt.” He laid the tiniest bit of stress on the civilian title.

The reporters, of course, made their living noticing tiny stresses. “Come on, General,” one of them said. “What do you really think of Colonel Roosevelt”—he laid the tiniest bit of stress on the military title—”as a soldier? What do you think of the men of the Unauthorized Regiment as soldiers?”

“Have mercy, gentlemen,” Custer said. “I’ve answered those same questions a lot of times over the past weeks.”
And I’d like it a lot better if you asked them a damned sight less often
. Having to share the limelight with the boy colonel gave him worse dyspepsia than salt pork and hardtack gave the reporters.

They wouldn’t leave him alone. He might have known they wouldn’t leave him alone. “Come on, General,” Charlie Worth coaxed. “Give it to us straight. You can do that.”

“I can only repeat what I’ve said a great number of times,” Custer answered: “Colonel Roosevelt and his volunteers were gifted, patriotic amateur soldiers, and fought as well as men of that sort could be expected to fight.” Every word of that was true. If the reporters judged the tone to be ever so little on the slighting side, was that his fault?

One of the newspapermen said, “General, isn’t it a fact that the Unauthorized Regiment performed better against the limeys than the Fifth Cavalry did?”

“Like hell it’s a fact,” Custer snarled, “and if Roosevelt has been saying that, he’s a damned glory-sniffing liar.”

“No, General, I never heard it from him,” the reporter said hastily. “But didn’t the Unauthorized Regiment fight Gordon’s cavalry to a draw and then chase the redcoats halfway back to Canada after the what-do-you-call-’ems—the Gatling guns—chewed them to smithereens?”

“The Unauthorized Regiment,” Custer said, as if lecturing on strategy at West Point to a class of idiots, “engaged the enemy forces pursuant to my orders. Had I placed them in the center and us on the wings, we would have done as well against the British cavalry, but they would have fared far worse against Gordon’s foot. Since my men were fighting dismounted at the battle by the Teton, they were not so well positioned to pursue as were the Volunteers.”

All that was true, too. Had Theodore Roosevelt been sitting by the campfire, Custer was sure he would have agreed with every word. (Custer was also sure he would have tried to aggrandize himself one way or another, though; that trait being acutely developed in him, he had an eagle eye for spotting it in others.) But reporters were not after agreement. Agreement didn’t sell papers. Argument did. “What about the—Gatterling?—guns, General?” another news hawk asked.

“Gatling guns,” Custer corrected. “Gatling.”
Idiots indeed
, he thought. “Well, what about them? Even if we hadn’t had a one of them, Gordon’s men hadn’t a prayer of carrying our position.”

He thought that was true, too, but he wasn’t quite so sure. Bold as he was, he wouldn’t have cared to mount an infantry assault on
men in earthworks. Even in the War of Secession, that sort of business had proved hideously expensive. With the right troops, though—good American boys, not those limey bastards—he might have had a go of it.

Charlie Worth said, “I hear tell Roosevelt says those Gatling guns saved your bacon in that fight—chewed the Englishmen up and spit ’em out again.”

“This being a free country, Mr. Roosevelt may say whatever he likes,” Custer answered. If you prefer the word of a man who became a soldier only because he was rich enough to buy himself a regiment over that of one who has devoted his entire life to the service of his country, you may do so, but I daresay no one will take you seriously afterwards.”

That flattened young Worth, who gulped his coffee down in a hurry so he could get a big tin cup in front of his red face. But one of the other men asked, “Colonel Welton, down at Fort Benton, tells it pretty much the same way, doesn’t he?”

“I haven’t heard what Henry has to say,” Custer replied. “I will note that, while I and many of the officers of my regiment were promoted for our work by the Teton, Colonel Welton remains a colonel. In this you have the War Department’s judgment on the value of our respective contributions.”

The reporters scrawled furiously. One of them muttered, “When the devil are we going to be able to get to a telegraph clicker?”

Charlie Worth came up with a question no one else had asked Custer: “Andrew Jackson licked the British after the War of 1812 was over, and he ended up president of the United States. Now that you’ve done the same thing in this war, would you like to end up the same way?”

“Why, Charlie, the notion never entered my mind till this moment,” Custer answered truthfully. Also truthfully, he went on, “Now that it is in there, I have to tell you I like it.” The reporters laughed.

“You’re a Democrat, aren’t you, General?” somebody asked.

“What sensible man isn’t?” Custer returned. “Did I hear rightly that Lincoln has shown the Republicans’ true colors by going Communard?” Several reporters assured him he had heard rightly. Sadly, he shook his head. “If Blaine weren’t in the White House, General Pope could have done the country a good turn by
hanging old Honest Abe. He’ll cause more trouble now, mark my words.”

“Lots of Democratic politicians who could run for president,” Charlie Worth observed. “We don’t have so many soldiers who know how to win battles. What if they want you to stay in the Army?”

“I shall serve the United States wherever that service can lend the greatest aid,” Custer declared, his tone grandiloquent and, on the whole, sincere.

    Winter was on the way to Sonora and Chihuahua. That was obvious to Jeb Stuart: instead of being hotter than blazes, the weather was all the way down to warm. As for Stuart himself, he was on the way to El Paso, which suited him down to the ground.

He turned in the saddle and spoke to Major Horatio Sellers: “Won’t it be fine, getting to spend Christmas somewhere near the edge of civilization?”

“Yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp agreed enthusiastically. “If El Paso isn’t civilization, at least it’s on the railroad line to it.”

“I like that,” Stuart said. “It’s true both literally and metaphorically. We are going to have to build a line through to the Pacific just as fast as we can scrape together the capital. Until we have one, and the feeder lines down to the city of Chihuahua and to Hermosillo, we aren’t going to be able to control these provinces … Territories … states … whatever we finally call them.”

“That’s true, sir.” Major Sellers nodded. “I expect we’ll end up with a Pacific Squadron in the Navy, too, and we’ll also need the railroad to keep that supplied.” He chuckled. “The damnyankees will love having us for neighbors, too; you can just bet on it.”

“One of the reasons they fought this war was to keep our frontier from touching the Pacific; no doubt about that,” Stuart said. “But they lost, and now they’ll have to make the best of it.”

“Serves them right for starting the fight in the first place,” Sellers said. “You ask me, sir, President Longstreet ought to squeeze an indemnity out of them that would make their eyes pop. Paying for a railroad would be a lot easier then.”

“Old Pete knows what he’s doing—you can doubt a lot of things, Major, but you’d better think twice before you doubt that,” Stuart said. “My guess is, he reckons the United States hate us plenty now that we’ve licked them twice. Piling on an indemnity
would be adding insult to injury: that’s how he’d see it, I think.”

Before Major Sellers could reply, a commotion to the rear made him and Stuart both look over their shoulders. Stuart soon heard men calling out his name. He waved his hat and shouted to show where he was.

A grimy, sweaty rider on a lathered horse came pounding up to him. “General Stuart, sir,” the Confederate trooper gasped, “everything’s gone to hell back in Cananea, sir.”