How Few Remain (91 page)

Not quite quietly enough, one of Henry Welton’s officers muttered, “I wish to Jesus the Fifth
would
go back to Kansas, and get the devil out of
our
hair.”

Another considerable silence filled the room, this one not nearly so sympathetic nor companionable as the first. Custer might have blown up. Instead (and he saw Libbie looking at him in surprise), he sipped his whiskey and affected not to hear. When the Fifth did go back to Kansas, he would not be going back with it, at least not as regimental commander. That was too small a position for a brigadier general to hold. Maybe, as John Pope had been doing before being sent to Utah, he would take charge of several regiments. Maybe the War Department would send him back to Washington, to help clean up the mess there. Whether or not he did that, someone would have to take care of it.

And maybe, when 1884 rolled around, he would lay down his commission, take off his uniform, put on a civilian sack suit and top hat, and campaign not against the British or the Confederates or the Indians but against the manifest and manifold iniquities of the Republican Party. That, though, was not entirely up to him. He would have to see what—and whom—the leaders of the Democrats had in mind.

Henry Welton said, “General, when you do go back to Kansas, would you arrange to leave behind some of your Gatling-gun crews as a defense against another British invasion?”

“Why, certainly,” Custer said. “As a matter of fact …” He was about to say,
You’re welcome to every blasted one of them
. Before he could, he saw Libbie looking intently at him. That look reminded him of the slaughter the Gatlings had wreaked on the Kiowas. They might do the same again. Tom would surely have
thought so. He softened his words: “As a matter of fact, you can have several of them.”

“Thank you, sir.” By Welton’s tone, he’d expected Custer to give him all the contraptions.

Maybe the whiskey helped fuel Custer’s chuckle. Being too predictable didn’t do. “See me tomorrow, Colonel, and we’ll see if we can’t settle on how many can stay here and how many will go with us.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll do that,” Welton answered. “I do wish you all the best on your return to Kansas.” That was more polite than the way his junior officer had phrased it, but meant the same thing. Henry Welton did not care for having a bigger chief in the teepee with him.

When supper was over, Custer and Libbie made their way back to their quarters. It was cold outside, and had got colder since they’d come to the dining room. Inside, it was nice and warm. Libbie spoke one word: “Whiskey.” All at once, it was chillier in there than out in the snow. Custer wanted another drink.

XX

“Is it then agreed, General?” Alfred von Schlieffen asked. “You will send officers to Berlin to study the methods of the German Empire?”
You will send officers to Berlin to learn how to do things right?
was what he meant, but, although no diplomat, he knew better than to phrase it so.

Major General William S. Rosecrans scratched the end of his long nose, then nodded. “It is agreed, Colonel,” he told the German military attaché, “or rather, the president, the secretary of state, and I agree to it. The Royal Navy, unfortunately, has other ideas.”

Schlieffen said, “Had President Blaine made peace some time ago, the British would not have found it necessary the blockade of your coast to resume.”

“I am painfully aware of that,” Rosecrans said, and his voice did indeed hold pain. “The entire country, I would say, is painfully aware of that—the entire country, less one man.”

“What can be done to persuade him?” Schlieffen asked. “Even if he would for more war make ready, he cannot fight more now. He needs to win time in which the United States can get over this fight. So it has always been. So, I think, it will always be.”

“Do you know the fable about the goddamn donkey dithering between two bales of hay, Colonel?” Rosecrans asked. After Schlieffen had nodded, the U.S. general-in-chief went on, “Well, sir, James G. Blaine is that donkey, except both bales are poisoned. If you were one of my colonels instead of one of the Kaiser’s colonels, I’d say he was a prize horse’s ass, too. But you aren’t, so I won’t.”

“But you just—” Schlieffen broke off, realizing exactly what Rosecrans had done. The military attaché sniffed, as if he had a cold. He’d smelled liquor on Rosecrans’ breath before. He didn’t
smell it now. Anger and frustration could also drive a man into indiscretion.

Rosecrans went on, “One bale of hay is making peace with the bastards who beat us. But that means admitting they beat us, and he can’t stomach it. The other bale is going back to war with ’em. But if we do, the only thing that’ll happen is that they’ll lick us some more. He knows as much, but he keeps trying to sick it up, too. And that leaves him nothing to do but dither. Stupid fool’s got pretty good at it, too, wouldn’t you say? He’s had practice enough lately, anyway.”

“This dithering, though—” Schlieffen liked the sound of the word, and repeated it: “This dithering cannot last. President Blaine must remember, he is not the only one who can begin again the war. Come soon or come late, your enemies will force you to fight if you do not obey now. This blockade is only a small thing. Much more could come. Much more would come.”

Rosecrans’ wrinkles got deeper. “I know that, damn it. You’ll have a friend in Richmond—your attaché to the Confederate States, I mean.”

“Aber natürlich
, a colleague.” Schlieffen made the correction without noticing he’d done it. Since his wife’s death—to a large degree before his wife’s death, too—he’d so immersed himself in work that he had no time for friends.

“Then you’ll have got word from him, one way or another, that the Confederate States are moving troops toward the Potomac,” Rosecrans said.

“I had heard this, yes,” Schlieffen said, nodding. “I was not going to speak of it if you did not; such is not my place.”

“They’re moving a good many troops.” Rosecrans’ voice was sour, heavy. “The railroad makes it easy to move a lot of troops in a hurry—hell of a lot easier than moving ’em on roads knee-deep in mud would be. They aren’t coming up toward the border for their amusement, or for ours.”

“You are also moving troops, I know,” Schlieffen said.

“Oh, yes.” The U.S. general-in-chief bobbed his head up and down. “If they hit us, we’ll give ’em the best damn fight we can—don’t doubt it for a minute, Colonel, the best fight we can. But what you may not have heard”—he was almost whispering now, like a boy talking about some bugbear or hobgoblin—”is that General Jackson is back in Richmond.”

“No, I had not heard that,” Schlieffen said. On hearing it, he
heard also that Rosecrans was a beaten man. No matter how many men the USA moved down to the Potomac, Jackson would find a way to beat them, because Rosecrans thought Jackson would find a way to beat them. Someone—Schlieffen annoyed himself by not recalling whether it was Napoleon or Clausewitz—had wisely said that the moral was to the physical in war as three was to one. As Austrian and Prussian armies had for so long gone into battle against Bonaparte convinced before the fighting started that they would lose, so Rosecrans faced the prospect of confronting Jackson.

“Well, it’s true; God damn it to hell, it’s true,” Rosecrans said.

Schlieffen listened with half an ear, trying to remember which military genius had come up with the maxim. He couldn’t. Like a bit of gristle stuck between two back teeth, it would bother him till he did. He became aware that Rosecrans had said something else, something he’d missed entirely. “Excuse me, please?” he said, embarrassed at piling one professional failure on another.

“I said, a few friends in the world sure would come in handy about now,” Rosecrans repeated.

“For this war, you have no friends who can give you help,” Schlieffen said. “This was, I hear from every American, the idea of your President Washington. This man has not been your president for many years. Maybe it is time to think that matters have perhaps changed since his day.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m starting to think,” Rosecrans said savagely. “I’m starting to think Washington was nothing but a stinking Virginian, and the Rebs can damn well keep him and his ideas both.”

Schlieffen did not smile. He made a point of not smiling. Not only would smiling have been against his interest and his country’s, he was such a resolutely moderate man that smiling did not come easy to him anyhow. In his usual careful way, he said, “I hope you will also say this to your president and to your foreign minister—no, secretary of state you call him.”

“I’ve been saying it since things started going downhill without any brakes,” Rosecrans answered. “I’ve been saying it to anyone who will listen. Colonel, if you think President Blaine is inclined to listen to me, you had better think again. If you think he’s inclined to listen to anybody, you had better think again.”

“This is not good,” Schlieffen said.

The telephone jangled. Rosecrans jerked as if a horsefly had
bitten him. “Guess who that is,” he said with a martyred sigh. “He may not listen, but by Jesus he likes to talk.”

Schlieffen left the office of the general-in-chief. Behind him, Rosecrans bellowed into the newfangled instrument. As Schlieffen came out into the outer office, Captain Saul Berryman looked up from his paperwork with a martyred expression.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Oberst,”
he said.

“Good-bye, Captain,” Schlieffen answered. He had more than a little sympathy for Rosecrans’ adjutant, a capable young man trapped in a position where his ability did his nation less good than it might have in the field.

The calendar said spring was only a few days away. Freezing rain pelted down in spite of what the calendar said. Schlieffen hardly noticed as he walked to the carriage waiting for him and climbed in. His mind was elsewhere.
Napoleon or Clausewitz? Clausewitz or Napoleon?
That he could not make a fact he knew spring up and stand to attention infuriated him.

“Back to the consul’s establishment, Colonel?” the driver asked.

“Yes,” Schlieffen snapped. He paid no more attention to the driver’s chattering teeth than he had to the weather that caused them. The wheels of the carriage slipped a little on the icy paving stones, but then the toe calks on the horse’s shoes bit and the carriage began to roll.

Despite the weather, some sort of political demonstration was going on not far from the War Department building.
Socialists
, Schlieffen thought, seeing the red flags that hung sodden from their staffs. He’d seen more Socialist demonstrations than he liked back in Germany, but never till now one of this size in the United States.

When he reported what he had seen to Kurd von Schlözer, the German minister to the USA nodded. “One faction of Blaine’s own party has made common cause with the Socialists,” Schlözer said.

“Really? I had not heard.” Save as they affected military affairs, Schlieffen paid little attention to politics.

Schlözer gave him a look that said he should have heeded them more closely. “If we have no peace, soon we shall have fighting in the streets. With the Socialists now stronger, we may have revolution, Red revolution,” he said. “This is a land of revolution, and the Socialists—the new Socialists, I mean—know it and exploit it.”

“God forbid,” Schlieffen said. “If they try to raise a revolution, may they be met with iron and blood.” After using Bismarck’s famous phrase, he nodded to Schlözer. “You know I feel the same about the Socialist movement in the Fatherland.”

“Oh, yes, my dear Colonel, of course,” Schlözer said. “No man of property, no man of sense, could possibly say otherwise. But too many Americans, like too many Germans, have neither property nor sense. And the leaders of the Socialists here, like the leaders there, have an oversupply of cunning, if not of sense.”

“This has not been true in the United States,” Schlieffen said. “So much I know—otherwise, the Socialists here would have stirred up far more trouble than they have.”

“Now, though, men who really know something of politics have started waving red flags for purposes of their own,” the German minister said. “In matters of politics, Blaine is now as dead as a salt herring. Even if he could have been reelected before—which would have taken an act of God—he has no hope whatever with a large part of his party going over to the radicals. He must understand as much.”