How Few Remain (23 page)

And it was a legal order. No questions there. Custer muttered again, this time something Libbie would not have approved of. But Libbie was in Fort Dodge. Who could guess when he would have the pleasure of sleeping in the same bed with her again? He raised his voice and called out to his troopers: “We are ordered to Fort Carton, men, and to leave the defense of the plains to others.” Through the surprised exclamations the horsemen sent up, he went on, “We are ordered to reach the fort as quickly as we can. By the speed with which we arrive, I want to show General Pope what sort of men he is getting when he calls upon the Fifth Regiment.” The troopers raised a cheer and set out to the north with a will. Not all of them were disappointed to ride away from the dangers of combat.

Fort Carton lay by the confluence of the North Platte and South Platte, across the river from the Union Pacific tracks. From southern Kansas, Custer and his command reached it in a week. The pace told on the men—and even more on the horses. Had Custer had to go much farther, he could not have pressed so hard. But the surprise the sentries at the fort showed when he and the regiment arrived made up for a lot of weariness and discomfort.

He found himself ushered immediately into Brigadier General Pope’s office. Pope was a handsome man of about sixty, who wore his hair long—though not so long as Custer did—and had a fine silver beard. “I am altogether delighted to see you here so promptly, Colonel,” he said in a deep, rumbling voice; he’d had a reputation for bombast during the War of Secession, and hadn’t changed since.

“Reporting as ordered, sir,” Custer said. “The orders you sent me said I would receiver further information on coming here.” “And so you shall,” Pope declared. “Colonel, President Blaine
has named me military governor of Utah Territory. The Mormons there are this far—
this
far, Colonel”—he held thumb and forefinger together so they almost touched—”from open revolt against the authority of the United States. They have cut off rail service through the Territory, and telegraphy as well. I am charged with restoring them to their allegiance to the US A by any means necessary, and I intend to do exactly that.”

“Yes, sir. I see, sir.” Custer hadn’t heard anything about what the Mormons were up to, but he’d been in the field and then on a forced march. “Trying to take advantage of our being busy elsewhere, are they? A coward’s trick, sir, if you care anything for my opinion.”

“That is my precise view of the situation, Colonel,” Pope said, beaming. “I aim to bring them to heel and to keep them from perpetrating any such outrage in the future. We’ve tolerated their evil sensuality far too long, and what is our reward? Disloyalty. Well, thanks to it, they have placed themselves beyond the pale. I am assured on highest authority that whatever I do will be accepted, as long as they are reduced to obedience.”

“Very good, sir.” Custer breathed a silent sigh of relief that arguments left over from the War of Secession were not what had brought him here. Now to find out what had: “How does my regiment fit into your plan, sir?”

“I am assembling an army with which to occupy the Territory, especially the essential rail lines,” Pope said. Custer remembered his own recent thoughts on the importance of railroads. Pope went on, “You and your men have already shown you can do good work, and, as regulars, are more reliable than volunteer units. And I have noted your success with the Gatling gun. I aim to overawe the Mormons, to demonstrate how futile any resistance to my might must be. Many of them, no doubt, have rifles. But they have no artillery to speak of, and they have no Gatlings. Once they see the destructive power of these weapons, they will be less inclined to try anything rash, and more likely to suffer if they do.”

“Yes, sir!” Custer said enthusiastically. He hesitated, then asked, “And if they persist in their foolishness, sir? If they attempt to resist us by force of arms?”

“If they are so stupid, Colonel, then we wipe them off the face of the earth.” Pope sounded as if he looked forward to such a
result. “That’s what we’ve done with the savages who presumed to challenge our expansion over the western plains, and that’s what we’ll do with the Mormons. If they resist us, they deserve destruction even more than the redskins, for they are not primitive by nature, but rather men of our own stock corrupted by a wicked, perverse, and licentious doctrine.”

“Yes, sir,” Custer said again. Having come out of McClellan’s camp, with the natural bias of Little Mac’s staff officers against the Young Napoleon’s rivals, he had never imagined John Pope to be a man of such obvious and evident good sense. “If they transgress against the moral code universally recognized as correct and legitimate, on their heads be it.”

“Well said.” Pope was studying Custer with some of the same surprise with which Custer had eyed him. After coughing once or twice, the brigadier general said, “I hope you will forgive my saying this, Colonel, but I had not expected us to see so many things in so nearly the same light.”

“If the general will pardon me, sir, neither had I,” Custer answered. “I suspect we are both bound by the prejudices of the past.” Impulsively, Custer thrust out his hand. Pope clasped it. Custer went on, “The only enemies I recognize as such—the only enemies I have ever recognized as such—are the enemies of the United States of America.”

“I think we shall work very well together, then, for my attitude is the same in every particular,” Pope said. His smile, which showed a couple of missing teeth, was not altogether pleasant. “Do you know who happens to be in Salt Lake City at the moment, Colonel?” When Custer shook his head, Pope took no small pleasure in enlightening him: “Abraham Lincoln. I have it on good authority from the War Department.”

“Is he, by thunder?” Custer said. “Well, there’s the first good reason I’ve heard yet for letting the Mormons go their own way.”

John Pope stared at him, then threw back his head and roared Jovian laughter. “That’s good, Colonel; that’s very good indeed. It hadn’t occurred to me, but I suppose it’s true that those who were of General McClellan’s party have as much cause to deprecate the capacity of our former chief executive as I do myself.” Plainly, he’d forgotten nothing over the years: neither his rivalry with McClellan nor his humiliation at being so ignominiously sent to the sidelines after failing against Lee and Jackson.

Custer said, “Sir, I don’t know of any U.S. officer serving during the War of Secession who does not have good cause to deprecate the capacity of Honest Abe, such as it is. I do know that the only good thing I’ve had to say about the Republican Party in all the years since is that they’ve finally given us the chance to have another go at the Confederate States—and now the Mormons are trying to interfere with that.”

This time, Pope reached out to shake Custer’s hand. “Colonel, whatever hard feelings may have existed between us in the past, I am suddenly certain we shall work together very well indeed.” Custer beamed at him. He was suddenly certain of the same thing. Pope took a bottle and a couple of glasses from a desk drawer. He poured amber liquid into the glasses, then passed one to Custer. “Down with the Mormons, and with Abe Lincoln, too!”

“I’m normally teetotal, General, but how can I resist a toast like that?” Custer drank the whiskey. It burned his throat; he’d drunk hardly at all since the War of Secession. Manfully, he didn’t cough. In his stomach, it was warm.

    Philadelphia struck Alfred von Schlieffen as being a real city, a city with past, present, and future. Washington, D.C., had always given him the impression of existing in a world of its own, slightly skewed from the rest of the planet. Because it had sprung
ex nihilo
from the wilderness by government fiat, it lacked many of the irregularities and imperfections that made cities interesting and different from one another. And, existing as it had for a generation under the guns of the Confederate States, Washington had also felt impermanent, as if it was liable to be smashed to bits at any moment.

“And so it has been,” Schlieffen murmured. Some of the staff of the German ministry remained behind in Washington; the Confederates had not tried to occupy it, and their bombardment was desultory these days. Schlieffen and Kurd von Schlözer had come north, though, the military attaché to maintain his connections in the War Department, the minister to offer whatever services in the cause of peace he could to President Blaine and to represent the interests of Great Britain (though not those of France) with the U.S. government.

Grudgingly, Schlieffen conceded that the War Department’s move from Washington up to Philadelphia had gone more
smoothly than he’d expected. “But,” he said to the German minister after the two of them had settled into offices at the headquarters of the German consul in Philadelphia (a prominent sausage merchant), “but, I say, Your Excellency, they were madmen—madmen, I tell you—to delay so long. One well-placed Confederate shell and the United States would have had no War Department left.”

“I am not saying you are mistaken, Colonel Schlieffen.” Schlözer paused to make a production of lighting a large, smelly cigar—the larger and smellier the cigar, the better he liked it. “I am asking whether it would have made much difference in the way the United States are conducting the war if they were suddenly bereft of this department.”

Seeing General Rosecrans leaving Washington, Schlieffen had wondered the same thing. Now he considered the question objectively, as he had been trained to do while serving on the General Staff. “Do you know, Your Excellency, it is very possible that you are right. The general-in-chief has not the competence to serve in his capacity.”

“That is your judgment to make, Colonel, but it is not precisely what I meant in any case.” Kurd von Schlözer blew a meditative and rather lopsided smoke ring. “The individual American, or the small group of Americans, has far more ingenuity and initiative than the individual German or small group of Germans. But we are much better at harnessing many small groups to work together for a common purpose. The Americans might be better off without anyone trying to impose order on them, for they do not take to it well.”

“You have said several things on this order,” Schlieffen replied thoughtfully. “If you are correct, this country must be doomed to anarchy before too long. I would call that a pity, the Americans’ situation on this continent having so much in common with our own in Europe.”

“If they would set their house in order, they might make valuable allies,” Schlözer agreed. “They might make allies of sorts in any case, but they would be worth more if they regimented themselves better.”

“This is true of anyone,” Schlieffen said, as if quoting God’s law from Deuteronomy. Trying to be charitable, he went on, “Even we Prussians needed to put our house in order after Napoleon defeated us.”

“Defeat is often a salutary lesson,” Schlözer said, nodding. “Of course, a generation ago, the United States were defeated in the War of Secession, and seem to have learned little from that. They made an even greater point of antagonizing Britain and France this time than in the previous war.”

“I wonder what the Confederate States have learned,” Schlieffen said. “They are full of Americans, too.”

“They have learned at least one thing the United States have not,” the German minister replied. He waited for Schlieffen to make a polite interrogative noise, then went on, “They have learned to make alliances, and to make those alliances last. The folk of the United States are so cross-grained, this seems not to have occurred to them, and that the Confederate States can do it is certainly part of the resentment the United States bear against them.”

“Foolishness,” Schlieffen said, like a man judging the antics of a neighbor who, while a good enough fellow, could not keep from getting drunk three nights a week. “If the United States are not strong enough to do as they desire by themselves, they need allies of their own.”

“The last allies they had were France and Spain, in their war of rebellion against Britain,” Schlözer said. “Since then, they have lost the knack for making them. They lived alone behind the Atlantic, and, like a woodcutter alone in the forest, forgot how to make friends with others. Now, with the Confederate States bringing alliances to the American continent, the United States need to relearn the arts of diplomacy.” He sighed. “They have not yet taken this lesson to heart.”

“If they learn the lessons of war well enough, the lessons of diplomacy matter less,” Schlieffen said. One corner of his mouth twitched, a gesture of irony as dramatic as any he permitted himself. “They have, unfortunately, shown no great aptitude for the lessons of war, either.”

“It is a pity,” Kurd von Schlözer said.

“Also a pity that I have not yet been permitted to observe any of the war save the Confederate bombardment of Washington, and that observation was not thanks to the good offices of the government of the United States,” Schlieffen said.

“As you requested, Colonel, I have laid on the carriage for you today, so that you may go down to the War Department and protest once more,” Schlözer said.

“For this I thank you very much,” Schlieffen said. “It is important that I do observe and report my findings to the Fatherland. Weapons have advanced considerably since we fought the French. As with the late war between the Russians and the Turks, what we learn here will apply to any future conflicts of ours. The Russians and Turks were less than strategically astute, I must say, and so are the USA and CSA, but still—”

“I have in the past heard you speak well of Confederate strategy and tactics,” Schlözer said.

“Compared to those of the United States, yes,” Schlieffen said. “Compared to ours, no.” And then, because he was a judicious man, he added, “On the whole, no. Some of what they do shows a certain amount of insight, I admit.”

He took his leave of the German minister of the United States and went downstairs, where the carriage was indeed waiting for him. Gustav Kleinvogel’s sausage factory, and, therefore, the German consulate, and, therefore, for the time being, the German ministry, were in the appropriately named Germantown district, north of Philadelphia’s city center. It was also appropriate, Schlieffen thought as he got into the carriage, for politics and sausage making to be so inextricably mixed. As Bismarck had observed, in neither did it pay to examine too closely the ingredients that went into the final product.