The Veteran

by Frederick Forsyth

  The reason for the week’s delay was simple: one week was the mourning period for their own dead from the fight with Crook on the 17th, and so the celebration could only take place after seven days. On the morning of the 25th the warriors were recovering from the dancing of the previous evening. They had not gone hunting and they were still in full body paint.

  Even so, Craig realized this was no sleeping village like that of Black Kettle by the Washita. It was past noon when Custer split his forces for the last and lethal time.

  The scout watched Major Reno depart, heading down the creek towards the river crossing. At the head of B Company Captain Acton gave a glance at the scout he had virtually condemned to die, permitted himself a thin smile and rode on. Behind him Sergeant Braddock sneered at Craig as he went by. Within two hours both would be dead and the remnants of Reno’s three companies marooned on a hilltop trying to hold out until Custer could come back and relieve them. But Custer never came back and it was General Terry who would rescue them two days later.

  Craig watched another 150 of the shrinking force head off down the creek. Though he was not a soldier, he had little faith in them. A full 30 per cent of Custer’s men were raw recruits with minimal training. Some could just about manage their horses when they were calm, but would lose control in combat. Others could hardly manage their Springfield rifles.

  Another 40 per cent, though of longer careers, had never fired a shot in anger at an Indian, nor met them in skirmish, and many had never even seen one except docile and cowed on a reservation. He wondered how they would react when a howling, painted horde of warriors came sweeping out to defend their women and children. He had the direst premonition and it turned out to be right. But by then it would be far too late.

  There was a final factor he knew Custer had refused to bear in mind. Contrary to legend, Plains Indians held life to be sacred, not cheap. Even on the warpath they refused to take heavy casualties and after losing two or three of their best and bravest warriors would usually disengage. But Custer was attacking their parents, wives and children. Honour alone would forbid the menfolk to cease to fight until the last wasichu was dead. There couldbenomercy.

  As the dust cloud of Reno’s three companies disappeared down the creek Custer ordered the baggage train to stay put, guarded by one company of his remaining six. With the others, E, C, L, I and F, he turned towards the north with the range of hills keeping him invisible to the Indians in the valley of the river, but they were also invisible to him.

  He called over to the provost-sergeant, ‘Bring the prisoner along. He can see what happens to his friends when the Seventh gets among them.’

  Then he turned and trotted off to the north. The five companies fell in behind him, about 250 men in all. Craig realized Custer still did not perceive the danger, for he was bringing three civilians with him to watch the fun. One was the wispy, bespectacled journalist Mark Kellogg. More to the point, Custer had two young relatives along, for whom he must have felt responsible. One was his youngest brother, Boston Custer, aged nineteen, and the other was a sixteen-year-old nephew, Autie Reed.

  The men were trotting two abreast, in a line nearly half a mile long. Behind Custer rode his adjutant, Captain Cooke, and behind him the general’s orderly of the day, Trooper John Martin, who was also the regimental bugler. His real name was Giuseppe Martino; he was an Italian immigrant who had once been a butler for Garibaldi, and he still had only a limited command of English. Sergeant Lewis and the tethered Ben Craig were thirty feet behind Custer.

  As they rode up into the hills, still keeping below the crest, they could turn in their saddles and see Major Reno and his men crossing the Little Bighorn before attacking from the south. At this point Custer, noticing the glum faces of his Crow and Ree scouts, invited them to turn and ride back. This they did without waiting for a second invitation. They survived.

  The troops rode like this for three miles until they finally cleared the crest to their left and could at last look down into the valley. Craig heard a sharp intake of breath from the big sergeant who held his horse’s bridle and the murmured words: ‘Sweet Jesus.’ The far bank of the river was a great ocean of teepees.

  Even at that distance Craig could make out the shapes of the lodges and the colours in which they were decorated, identifying the tribes. There were six separate villages.

  When the Plains Indians travelled, they did so in column, tribe by tribe. When they stopped to camp, they settled in separate villages. Thus the whole encampment was long and narrow, six circles flowing down the riverbank on the other side of the water.

  They had been travelling north when they had stopped several days earlier. The honour of breaking trail had been given to the Northern Cheyenne, so their village was the northernmost. Next to them came their closest allies, the Oglala Sioux. Close by the Oglala were the Sans Arc Sioux and then the Blackfeet. Second from the south were camped the Minneconjou and at the far south, even then being attacked by Major Reno, was the tail of the column, the village of the Hunkpapa, whose chief and supreme medicine man of the Sioux was the veteran Sitting Bull.

  There were others present, lodged with their nearest relatives, elements of the Santee, Brulé and Assiniboin Sioux. What the Seventh could not see, now blotted out by the hills, was that Major Reno’s attack on the southern end of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa tribe was a catastrophe. The Hunkpapa had come swarming out of their lodges, many mounted and all fully armed, and counter-attacked.

  It was almost two in the afternoon. Reno’s men had been easily and skilfully outflanked to their left by pony-mounted warriors riding round them on the prairie and, with their flank turned, were being forced back into a stand of cottonwoods by the riverbank they had just crossed.

  Many had dismounted from their horses in the trees, others had lost control and been thrown off. Some had lost their rifles, which the Hunkpapa gleefully took. Within minutes the remainder would have to stream back across the same river and take refuge on a hilltop, there to endure a thirty-six-hour siege.

  General Custer surveyed what he could see, and from a few yards away Craig studied the great Indian-fighter. There were squaws and children to be seen about the camps but no warriors. Custer thought this a nice surprise. Craig heard him call to the company commanders, who had grouped round him. ‘We will go down and make a crossing and capture the village.’

  Then he summoned Captain Cooke and dictated a message. It was to, of all people, Captain Benteen, whom he had long sent off into the wilderness. The message Cooke scribbled said: ‘Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs.’ He meant extra ammunition. This he gave to the bugler, Martino, who would live to tell the tale.

  The Italian by a miracle did find Benteen, because that canny officer had given up his wild goose chase in the badlands, returned to the creek, and eventually joined Reno on the besieged hill. But by then there was no question of breaking through to the doomed Custer.

  As Martino cantered back down the trail, Craig turned in his saddle to watch him. He saw twenty-four of Captain Yates’s F Company also turn round and simply ride off without orders. No-one tried to stop them. Craig glanced back at Custer, up ahead. Did nothing penetrate that peacock head?

  The general stood in his stirrups, raised his cream hat above his head and called to his troops, ‘Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them.’

  These were the last words the departing Italian heard, and he later reported them to the inquiry. Craig noticed that, like so many with fine auburn hair, Custer at thirty-six was developing a bald patch. Although nicknamed ‘Long Hair’ by the Indians, he had had it cropped short for the summer campaign. Perhaps for this reason the Oglala squaws later could not recognize him where he fell, and the warriors did not think him worth scalping.

  After his salutation Custer spurred his horse forward and the remaining 210 men followed. The ground ahead, leading down to the riverbank, was shallower and easier for a downhill charge. Half a mile later the column wheeled left, company by company,
to descend the slope, ford the river and attack. At this point the Cheyenne village exploded.

  The warriors came out like a cloud of hornets, painted in their battle colours, most naked from the waist up, screaming their high-pitched ‘yip yip yip’ cries as they rode to the river, splashed across and came up the eastern bank towards the five companies. The bluecoats stopped in their tracks.

  Beside Craig, Sergeant Lewis reined in, and Craig heard again the muttered ‘Sweet Jesus’. Hardly were they across the river than the Cheyenne threw themselves from their ponies and came forward and upward on foot, sinking into the long grass to become invisible, rising, running a few paces and dropping again. The first arrows began to fall among the cavalry. One buried itself in the flank of a horse, which whinnied in pain, rearing high and throwing its rider.

  ‘Dismount. Horses to the rear.’

  The shout was from Custer, and no-one needed a second bidding. Craig watched some of the soldiers unholster their Colt .45s, shoot their own horse straight through the forehead, and then use the body as a rampart. They were the smart ones.

  There was no defensive cover on that hill. Not a rock or boulder behind which to hide. As the men jumped to the ground a few were detached from each company to take a dozen mounts by the bridle and run them back to the crest of the ridge. Sergeant Lewis turned both his and Craig’s horse and cantered them back to the ridge. There they joined the milling mob of cavalry mounts being held by a score of troopers. Before long the horses began to scent the Indians. They skittered and reared, pulling their handlers with them. From the saddle Lewis and Craig watched. After the first rush, the battle went quiet. But the Indians were not finished; they were simply moving to surround.

  It was said later that the Sioux destroyed Custer that day. Not so. The Cheyenne did most of the frontal assault. Their cousins the Oglala Sioux deferred to them the honour of defending their own village, which would have been the first in Custer’s attack, and acted in an assisting capacity, moving round the flanks to cut off any retreat. From his vantage point Craig could see the Oglala slipping through the long grass far to the left and right. Within twenty minutes there was no hope of retreat. The zipping bullets and hissing arrows began to fall closer. One of the horse-handlers took a falling arrow in the base of the throat and fell, choking and screaming.

  The Indians had some rifles and even a few old flintlocks, but not many. By the end of the afternoon they would be substantially rearmed with new Springfields and Colts. Mainly, they used arrows, which for them had two advantages. The bow is a silent weapon; it does not give away the position of the firer. Many bluecoats died that afternoon with an arrow in the chest and never saw a target. The other advantage was that clouds of arrows could be fired high in the sky, to fall almost vertically on the cavalrymen. The effect was particularly damning on the horses. Within sixty minutes a dozen mounts had been hit by falling arrows. They broke away from the handlers, tearing the reins from the men’s grasp, and galloped away down the trail. The others, uninjured, followed their example. Long before the men were dead, the horses were gone and all hope of escape gone with them. Panic began to run like wildfire through the crouching troopers. The few veteran officers and NCOs simply lost control.

  The Cheyenne village belonged to Little Wolf, but by chance he was missing. When he returned an hour too late for the fight, he was roundly abused for not being there. In fact, he was the one leading the scout party that had been tracking Custer up the Rosebud and across the divide to the Little Bighorn.

  In his absence leadership went to the next senior warrior, a visitor from the Southern Cheyenne called Lame White Man. He was in his mid-thirties, neither lame nor white. When a group of thirty troopers under an officer tried to make a break towards the river, he charged them alone, crushing their morale and dying a hero in the process. None of those thirty struggled back to the rings on the slope. Watching them die, their companions lost hope of survival.

  From above, Lewis and Craig could hear the sounds of men praying and crying as they faced their death. One trooper, little more than a boy and blubbering like a baby, broke circle and came up the hill seeking one of the last two horses. Within seconds four arrows thudded into his back and he went down twitching.

  The two men on horses were now within range, and several arrows whistled past. Perhaps fifty to a hundred men were still left alive on the slope below, but half of them must have taken an arrow or a bullet. Sometimes a warrior, seeking personal honour, would mount up and charge straight past the crouching soldiers, defying a hail of shot and, the marksmanship being what it was, riding away unharmed but covered in glory. And always the high-pitched screams.

  Every soldier there thought they were war cries. Craig knew better. The charging Indian’s cry was not for battle but for death, his own. He was simply confiding his soul to the care of the Everywhere Spirit.

  But what really destroyed the Seventh Cavalry that day was their fear of being taken alive and tortured. Each soldier had been completely brainwashed with stories of the hideous ways in which captives of the Indians died. In the main they were wrong.

  Plains Indians had no culture of the prisoner of war. They had no facilities for them. But an opposing force could surrender with honour if they had lost half their men. After seventy minutes Custer had certainly done this. But in Indian lore, if opponents just kept on fighting, they would normally be killed to the last man.

  If a prisoner was taken alive, he would normally only be tortured in one of two cases: if he was recognized as one who had formally sworn never to fight the Indians of that tribe again, and had broken his word, or if he had fought with cowardice. In either case he was without honour.

  In Sioux/Cheyenne culture the withstanding of pain with fortitude and stoicism could recover that honour. A liar or a coward should be given that chance, through pain. Custer was one who had once sworn to the Cheyenne that he would never fight them again. Two squaws of that tribe, recognizing him among the fallen, pushed steel awls through the dead eardrums so that he could hear better next time.

  As the circle of Cheyenne and Sioux closed in, the panic ran like a brushfire through the surviving men. Battles in those days were never fought in good visibility; there was no smokeless ammunition. After an hour the hill was wreathed in a fog of powder smoke, and through the fog came the painted savages. Imagination ran riot. Years later an English poet would write:

  When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

  And the women come out to cut up your remains,

  Why, you rolls to your rifle and blows out your brains,

  And you goes to your Gawd like a soldier.

  None of the last survivors on that hillside would ever live to hear of Kipling, but what he described was what they did. Craig heard the first pistol shots as wounded men saved themselves the misery of torture. He turned to Sergeant Lewis.

  The big man was white-faced beside him, both their horses running out of control. There was no escape back down the track; it seethed with Oglala Sioux.

  ‘Sergeant, you’ll not let me die like a tied pig,’ the scout called to him. Lewis paused, thought, and his dedication to duty ended. He slipped from his horse, drew his knife and cut the thongs that tied Craig’s ankles to his girth-strap.

  At that moment three things happened in less than a second. Two arrows from a range of no more than a hundred feet thudded into the sergeant’s chest. Knife in hand, he gazed at them with some surprise, then his knees buckled and he fell onto his face.

  From even closer range a Sioux warrior rose from the long grass, pointed an ancient flintlock musket at Craig and fired. He had clearly used too much black powder in an effort to achieve increased range. Worse, he had forgotten to remove the ramrod. The breech exploded with a roar and a sheet of flame, shattering the man’s right hand to pulp. If he had been firing from the shoulder he would have lost most of his head, but he was firing from the hip.

  The ramrod came out of the barrel like a quive
ring harpoon. Craig had been facing the man. The ramrod took his horse full in the chest, penetrating to the heart. As the animal went down Craig, hands still cord-tied, tried to throw himself clear. He landed on his back, his head slammed into a small rock and he was knocked cold.

  Within ten minutes the last white soldier on Custer’s hill was dead. Though the scout was unconscious and never saw it, the end when it came was blisteringly fast. Sioux warriors would later relate that one minute the few dozen last survivors were still fighting and the next the Everywhere Spirit had simply swept them away. In fact most just ‘rolled to their rifles’ or used their Colt pistols. Some did the favour to wounded comrades, others to themselves.

  When Ben Craig came to, his head sang and reeled from the blow by the rock. He opened one eye. He was on his side, hands tied behind, one cheek pressed to the earth. Grass blades were close to his face. As his head cleared he became aware of soft-shod feet moving all about him, of excited voices and occasional cries of triumph. His vision cleared also.

  There were bare legs and feet in moccasins running across the hillside as Sioux warriors hunted for loot and trophies. One of them must have seen his eyes move. There was a yelp of triumph and strong hands jerked his torso upright.

  There were four warriors round him, faces painted and contorted, still deranged by the killing frenzy. He saw a stone war club raised to smash out his brains. For one second as he sat and waited for death he wondered idly what lay on the other side of life. The blow did not fall. Instead a voice said, ‘Stop.’

  He looked up. The man who had spoken was astride a pony ten feet away. The dropping sun was to the right of the rider’s shoulder and the glare reduced the image of the man to a silhouette.

  His hair was undressed; it fell like a dark cloak around his shoulders and back. He carried no lance, nor yet a steel hatchet, so he was clearly not Cheyenne.

  The pony the man rode moved a foot to one side; the sun went behind the shoulder and the glare fell away. The rider’s shadow dropped over Craig’s face and he saw more clearly.