How Few Remain (great war)

by Harry Turtledove

  "Ah." Roosevelt gave a slow, thoughtful nod. "That is a distinction." Unlike Custer, he evidently could feel the intellectual force of a counter-argument. That index finger stabbed out again. "But you do believe the pernicious Marxian doctrine of the class struggle."

  "I do believe it, yes," Lincoln said. "I do not believe it pernicious, not after spending my time since the War of Secession observing what has been afoot in the United States, in the Confederate States, and, as best I can at a distance, in Britain and Europe as well."

  "Class struggle is balderdash! Poppycock!" Roosevelt declared. "We can attain a harmonious society by adjusting our laws and their interpretation so as to secure to all members of the community social and industrial justice."

  "We can, surely. I said as much," Lincoln replied. "But shall we? Or will those in whose hands most capital now rests seek only to gain more? That looks to be the way the wind is blowing, and it blows a fire ahead of it."

  Roosevelt surprised him again, this time by nodding. "The worst revolutionaries today are those reactionaries who do not see and will not admit that there is any need for change."

  "You had best be careful, Colonel Roosevelt, or people will be calling you a Marxian Socialist," Lincoln said.

  "By no means, sir. By no means," the brash young officer said. "You believe the damage to our body politic is… I shall give you the benefit of the doubt and say, all but irreparable. My view, on the contrary, is that the political system of the United States remains perfectible, and that resolute action on the part of the citizens as voters and the government as their agent can secure the blessings of both liberty and prosperity for capital and labour alike."

  "I have heard many men with your views, but few who express them so forcefully," Lincoln said. "Most, if you will forgive me, have their heads in the clouds."

  "Not I, by jingo!" Theodore Roosevelt said.

  "I wish I could believe you likely to be correct," Lincoln carried out. "For reform to be carried out in the manner you describe, though, a man of truly titanic energy would have to lead the way, and I see none such on the horizon. I do see workers by the millions growing hungrier and more desperate day by day. Now if you will excuse me, Colonel, this other gentleman wished to speak with me." Roosevelt turned away. Lincoln heard him mutter "Poppycock!" under his breath once more. Then the former president, being greeted by a supporter, forgot about the young cavalry colonel.

  Frederick Douglass wished he could go home to Rochester. In fact, nothing save his own pride and stubbornness kept him from going home to Rochester. If he went home, he would be admitting defeat: not only to those who read his despatches from the Louisville front in their newspapers, but also, and more important, to himself.

  As he got out of a carriage Captain Richardson had furnished him and headed for the newly built wharves several miles east of Louisville, he knew defeat was there whether he admitted it or not. Captain Richardson kept right on being obliging, still, Douglass was convinced, in the hope that he could get him killed. With each new time Douglass crossed the Ohio into Kentucky, the total chance of his getting killed grew more likely, and he knew it. He kept crossing anyhow, every time he could.

  The United States now held two tracts on the southern side of the river, one inside battered Louisville itself, the other projecting toward it from the east. The shape of that second salient, sadly, was deceiving; the front had not advanced more than a couple of furlongs in the past several days. Hope that the flanking manoeuvre would drive the Confederates from Louisville had all but died. With it had also died a great many young men in U.S. blue.

  Confederate artillery pounded away at the U.S. positions east of Louisville. This salient was bigger than the one in the city, and had pushed the Rebels out of range of the Indiana side of the Ohio. The amount of ground gained, however, was not the be-all and end-all of the campaign. The be-all had not come to be, and the end-all was not in sight.

  Another barge was loading. Barges were always loading, sending in more soldiers to do what they could against the Rebels' entrenchments and rifles and cannon. Some soldiers came back on barges, too, shrieking in anguish. Some stayed in Kentucky and fought and did not go forward. Some stayed in Kentucky and died and were hastily buried. Some stayed in Kentucky and died and were not buried at all.

  Sometimes Douglass had trouble persuading the soldiers he had the right to cross. This time, though, he met no difficulties. Even before he drew from a pocket Captain Richardson's letter authorizing him to go into Kentucky, one of the men tending to the barge's engine waved and said, "Got a letter from my cousin, sayin' she really likes the way you're writin' about the war."

  "That's very kind of her," the Negro journalist said as he stepped aboard the barge. Had he been white, he thought the soldier would have called him Mr. Douglass. Few white men could bring themselves to call a Negro Mister. Making an issue of an act of omission, though, was much harder than doing so about an act of commission. Douglass kept quiet, consoling himself with the thought that he might have been wrong.

  Once the one white man had accepted him as an equal, or something close to an equal, the rest did the same. He'd seen that before, too. People all too often put him in mind of sheep. Had that fellow mocked him and called him a nigger, the others packing the barge likely would have followed that lead as readily as the other.

  U.S. guns on the Kentucky shore not far from the riverbank belched smoke and flames as they tried to put their Confederate counterparts out of action. Near the guns lay wounded soldiers who would go back to Indiana aboard the barge once it had unloaded the men it carried. Some cried out, some groaned, and some lay limp, too far gone in suffering to complain. Along with the soldiers headed toward the battle line, he averted his eyes from the bloodstained evidence of what war could do.

  He did not accompany the fresh troops to whatever position they had been assigned. Instead, he made his way toward the men of the Sixth New York. They had come closer than any other U.S. troops to breaking the Confederate line and smashing into Louisville as General Willcox had envisioned. Only a desperate countercharge by a Rebel regiment-led by a lieutenant, some said, though Douglass didn't believe it-had knocked them back on their heels and let C.S. forces bring in more troops and solidify their position.

  Several Confederate shells came screaming down within a couple of hundred yards of him. He took no notice. Back before the battle began, they would have sent him diving, panicked, for the closest hole he could find. He was astonished at how blase he'd grown about shell-fire.

  On toward the line of battle he tramped, not at any great speed but as steadily as if powered by steam. That comparison made him smile. He puffed less now on such hikes than he had when he'd first made them; his wind was better than it had been for years. He'd always been blessed with a robust constitution, which served him in good stead today.

  He'd gone up to the Sixth New York's position so often by now, some of the troops behind the line had grown used to his presence. One made as if to set his watch by Douglass. "How are you this morning. Uncle?" another called. The Negro answered that with a nod and nothing more; as usual, Uncle straddled the line between polite and insulting.

  Another U.S. soldier whistled and waved and said, "Good morning to you, Fred."

  "And to you, Corporal," Douglass answered, this time feeling his face stretch into a broad, almost involuntary grin. A white man who called him Fred might be short on formality, but was also short on prejudice. Douglass reckoned that a fair exchange.

  He was drawing near the front line, up into the area where entrenchments seamed Kentucky's smooth fields as scars from the lash seamed his own back, when an officious provost marshal whom he hadn't seen before challenged him: "Who the devil are you, and what business have you got here?"

  "Don't you recognize Jefferson Davis when you sec him?" Douglass demanded. The joke fell flat; like most provost marshals, this one had no sense of humor. Douglass produced the letter from Captain Oliver Richardson. The soldi
er read it, moving his lips. At last, reluctantly, he returned it to the journalist and stood aside.

  Up in the trenches, the men of the Sixth New York hailed him as an old friend. "You're a crazy old coot, you know that?" one of them said by way of greeting. "We've got to be here, and you don't, but you keep comin' anyhow."

  "He reckons we'll keep him safe, Aaron, that's what it is," another soldier said. "Looky! He ain't even carrying his six-shooter no more."

  "As you say, I am among heroes." Douglass smiled at the blue-coat, who, along with his companions, hooted and jeered. Many of them were heroes, but they bore that heroism lightly, as if mentioning it embarrassed them. Douglass had stopped wearing a revolver once the line stabilized, no longer seeing much likelihood he would need it for self-defense. Instead of a Colt, he pulled out a notebook. "And what has gone on here since my latest visit?"

  "Snaked a raid over into the Rebs' trenches yesterday afternoon, we did," Aaron said proudly. "Killed two or three, brought back a couple dozen prisoners, only had one feller hurt our ownselves."

  "Well done!" Douglass said, and scribbled notes. Inside, though, he winced. This was what the bold if tardy flank assault had come down to: little raids and counterraids that might move the front a few yards one way or the other but meant nothing about when or if the Army of the Ohio would ever drive the Confederates out of Louisville.

  Douglass listened to the volunteers as they talked excitedly about the raid. They were caught up by it; because they'd done well in a tiny piece of the war, they thought the whole of it was going well. Douglass had not the heart to disillusion them, even had they chosen to listen to him in turn. He pressed on up to the foremost trench, knowing he would find Colonel Algernon van Nuys there.

  Sure enough, van Nuys squatted by a tiny fire, eating hardtack and waiting for his coffee to boil. "Ah, Mr. Douglass, you come back again," the regimental commander said. His knees clicked as he straightened up. "You must be a glutton for punishment. Here, you can prove it: have a hardtack with me." He offered Douglass one of the thick, pale crackers.

  "Why do you hate me so?" Douglass asked, which made Colonel van Nuys laugh. Accepting the hardtack, Douglass took a cautious bite. When fresh, the crackers weren't bad. By the way this one resisted his teeth, it might have been in a warehouse since the War of Secession. After he'd managed to swallow, he said, "Do I rightly hear that you poked the Rebels yesterday?"

  "A poke is about what it was, a little poke," van Nuys said with a sour smile: he knew too well this wasn't what Orlando Willcox had intended for the flanking move. "Today, tomorrow, the next day, the Rebs'll try to poke us back, I expect. We might as well be playing tag with 'em."

  "No, thank you," Douglass said, and the colonel chuckled again. Van Nuys stooped to see how the coffee was doing, and, as if to confirm his words, Confederate artillery opened up on the Sixth New York. Now Douglass did throw himself flat; these shells came crashing down far closer than a couple of hundred yards away. Fragments scythed through the air above his head, hissing like serpents.

  Through the din of the shelling, the roar of rifle fire also picked up. "To the firing steps!" Colonel van Nuys shouted. "Here they come! Let's give it to 'em, the sons of bitches."

  A moment later, he cried out wordlessly and reeled back into the trench. The cry was necessarily wordless, for a bullet had shattered his lower jaw, tearing away his chin and leaving the rest a red ruin. He gobbled something unintelligible at Douglass. Maybe it was I told you so, but it could have been Tell my wife I love her or anything else. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and, mercifully, he swooned, his blood pouring out onto the floor of the trench. Douglass wondered if he would ever wake again. With that wound, eternal sleep might be a mercy.

  High and shrill. Rebel yells rang out from the stretch of ground between C.S. and U.S. trench lines. "Reinforcements!" Douglass shouted. "We need reinforcements here!" But no reinforcements came. Cleverly, the Confederates were using the artillery bombardment to form a box around the sides and rear of the length of entrenchments they had chosen to attack. Anyone who tried to get through that bombardment was far likelier to get hit.

  A U.S. soldier a few feet away from Douglass fired his Springfield. One of the Rebel yells turned into a scream of a different sort. But as the bluecoat was slipping another cartridge into the breech, a Confederate bullet caught him in the side of the head. Unlike Algernon van Nuys, he never knew what hit him. He slumped to the ground, dead before he touched it. The rifle fell from his hands, almost in front of Frederick Douglass.

  He grabbed for it, wishing it were a carbine, whose shorter barrel would have made it easier for him to reverse it and blow out his own brains. But all his resolve about not being taken alive came to nothing, for a Confederate in dirty butternut leaping down into the trench landed on his back. Pain stabbed through him-a broken rib? He didn't know.

  He didn't have time to think, either. "Come on, nigger!" the Reb screamed. "Up! Out! Move! You're caught or you're a dead man!" No matter what his head thought, Douglass' body wanted to live. However much it hurt, he scrambled out of the trench and, after getting jabbed in a ham by the Confederate's bayonet, stumbled toward the C.S. lines.

  A Rebel captain was shouting, "Come on, you prisoners! Move! Move fast!" When he saw the journalist captured with eight or ten U.S. soldiers, his eyes widened. "Good God," he said. "It can't be, but it is. Frederick Douglass, as I live and breathe."

  "The nigger rabble-rouser?" Three Confederates asked it at once. "Him?"

  "Him-the same." The captain had no doubt whatever.

  The soldier who'd captured Douglass jabbed him again, harder. "Let's string the bastard up!" His friends bayed approval.

  Chapter 13

  As the: Louisville campaign ground on, Colonel Alfred Von Schlieffen found himself with ever freer access to Orlando Willcox and to the map-filled tent where the commander of the Army of the Ohio planned his operations. He found himself less and less happy each time he visited the U.S. general. It was too much like having ever freer access to a sickroom where the patient grew visibly more infirm as day followed day.

  Brigadier General Willcox seemed uneasily aware of the wasting sickness afflicting his campaign, aware but doing his best to pretend he wasn't. "Good afternoon, Colonel," he said when he spied Schlieffen through the partly open tent fly. "Come in, come in. Ah, I see you have coffee. Very good."

  "Yes, General, I have coffee. Thank you." Carrying the tin cup stamped USA, Schlieffen ducked his way into the tent and came over to stand beside Willcox. "The guns in the night were not noisier than usual. Have I right-no, am I right; this mistake I make too oftennothing new happened?"

  "Nothing new," Willcox agreed with a small sigh. He stared down at the maps, at the blue lines and the red that had moved so much less than he'd hoped. "It's always good to see you here, Colonel. I want you to know that."

  "You are too kind to a man who is not of your country," Schlieffen said.

  Without looking over at the German military attache, General Willcox went on, "You always keep your temper. You never judge me.

  My corps commanders, my division commanders-sometimes this tent gets like a kettle full of live lobsters over the fire. But I never hear recriminations from you, Colonel, and, if you send telegrams to Philadelphia, you don't send them to General Rosecrans."

  Schlieffen hadn't heard the word recriminations before, but he didn't bother asking Willcox to explain it; context made the meaning plain. An army that was winning had little backbiting. When things went wrong, everyone was at pains to prove the misfortune could not possibly have been his fault.

  Willcox said, "Tell me what you think of our position at the present time."

  "Let me examine the map before I answer." Schlieffen seized without hesitation the chance to think before he spoke. He wished he had Kurd von Schlozer's diplomatic talents, so he might come somewhere near the truth without destroying the U.S. commander's good opinion of him. At last, he said, "I think it n
ow unlikely that you will from the east into Louisville break."

  Willcox sighed again. "I'm afraid I think the same thing, although, if 1 admit it to anyone but you, I'll see my head go on a platter faster than John the Baptist's after Herodias' daughter danced before King Herod. We came close; I'll wager we scared old Stonewall out of a year's growth. But in war, the only thing that does any good if it's close to where it ought to be but not quite there is an artillery shell."

  That was an effective image; Schlieffen filed it away to use if and when he had the luck to return to General Staff duty in Berlin. He said, "In the salient you made with the flanking move, you still have most of your men on the line facing Louisville, and in other places not so many."

  "Well, yes, of course I do," General Willcox replied. "I have orders that I am still to do everything I can to capture the city, and I must obey them."

  "If you think you can do this, then naturally you… are right," Schlieffen said, pleased he'd remembered the English idiom this time. "If you think you cannot do this, and you leave your flank as weak as it is-"

  "The Rebs looked to have a weak flank," Willcox said. "It got strong a lot faster than we wished it would have, and that's the Lord's truth. If the Confederates could stop us, I reckon we'll be able to stop them."

  "This may well be so, but your situation here seems to me not to be the same as that of the Confederate States," Schlieffen said.

  "And why not?" Willcox bristled at what was to Schlieffen a gentle suggestion of something so obvious a schoolchild should see it.

  Patiently, the attache spelled it out in words almost literally of one syllable: "The Confederate States had more depth to use than you have now. They could halt you for a little while, fall back, halt you again, and so on. This is not something you enjoy. If they break through your trenches from the south, they will go into the rear of the main body of your forces there."