How Few Remain (great war)

by Harry Turtledove

  He did what he always did with doubt-he stifled it. "Here we go!" he shouted. "For the United States of America! Chaaarge!"

  As if held by a single man, all the rifles along the British firing line leveled on the Fifth. As if held by a single man, all those rifles fired at the same instant. A great cloud of black-powder smoke rose above and around the enemy. Through it, flames thrust like bayonets from the muzzles of the Englishmen's Martini-Henrys.

  Three balls snapped past Custer. Not all his men were so lucky as to have bullets miss them. The charge broke up almost as if the troopers had slammed into a wall. Men screamed. Horses screamedlouder, shriller, more terrible cries than could have burst from a human throat.

  The British infantry fed more cartridges into their rifles. Precise as so many steam-driven machines, they gave the Fifth Cavalry another volley, and another, and another. The horsemen replied as best they could. Their best was not enough, not nearly. The redcoats not only outnumbered them but were also firing on foot rather than from the bounding backs of beasts. Englishmen, many Englishmen, toppled and writhed and cursed and shrieked. The Americans, though, melted away like snow on a warm spring afternoon.

  "We can't do it, Autie!" Tom Custer shouted.

  If Tom said a piece of fighting could not be done, no man on earth could do it. "We'll have to fall back," Custer said, and then, to the bugler, "Blow Retreat." But no call rang out. The bugler was dead. "Retreat!" Custer yelled at the top of his lungs. "Fall back!" The words were as bitter as the alkali dust of Utah in his mouth. So far as he could remember, he'd never used them before.

  Fewer of his men heard him than would have heard the horn. But they would have fallen back whether he ordered it or not. They now made the same discovery the British lancers had not long before: some fires were too galling to bear.

  Then Tom shouted again, wordlessly this time. The shout ended in a choking gurgle. Custer stared at his brother. Blood poured from Tom's mouth, and from a great wound in his chest. Ever so slowly, or so it seemed to Custer, Tom crumpled from his horse. When he hit the ground, he didn't move.

  Custer let out one long howl of pain. The worst of it was, that was all he had time for. Even without Tom-and Tom, surely, would never rise again till Judgment Day-he had to save his force. His head swiveled wildly to east and west. Did the Volunteer cavalry know he couldn't maintain the fight? If they didn't, they would have to face the weight of the whole British army by themselves.

  But no-they were breaking away from combat, too, falling back to screen the retreat of the Regulars. That was humiliating. Even more humiliating was that the British cavalry showed no great inclination to pursue. Roosevelt 's Unauthorized Regiment had given the limeys all they wanted and then some.

  The boy colonel rode over to Custer. "What now, sir?" he asked, as if his superior hadn't just finished feeding his own prized regiment into the meat grinder.

  What now, indeed? Custer wondered. Without Tom, he hardly cared. But he had to answer. He knew he had to answer. "We fall back on our infantry and await the British attack as the enemy awaited ours," he mumbled. It was a poor solution-even with Welton's infantry, he didn't have the manpower General Gordon did. But, battered and dazed as he was, it was the only solution he could find.

  "Yes, sir!" Roosevelt, by his tone, thought it brilliant. "Don't worry, sir-we'll lick 'em yet."

  "Come on, men!" Theodore Roosevelt shouted. "We've got to keep the damn limeys off the Regulars' backs a little bit longer."

  First Lieutenant Karl Jobst gave him a reproachful look. "Sir, I wish you would have found a politer way to put that."

  "Why?" Roosevelt said. "It's the truth, isn't it? Right now, General Custer's men couldn't fight off a Sunday-school class, let alone the British army. You know it, I know it, and Custer knows it, too."

  His adjutant still looked unhappy. "They fought General Gordon's men most valiantly-smashed the lancers all to bits and hurt the infantry, too."

  "That they did. They charged home as bravely as you'd like," Roosevelt said. "So did the six hundred at Balaclava. They paid for it, and so did the Regulars. Custer's brother's down, I heard, among too many others. We won our part of the fight. Unfortunately, the result is measured by the whole, which here proves less than the sum of its parts."

  Off from behind him came a brief crackle of rifle fire. The British cavalry, confident he would not turn on it with the whole Unauthorized Regiment, was dogging the tracks of the U.S. force, keeping an eye on it as it retreated. Every so often, British scouts and his own rear guard would exchange pleasantries.

  "Sir, do you happen to know where Colonel Welton has positioned the Seventh Infantry?" This was not the first time Jobst had asked the question. Though normally a cold-blooded fellow, he could not keep concern from his voice. The Seventh Infantry was his regiment, Henry Welton his commander, to whose rule he would return when Roosevelt went back to civilian life.

  Now, though, Roosevelt had to shake his head. "I wish I did, but General Custer has not seen fit to entrust that information to me." He rode on for another few strides, then asked a question of his own: "You being a professional at this business, Lieutenant, what is your view of Custer the soldier?"

  "I told you before he came up to Montana, sir, that he had a name for impetuous boldness." Karl Jobst started to say something else, stopped, and then began again: "The reputation appears to be well founded."

  After a while, Roosevelt realized that was all he'd get from his adjutant. If Jobst said anything more-something on the order of, He took a perfectly good regiment and chopped it into catmeat, for instance-and word of that got back to Custer, it would blight the lieutenant's career. No one could possibly doubt Custer's courage. He'd done everything he could, going straight into the British. But that hadn't been enough, and hadn't come close to being enough, to turn them back.

  Roosevelt sighed. "Well, in his shoes I might well have done the same thing. With the enemy in front of him, he could think of nothing but driving them off."

  "I do believe, sir, that you might have handled the engagement with rather more finesse," Jobst said. Roosevelt needed a moment to realize that was praise, and another moment to realize how much. If a Regular Army officer felt a colonel of Volunteers could have done better than a Regular brevet brigadier general, that spoke well of the Volunteer indeed-and not so well of George Custer.

  A few minutes later, Custer rode back to confer with Roosevelt. Even if Custer had been overeager in the attack, even if the loss of his brother left his face raw with anguish, he was handling the retreat about as well as any man could. He kept a firm rein on both his unit and the Unauthorized Regiment, and made sure he found out whatever Roosevelt 's riders could learn about British dispositions and intentions.

  Roosevelt found a moment to say, "I'm sorry about your loss, sir."

  "Yes, yes," Custer said impatiently-he was surely doing his poor best not to think of that. "Now we have to see to it that our country's loss does not include the whole of this force."

  "Yes, sir. I wish I could tell you more," Roosevelt said. "Their cavalry screen keeps us from finding out as much as we'd like, just as ours does to them."

  Custer gnawed at his mustache. "I wish I knew how far ahead of their infantry the cavalry's got. Not far enough to suit me, unless I miss my guess. Infantry pushed hard can almost keep up with horsemen. Once we've joined with Colonel Welton, odds are we shan't have to wait long before they attack us."

  "You don't think they'll simply ignore us and go on down toward the mines around Helena, which I presume to be their goal?" Roosevelt said.

  "Not a chance of it, Colonel." Custer spoke with decision. "We shall be far too large a force for them to dare to leave us in their flank and rear. We could and would work all sorts of mischief on them."

  "That does make sense," Roosevelt said. "And, from what I've heard, their General Gordon is a headlong brawler, as I believe I've mentioned once before."

  "Yes, yes," Custer said again. Roosevel
t bristled at the tone, even if Custer was not, could not be, quite himself. Had the general commanding U.S. forces in Montana Territory done so well, he could afford to ignore what anyone told him? The answer was only too obvious. Had the general done as well as all that, he and Roosevelt would have been riding north, not south. But then Custer showed he'd heard after all: "If he's so very headlong, maybe he'll run onto our sword, the way bulls do in the arena."

  "I do hope so, sir," Roosevelt said. Custer's response let him ask the question in whose answer both he and Karl Jobst were keenly interested: "Where has Colonel Welton set up the position that awaits us?"

  "Not far from the Teton River," Custer replied, which told Roosevelt less than he would have liked but more than he'd already known. The brevet brigadier general went on, "He has orders to pick the best possible defensive position. We should be in it, wherever it proves to be, by nightfall."

  There was information worth having. "If we are, we'll fight in the morning," Roosevelt said.

  "I expect we will," Custer said. He hesitated, gnawing at his mustache once more. That was unlike him. After a moment, he went on, "I am thinking of dismounting my men and having them fight on foot. That would leave your regiment, Colonel, as our sole force on horseback. I shall rely on you to keep the British cavalry off our flanks."

  "We'll do it, sir," Roosevelt promised. "That's the sort of job Winchesters were made for." The Unauthorized Regiment would never have got close enough to the British infantry to engage them with the repeating rifles, whose effective range was not great. With Springfields, Custer and the Fifth Cavalry had slugged it out with the foot soldiers in red-and had come out on the short end of the fight.

  "I shall rely on you, as I did in the engagement farther north," Custer said. Roosevelt didn't mention that his part of the force had driven back their opponents. Custer already knew that. He nodded absently to Roosevelt and then trotted south, to the regiment he had long commanded.

  No sooner had he gone than Karl Jobst rode over to Roosevelt, a questioning look on his face. Roosevelt repeated what Custer had said. Jobst brightened. "Colonel Welton knows how to read a field as well as anyone I've ever seen," he said. "He'll pick the best place he can find for us to make a stand."

  "Good," Roosevelt said. A moment later, he wished his adjutant had put it a different way. Making a stand implied that defeat carried disaster in its wake. That was probably true here, but he would sooner not have been reminded of it.

  As Brigadier General Custer had said, they met Henry Welton about four that afternoon. And, as Lieutenant Jobst had said, Welton did indeed know how to read a field. He'd chosen to defend the forward slope of a low, gentle rise. No one could possibly approach without being seen and fired upon from as far out as rifles could reach.

  And not only had he picked a good position, he'd improved on what nature provided. His men had dug three long trenches and heaped up in front of them the dirt they'd shoveled out. The trenches and breastworks didn't look like much from the front. Roosevelt wondered if they were worth the labour they'd cost.

  So did Custer, who was arguing with Welton as Roosevelt rode up. Welton looked stubborn. "Sir," he was saying, "from everything I saw in the War of Secession, any protection is a lot better than just standing out in the open and blazing away at the bastards on the other side."

  "All right, all right." Custer threw his hands in the air. "Have it your way, Henry. The dashed things are dug, and you can't very well undig them. But while you've been building like beavers, we've been fighting like fiends."

  "Yes, sir, I know that," Henry Welton said. He nodded to Roosevelt. "And was I right about the Unauthorized Regiment?"

  "They fought well, I'll not deny it," Custer replied. Theodore Roosevelt drew himself up straight at the praise. He thought his troopers deserved even better than that; they'd outfought the Regulars seven ways from Sunday. But, whatever else Custer might have been about to say, he didn't say it. Instead, he stared and pointed. "Colonel, you've posted all my damned"-he didn't bother with dashed; he was exercised-"coffee mills in the forward trench? Don't you think we'd be better off with riflemen there?"

  "Sir, I thought we might as well use the Gatling guns, since we've got them," Welton answered. Roosevelt stared at them with interest; he'd never seen one before. They did look rather like a cross between a cannon and a coffee mill. Welton went on, "If they perform as advertised, they should be well forward, I think. If they don't, we can always bring riflemen in alongside them."

  "They're the only artillery we've got," Custer said worriedly. "That means they belong in the rear." He looked around-probably for his brother, Roosevelt thought. He did not see Tom Custer. He would never see Tom Custer again. Not seeing him, the brevet brigadier general settled for Roosevelt. "What's your opinion in this matter, Colonel?"

  "They're already emplaced," Roosevelt answered, "and they're not quite like artillery, are they, sir? If you're asking me, I say we leave them."

  Custer yielded, as he likely would not have done with Tom to back him: "Have it your way, then. If they don't work, it doesn't matter where in creation they are. I reckon that likely, myself. As you say, though, Colonel Welton, we can always bring up riflemen."

  "Sir, with your permission, I'm going to throw out a wide net of cavalry pickets, to make sure the British don't try anything in the night," Roosevelt said. "When the real fight comes, I'll keep them off your flanks."

  "That's what you're here for," Custer agreed. "Go do it." It wasn't quite a summary dismissal, but it was close. Roosevelt saluted and stomped off.

  Occasional rifle shots punctuated the night, as American and British scouting parties collided in the darkness. The British weren't trying a night attack; their pickets rode out ahead of their main force to keep the Americans from unexpectedly descending on them. Roosevelt snatched a few hours of fitful sleep, interrupted time and again by riders coming in to report.

  He drank hot, strong, vile coffee before sunup as he deployed his men. He commanded the right, as he had in the earlier fight against General Gordon's army. The left wing was largely on its own; he knew he wouldn't be able to keep in touch with it once the fighting started.

  And it would start soon. When men found targets they could actually see, cavalry skirmishing picked up in a hurry. On came the British infantry, deployed in line of battle, rolling straight toward the position Custer and Welton were defending. Roosevelt 's men tried without much luck to delay them; their British counterparts held them off.

  Behind the British line, the field guns accompanying the men in red opened up on the U.S. entrenchments. Custer and Welton had nothing with which they could reply; the Gatlings couldn't come close to reaching those cannon. In the trenches, the Regulars, infantry and dismounted cavalry alike, took what the enemy dished out. Roosevelt 's respect for them grew. That had to be harder than fighting in a battle where they could strike back at what was tormenting them.

  "Once General Gordon has us properly softened up, or thinks he has, he'll send in the infantry," Karl Jobst said.

  Gordon let the two field guns pound away at the entrenchments for half an hour, his foot soldiers pausing just outside rifle range. Then the cannon fell silent. Thin in the distance, a bugle rang out. The British infantry lowered their bayoneted rifles, as the cavalry had lowered their lances. The bugle resounded once more. The Englishmen let out a great, wordless shout and marched forward.

  "What a bully show!" Roosevelt exclaimed. "Enemies they may be, but they are splendid men." He raised his Winchester to his shoulder and tried at very long range to pot some of those splendid men.

  Unlike the luckless lancers, the British infantry fired as they advanced; their breechloaders made reloading on the move, which had been next to impossible during the War of Secession, quick and easy. A cloud of smoke rose above them, thicker and thicker with every forward stride they took.

  Smoke rose from the trenches where the bluecoats crouched, too. Englishmen began falling. Their comrades f
illed their places. No doubt Americans were falling, too, but Roosevelt couldn't sec that. What he could see was the red British wave flowing forward, steady and resistless as the tide. The redcoats drew within four hundred yards of the frontmost entrenchment, within three hundred…

  "They're going to break in!" Roosevelt cried in bitter pain.

  And then, through the din of the rifles, he heard a sound like none he'd ever known before, a fierce, explosive snarl that might have been a giant clearing his throat, and clearing it, and clearing it.

  … Amazing puffs of smoke blossomed in the center of the U.S. front line. "The Gatlings!" Karl Jobst yelled, somewhere between astonishment and ecstasy.

  Roosevelt had no words, only awe. In what seemed the twinkling of an eye and was perhaps two or three minutes of actual time, those steadfast British lines abruptly ceased to exist, in much the same way as a slab of ice will rot when hot water pours over it. For the first half of that time, the infantry kept trying to go forward in the face of fire unlike anything they'd ever met or imagined. They dropped and dropped and dropped. Not one of them got within a hundred yards of the trench. After that, the foot soldiers, those of them still on their feet, realized the thing could not be done. They also realized they were dead men if they didn't get out of range of the terrible stream of bullets pouring from the Gatling guns.

  It was not a retreat. Custer had led a retreat. It was a rout, a panic-stricken flight, a stampede. The British, surely, were as steady in the face of familiar danger as any men ever born. In the face of the snarling unknown, they broke. Some of them- Roosevelt took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes to be sure he was seeing straightthrew away their rifles to run the faster.

  He spent only a little while luxuriating in amazement. Then he started thinking like a soldier again. "After them!" he shouted. "After them, by jingo! They thought they'd run over us like a train, did they? Well, they've just been train-wrecked, boys. Now we haul away the rubbish."