How Few Remain (24 page)

Washington’s reason for being was—or perhaps had been—government. Philadelphia had been a thriving port and industrial center for many years before the results of the War of Secession forced big chunks of the government of the United States to move north, away from the muzzles of Confederate cannon. Factories belched black smoke into the air. So did the stacks of steamships and trains bringing raw materials into the city and taking away finished goods. Schlieffen looked on the smoke with approval, as a sign of modernity.

In Philadelphia, the War Department operated out of a building of muddy-brown brick northwest of Franklin Square. It was, Schlieffen thought, an even homelier edifice than the one next to the White House in Washington. He was of the opinion that the military should have the finest headquarters possible, to hearten the men who protected the nation. The view of the United States seemed to be that the military, like any other arm of the government, rated only the cheapest headquarters possible.

The sentries at the entrance were not so well trained as those with whom he had dealt in Washington. That his uniform was close to the shade of theirs convinced them he was no Confederate, but they had not the slightest clue as to what a military attaché was, what he did, or what his privileges were. He had to grow quite severe before one of them would take a message announcing his presence up to General Rosecrans’ office. The fellow returned looking flabbergasted at bearing the news that Rosecrans would see Schlieffen at once.

A different sentry escorted him up to the office of the generalin-chief. In the outer office, he traded English for Captain Berryman’s German. He listened to the bright young adjutant with only half an ear, for in the inner office General Rosecrans was bellowing, “Yes, Mr. President … I’ll try and take care of it, Your Excellency … Yes, of course.” That left Schlieffen puzzled, for he could not hear President Blaine at all, and the chief executive of the United States did not have a reputation for being soft-spoken—on the contrary.

Presently, Rosecrans came out into the antechamber. Looking harassed, he said, “Captain, I am convinced the telephone is an invention of the devil, inflicted upon us poor soldiers so politicians can harangue us at any hour of the day or night, without even the pause for thought sending a telegram affords.” That off his chest, he deigned to notice Schlieffen. “Come in, Colonel, come in,” he said, invitingly standing aside from the doorway. “Believe me, it will be a pleasure to talk with a man who knows what he’s talking about. Have you got telephones in Germany, Colonel?”

“I believe we are beginning to use them, yes,” Schlieffen said, eyeing with interest the wooden box and small attached speaking trumpet bolted to the wall by Rosecrans’ desk.

“Invention of the devil,” Rosecrans repeated. “Nothing but trouble.” He waved his visitor to a chair, then asked, “And what can I do for you today besides complain about inventors who should have been strangled in the cradle? Bell’s a Canadian, which probably explains a good deal.”

It explained nothing to Schlieffen. Since it didn’t, he came straight to the point: “As I asked in Washington, General, I should like to get a close view of the fighting in this war. Perhaps you will be so kind as to authorize my travel for this purpose to the headquarters of one of your armies in the field.”

“Very well, Colonel; I can do that.” Rosecrans had made promises before. Schlieffen was about to ask him to be more specific when he did so unasked: “We are going to take Louisville away from the Rebs. How would you like to watch us while we’re doing that?”

Schlieffen glanced at the map hanging by the telephone. “You will send me to the province of Indiana? The state, I should say—excuse me. You plan on crossing the Ohio River to make your assault? Yes, I should be most interested in seeing that.” If France ever mounted an invasion of Germany, she would have to cross the Rhine. Seeing how the United States attempted a river crossing in the face of opposition would tell Schlieffen something of what the French might try; seeing how the Confederates defended the province—no, the state—of Kentucky would also be informative.

“Well, that’s easy enough, isn’t it?” Rosecrans reached into his desk for stationery and with his own hand wrote the authorization Schlieffen needed. “Nice to know
something
is easy, by thunder. The Rebs aren’t—I’m finding that out. But you hang onto that sheet there, and I’ll send a telegram letting ’em know you’re on the way.”

“Thank you very much,” Schlieffen said, and then, sympathetically, “A pity your arms did not have better luck in Virginia.”

Rosecrans flushed. “They have Stonewall, dammit,” he muttered. He had an ugly expression on his face, to go with the ugly color he’d turned. Austrian generals—and Prussian generals, too—must have talked that way about Bonaparte. Austrian generals—and French generals, too—must have talked that way about Moltke.

Sympathetically still, Schlieffen said, “As you have said to me, your land is wide. General Jackson cannot be everywhere at once, cannot take charge of all the battles your two countries are fighting.”

“Thank God for that,” Rosecrans said. The telephone on the wall clanged, like a trolley using its bell to warn traffic at a corner. Rosecrans went over to it. He listened, then shouted, “Hello again, Mr. President.” That hunted look came back onto his face. Schlieffen left before the general had to order him out. As he walked down the hall toward the stairs, he heard Rosecrans still shouting behind him. All at once, he hoped the General Staff back home in Berlin did without this newfangled invention.

* * *

“Come on!” Samuel Clemens fussed like a mother hen. “Come on, everyone. We’ve no time to waste, not a single, solitary minute.”

Alexandra Clemens set her hands on her hips. “Sam, if you’ll look around, you’ll see that you’re the only one here who isn’t ready for the picnic.”

“Well, what has that got to do with the price of persimmons?” Sam demanded. “Pshaw! If you hadn’t stolen my jacket, I’d have it on by now.”

His wife didn’t know anything about persimmons: she was that rarity, a native San Franciscan, having been born a little more than a year after the gold rush started Americans flooding into California. She did, however, know where his jacket was: “It’s hanging on the chair behind you there, Sam, where you put it when you looked under the bed for your shoes.”

“And I found them, too, didn’t I?” Clemens said, as if in triumph. He put on the white linen jacket, jammed a hat down over his ears, and handed Alexandra a sunbonnet. “There! All ready. Now we’d better see what mischief the children have got into since you started hiding things from me.”

Ignoring that sally, Alexandra Clemens said, “They
are
being quiet downstairs, aren’t they?” She swept out of the bedroom in a rustle of skirts. “What
are
they doing?” Sam hurried after her.

The quiet broke even as they hurried—broke into shouts from both Orion and Ophelia, a growl from Sutro the dog, and a series of yowls and hisses from Virginia the cat. Virginia shot by at a speed that would have done credit to a Nevada jackrabbit, then vanished under the sofa in lieu of diving into a hole in the ground.

“She scratched me!” Ophelia said. “Bad kitty!”

Sam examined the damage, which was superficial. “The next question before the house, young lady, is why she scratched you.”

Ophelia stood mute. Orion, either more naive or less sure of how much his parents had seen, said, “We weren’t really trying to feed Ginny to Sutro, Pa. It just looked that way, honest Injun.”

“Did it?” Sam said. Departure for the picnic was briefly delayed for reasons having nothing to do with missing clothes. When Orion and Ophelia climbed up into the family buggy, they took their seats with considerable caution. Above their heads, Sam and Alexandra looked into each other’s eyes. That might have been a mistake. They both had all they could do to keep from laughing.

The horse went down a couple of blocks to Fulton, and then west to Golden Gate Park, a narrow rectangle of land south of the Richmond district. Much of it was sand dunes and scrubby grass. Here and there, where irrigation and better soil had been brought in, real grass grew and young, hopeful trees sprouted.

Sam tethered the horse to an oak that had advanced further beyond saplinghood than most. He gave it a long lead, so it could crop the grass and, thus distracted, not interfere with the family’s enjoyment of a Sunday afternoon. Having explained this to his wife, he added, “Don’t you wish we could do the same with the children?”

“Not more than half a dozen times a day,” Alexandra answered. “Not usually, anyhow.” She spread a blanket on the grass, then set the picnic hamper upon it. Ham sandwiches and fried shrimp from a Chinese cafe and hard-boiled eggs—not the elderly sort the Chinese esteemed—and a homemade peach pie and cream puffs from an Italian bakery and lemonade were enough to keep the children from running wild for a while, and gave them sufficient ballast once they were through to slow them down for a while.

“Ha! First match!” Sam said proudly once he got his cigar going. That proved what a fine, mild day it was. The wind blew off the Pacific, as it almost always did, but only gently. “It’s not strong enough to lift sand today, let alone dogs, trees, houses, or one of Mayor Sutro’s public proclamations,” he added. “Of course, they call
that
kind of wind a cyclone.”

“I call that kind of wind an editorial,” Alexandra said, which made him mime being cut to the quick.

Other picnicking families dotted the grass of the park. Children ran and played and got into fights. Boys barked their bare knees. Somebody who’d brought a bottle of something that wasn’t lemonade started singing loudly and badly. Sam lay back, watched the gulls wheeling through the blue sky, and declared, “I refuse to let myself despair on account of God’s creation being imperfect to the extent of one noisy drunk.”

Alexandra reached out and ruffled his hair. “I’m sure He could have done a much better job if only He’d listened to you.”

“It’s so nice to know, my dear, that we can stay together when they start burning freethinkers,” he said, quite without irony. “And to think that, if I’d left San Francisco, I never would have
met you. I didn’t intend to settle down here, not for good.” He started another cigar, also on the first match. “But it has turned out to be good, I’d say.”

Before Alexandra could answer—if she was going to answer with anything more than a smile—the breeze brought a thin series of cries from the west: “Hut! Hut! Hut hut hut!”

“Hear that?” Orion said to Ophelia, who nodded. “You know what it is?” She shook her head. He was jumping up and down with excitement. “That’s soldiers, that’s what it is!” He ran off, legs pumping. His little sister followed a moment later, slower both because she was younger and because her dress dragged the ground, but determined even so.

Samuel Clemens got to his feet. “Those
are
soldiers, of sorts,” he said; he knew the sounds of drill when he heard them. “I’d forgotten they were teaching the volunteers to walk—I beg your pardon, to march—in the park. I think I’ll have a look at them myself. After all, they may be protecting us one day soon—and if that notion doesn’t frighten you, for heaven’s sake why not?”

“Go ahead,” Alexandra said. “I’ll stay here and make sure things don’t take a mind to wander off by themselves.”

Only a couple of low swells of ground had hidden the volunteer troops from Sam. There on the grass, surrounded by admirers, a company raggedly marched and countermarched. Seeing them took Clemens back across the years to his own brief service as a Confederate volunteer. They looked just the way his comrades had: like men who wanted to be soldiers but didn’t have it down yet.

About half of them wore Army blouses. About half wore Army trousers. Only a few wore both. The rest of the clothes were a motley mixture of civilian styles. A few carried Army Springfields. Rather more had Winchesters, probably their own weapons. Many still shouldered boards in place of rifles.

“Left!” shouted the sergeant drilling them, a grizzled veteran no doubt from the Presidio. A majority of them did start out with the left foot. He cursed the rest with fury enough to make women flee, small boys cheer, and Clemens smile reminiscently. No, sergeants hadn’t changed a bit.

Somebody called, “What the devil good are you people if you can’t get to where the shooting’s at because the Mormons have the railroad blocked?”

One of the volunteers took the board off his shoulder and thrust with it as if it were a bayoneted Springfield. “We ain’t afraid o’ no Mormons,” he declared, “nor their wives, neither. They send us east, we’ll clean them bastards out and then go on and slaughter the Rebs.” Spectators burst into applause.

The drill sergeant was less impressed. “Pay attention to what I tell you, Henry, you goddamn stupid jackass,” he bellowed. “Forget about these, these, these—
civilians.”
He could have cursed for a day and a half without venting more scorn than he packed into the single word. Still in stentorian tones, he went on, “How do you know that nosy bastard isn’t a Confederate spy?”

“I am not!” the man so described said indignantly.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant,” Henry said. “I didn’t think.”

“Of course you didn’t think,” the sergeant snarled. “You’ve got your brains in your backside, and you blow ’em out every time you go to the latrine. And you’re not sorry yet. You haven’t even started being sorry yet. But you will be, oh yes you will.” He spoke in somber anticipation of disaster still ahead for the unfortunate volunteer private. “Hut! Hut! Hut hut hut!”

A small hand tugged at Sam’s trouser leg. Face shining, Orion looked up at him. “I wanna be a soldier, Pa, and have a gun. Can I be a soldier when I get big?”

Before Clemens could answer that, Ophelia, who’d tagged after her brother, shook her head so vehemently that golden curls flew out from under the edge of her bonnet. “Not me,” she said, and folded her arms across her chest as if things were already settled. “I want to be a
sergeant.”

Sam threw back his head and shouted laughter. He picked up Ophelia, spun her through the air till she squealed, then set her back on the ground. “I think you’ll do it, too, little one—either that or wife, which is the same job except you don’t get to wear stripes on your sleeve.”