How Few Remain (29 page)

Buckley and Neufeld snapped out orders. Their commands were tiny, but they led them with confidence and skill. As each sergeant cranked his weapon, the barrels revolved, spitting bullets at the astonishing rate in which Custer had delighted down in the Indian Territory. The pauses while full magazines replaced empty ones were barely perceptible.

Silence slammed down after each Gatling went through its second magazine. Into it, Custer addressed the bodyguard with the Winchester: “If you want to charge into that, friend, make sure you tell your mother and your wives good-bye first.”

John Pope nodded to Orson Pratt in a friendly-seeming way. “As you see, we are fully prepared to crush without mercy any resistance your people may be rash enough to offer, and have with us the means to do precisely that.” He didn’t mention that the two Gatling guns the Mormons had seen were the only two he had with him. He did such a good job of not mentioning it, Custer was glad he didn’t play poker against him. As if every other freight car were full of Gatlings, Pope went on, “I will have your answer now, Mr. Pratt: either that, or I shall commence operations against your forces immediately you have returned to them.”

Under that beard, Pratt’s jaw worked. The Mormon apostle looked a good deal like an angry prophet. He also, Custer realized with a small chill, looked a good deal like an older, fleshier version of John Brown. But, where John Brown had had no give in him whatever, Pratt’s eyes kept sliding to the field guns and especially to the Gatlings. “You drive a hard bargain, General,” he said at last, each word dragged from him.

“I am not here to bargain.” Pope drew himself up straight. “I am here to rule. Either peacefully yield your usurped authority to me and accept whatever penalties I see fit to impose on your misguided people or chance the hazards of war. Those are your only choices.”

“You would hold our people hostage—” Pratt began.

“You are holding the United States of America hostage,” Pope broke in. He drew his sword. To Custer’s surprise, he found something to do with it besides making a dramatic gesture, or rather, he found a new sort of dramatic gesture to make: he drew a ring around Orson Pratt in the dirt. “As the Roman told the
Greek king’s envoy, say yes or no before you step out of the circle.”

Pratt understood the allusion. He also understood that, like the Seleucids when measured against Rome’s might, he had no choice. “I yield, sir,” he said. “Under compulsion, I yield. Let me go back to Castle Rock, and I will wire President Taylor to that effect. God will judge you for what you do in Utah, General Pope.”

“So will the president,” Pope replied. “I worry more about him.”

Custer clapped his hands together. “Very good, sir!” he said. Pope beamed. Custer nodded to himself. You couldn’t go far wrong praising your commander.

General Thomas Jackson paced in the antechamber outside President Longstreet’s office like a wolf confined for too long in a cage too small for it. After watching him for a few minutes, G. Moxley Sorrel said, “Please be at ease, General. The president will see you soon, I assure you.”

“No doubt. No doubt.” Jackson didn’t sit. He didn’t even slow down. “I should not be here at all. I should be in the field, where I belong.”

“Being summoned to confer with your chief executive is not an insult, sir,” Sorrel said. “On the contrary: it is a signal honor, a mark of the president’s confidence in you and in your judgment.”

As far as Jackson was concerned, Longstreet showed confidence in only one person’s judgment: his own, a confidence Jackson reckoned exaggerated. To the president’s chief of staff, he replied, “I am not insulted, Mr. Sorrel. I am delayed. Who knows what the Yankees may be doing whilst I fritter my time away in useless consultation?”

The door to Longstreet’s office came open. The French minister, a dapper little man who looked like a druggist, strode out, bowed to Jackson, and hurried away. President Longstreet followed him. “You think I’m wasting your precious time, do you?” he said.

“Of course I do, Your Excellency,” Jackson said: when asked a direct question, he was never one to back away from a direct answer. Moxley Sorrel, whose principal function, so far as Jackson could see, was shielding President Longstreet from unpleasantness of any sort, looked horrified.

Longstreet himself, however, merely nodded, as if he’d expected nothing different. “Well, come on in, General, and we’ll talk about it.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Jackson said: he might have been restive, but he understood perfectly well that the president of the Confederate States was his superior. Inside Longstreet’s office, he took his usual stiff seat in a chair not really designed to accommodate such a posture.

Longstreet picked up a pen and pointed it at him as if it were the bayonet on the end of a Tredegar. “I know what you’re thinking,” the president said. “You’re thinking what a blasted nuisance it is to have a president who’s also a soldier, and that I wouldn’t be such an interfering old buzzard if I were a civilian.”

“Your Excellency, if this was not a thought that crossed your mind a great many times during the administration of President Davis, I should be astonished,” Jackson said.

“Touché,”
Longstreet said with a laugh, and then, “You see how having Monsieur Méline here just before you has had its influence on me.”

Again, Jackson was frank to the point of bluntness: “Very little influences you, Mr. President, when you do not care to let yourself be influenced.”

Longstreet started to reply to that, but checked himself. Setting down the pen, he made a steeple of the fingertips of both hands. “Do you know, General, you can at times be alarmingly perceptive,” he remarked. “Perhaps it is as well that you never took any great interest in politics.”

“As well for me, certainly,” Jackson agreed, “and, I have no doubt, also for our nation.”

Longstreet surprised him by being frank in turn (any frankness from Longstreet surprised him): “By the first part of which you mean you’d sooner see others do the dirty work, so as not to tarnish your own moral perfection.” He held up a hand—he used them expressively, as a politician should. “Never mind. What I’m driving at is that you chafe under me for exactly the opposite reason I—and so many others—chafed under Jeff Davis.”

Jackson realized he would have to examine, and if necessary root out, what looked like a stain of hypocrisy on his own soul. But that had to wait. Duty first. Always duty first. “I beg your pardon, Mr. President, but I do not see the distinction you are drawing.”

“No?” President Longstreet sounded amused. “I’ll spell it out for you. President Davis interfered with the way his commanders fought the War of Secession because he thought he was a better general than they were. I am interfering in the way you fight this war because I think I am a better politician than you are.”

“I would not presume to argue that, despite your intimations to the contrary a moment ago,” Jackson replied.

“All right, then,” Longstreet said. “Believe me, General, I would constrain you less if I did not have to worry more about keeping our allies satisfied with the manner in which we conduct the war.”

“It is war,” Jackson said simply. “We must conduct so as best and most expeditiously to defeat the enemy.”

“How best to defeat the United States and how to defeat them most expeditiously may not be one and the same,” Longstreet said. “This is one reason I ordered you not to go on and attack Harper’s Ferry after beating the Yankees at Winchester.”

“Mr. President, I do not understand.” Jackson knew no better way to express the frustration he felt at having to abandon an assault he was certain would have been successful.

“I know you don’t. That is why I called you back to Richmond.” Longstreet pointed to the map on the wall. “Suppose we win an overwhelming victory in this war, which God grant. Can we hope to overrun and conquer the United States?”

Jackson didn’t need to look at the map. “Of course not, sir.”

“Good.” The president of the CSA nodded approval. “There you have the first point: any success we win must of necessity be limited in scope. After it, we still face United States larger and stronger than ourselves.” He cocked his head to one side, awaiting Jackson’s response. Reluctantly, Jackson nodded in turn. The president proceeded, like a teacher taking a scholar through the steps of a geometric proof: “It therefore follows, does it not, that we should be wise to maintain and cultivate our alliance with the powers whose intervention was essential in securing our independence a generation ago?”

Like a scholar who did not grasp the proof, Jackson said, “I fail to see how the one follows from the other.”

“I thought not—another reason to call you away from the front.” Longstreet seemed willing, even eager, to go through the proof the long way where the short way had failed. “The key to your understanding, General, is that, in the eyes of our allies, we
are engaged in a defensive struggle. The United States declared war against us, not the other way round. The United States first took offensive action, sending their cavalry down into the Indian Territory. That justified our responding.”

“You don’t win a war by merely responding, Mr. President.” Jackson was as unyielding as the stone wall that had given him his lasting nickname.

“We aren’t
merely
responding,” Longstreet said. “General Stuart has stung the Yankees down in the New Mexico Territory, and our raids into Kansas have been effective in keeping the USA off balance there—and the United States have pulled regular troops from that front to bring in Mormons in Utah back under their thumb.”

“Ah—the Mormons.” Jackson leaned forward. “Had we anything to do with their … timely disaffection?” That sort of inspired chicanery, sowing trouble in the Yankees’ rear, was what he would have expected from Longstreet.

“I despise the Mormons, General, and I thank heaven every day that we have only a handful of them in the Confederacy,” the president said.

For a moment, Jackson thought Longstreet had denied abetting the unrest in Utah Territory. Then he realized the president of the CSA had done no such thing. He suspected he’d got all the answer he was going to get, too. No point to pursuing it further; he returned to the main subject at hand: “What we’ve given the United States are pinpricks, fleabites. We need to hit them hard enough to let them know they’re hurt.”

“I will not strike them blows that, in my judgment, would cause Britain and France to conclude they are being used as instruments of our aggrandizement rather than protectors of our legitimate rights,” Longstreet said. “I will not. If that makes the war more difficult, so be it. My firm view is that, in the long run, we shall be better for it.”

Jackson got to his feet. “If I cannot prosecute the war to the utmost, Your Excellency, I hope you will accept my resignation.”

“Oh, sit down, Tom. Don’t be a stiff-necked fool,” Longstreet said testily. Surprised, Jackson did sit. The president went on, “Even if I tie one hand behind your back, I need you. You’re the best I’ve got. That’s all the more true
because
I tie one hand behind your back. I’m not the only one who needs you. The country does.”

Jackson saw that Longstreet deserved his place in the executive mansion. The president knew precisely which levers to pull to return a recalcitrant general to obedience. Maybe that meant he knew which levers to pull to keep Britain and France on good terms with the Confederate States, and maybe it meant he correctly gauged how important the alliance was. If all that was so …

“For the sake of the nation we both serve, I retract what I just said.” Jackson spoke firmly. Through his life, he’d seldom had to backtrack. When he found the need, he was as unflinching in meeting it as with any other tactical necessity.

“Did you say something, General?” Longstreet brought a hand to his ear. “I’m an old man. I must be getting deaf, because I didn’t hear a word.”

That drew a chuckle from Jackson. Longstreet was smoother than Jackson had ever wanted to be, and crookeder than Jackson ever wanted to be, too. But he’d found a way out of a situation from which the general-in-chief would have been too stubborn to retreat unaided. He deserved credit for that.

“Very well, then.” Jackson gave him credit by proceeding from the point of their disagreement as if he had in fact agreed. “Recognizing that we cannot hope to conquer the United States, how are we to secure victory over them?”

“By demonstrating to them that they cannot hope to conquer us,” President Longstreet answered. “The way you ran them out of Winchester was first-rate, General. That is how we won the War of Secession, after all.”

“Our armies were in Pennsylvania when we won the War of Secession,” Jackson pointed out.

“True,” Longstreet said, “but we were compelled to invade their territory then, for they had gained several lodgments in ours: along the Carolina coast, in Virginia, and in the West. That is not the case now. Our navy is far more able to defend our shores than was so then, and we have our allies to assist us. We stand in firm control on our side of the Potomac, and have punished Washington for the effrontery of the United States. And Kentucky and the line of the Ohio River are now ours, where we had to gain that line by force of arms during the previous war. The United States have not got the initiative, nor shall they gain it.”

“Hard to be assured of that while we stand on the defensive,” Jackson said.

Longstreet shrugged his broad shoulders. “Modern weaponry favors the defensive, at least on land. Having seen the fighting at first hand, do you deny it?”

“No, sir,” Jackson said. “Harder now to break a strongly held defensive position than it was in the War of Secession, and it wasn’t easy then. As my written report states, a bare regiment of entrenched Yankees fought manfully against my brigade south of Kernstown, though eventually being overcome by superior force.”

“Well, then,” Longstreet said, as if everything were settled, “is it not more profitable to strike where we and our allies are strong, as in the recent bombardments of U.S. towns on the shores of the Great Lakes, and to let the Yankees beat their heads against the wall coming at us?”