How Few Remain (50 page)

Irony to Custer was like a mouse on the tracks to a locomotive: not big enough to notice. He rolled right over it, saying, “You dashed Black Republican, they should have hanged you after we lost the last war, they should have hanged you again for a Communard, and now they should hang you for a traitor. You’re luckier than you deserve, do you know that?”

“I’m lucky in all the people who love and admire me, that’s plain,” Lincoln answered.

Again, it sailed past the cavalry colonel. He paused to kick dust on Lincoln’s shoes, another of his less endearing habits, then jerked a thumb back in the direction of General Pope’s office. “The military governor is going to want to see you. You may as well go on over there now.”

“I’ll do that,” Lincoln said, amiably enough. When Custer did not move, he added, “Just as soon as you get out of my way, I mean.” With another growl, the commander of the Fifth Cavalry stepped aside.

As Lincoln ambled along in the direction of Pope’s office, the young lieutenant who’d arrested him at Gabe Hamilton’s house came out of the stockade, spotted him, and came over at a run. “Mr. Lincoln! I was looking for you. General Pope—”

“Wants to invite me to take some tea with him,” Lincoln said as the lieutenant gaped. “Yes, so I’ve been informed.” Resisting the urge to pat the youngster on the head, Lincoln walked past him toward the beckoning shade.

General John Pope looked up from the sheet of paper he was reading. “Ah, Mr. Lincoln,” he said, taking off his spectacles and setting them on the desk. “I wanted to speak with you.”

“So I’ve been told,” Lincoln said. A moment later, he repeated, “So I’ve been told.” It meant nothing to Pope. It probably would have meant nothing to him had he seen both Custer and the young lieutenant come up to Lincoln. The former president started to sit, waited for Pope’s brusque nod, and finished setting his backside on a chair.

The military governor of Utah Territory glowered at him. It was probably a glower that put his subordinates in fear. Since Lincoln already knew Pope’s opinion of him and was already in his power, it had little effect here. Perhaps sensing that, Pope made his voice heavy with menace: “You know what would happen to you if your fate were in my hands.”

“I have had a hint or two along those lines, yes, General,” Lincoln answered.

“President Blaine forbids it. You know that, too. It’s too damned bad, in my opinion, but I am not a traitor. I obey the lawful orders of my superiors.” Pope tried the glare again, not quite for so long this time. “Next best choice, in my view, would be putting convict’s stripes on you and letting you spend the rest of your days splitting rocks instead of rails.”

“In my present state, I doubt the gravel business would get as great a boost from my labors as you might hope,” Lincoln said.

Pope went on as if he had not spoken: “The president forbids that as well. His view is that no one who has held his office deserves such ignominy—no matter how much he deserves such ignominy, if you take my meaning.”

“Oh yes, General. You make yourself very plain, I assure you.”

“For which I thank you. I am but a poor bluff soldier, unaccustomed to fancy flights of language.” Pope was a grandiloquent twit, given to flights of bombast. He didn’t know it, either; he was as blind about himself as he had been about Stonewall Jackson’s intentions during the War of Secession.

“If you can’t hang me and you can’t put me at hard labor for the rest of my days, what do you propose to do with me?” Lincoln asked.

Pope looked even less happy than he had before. “I have been given an order, Mr. Lincoln, for which, to make myself plain once more, I do not care to the extent of one pinch of owl dung. But I am a soldier, and I shall obey regardless of my personal feelings on the matter.”

“Commendable, I’m sure,” Lincoln said. “What is the order?”

“To get you out of Utah Territory.” Pope truly did sound disgusted. “To put you on a train and see your back and never see your face again. To make sure you interfere no further in the settling of affairs here.”

That was better than Lincoln had dared hope. He did his best to conceal how happy he was. “If you must, General. I was bound for San Francisco when matters here became unfortunate. I shall have to set up some new engagements there, having been detained so long, but—”

“No,” Pope interrupted. “You are not going to San Francisco. Neither are you going to Denver, nor Chicago, nor St. Louis, nor
Boston, nor New York. President Blaine has shown so much sense, if no more.”

“Whither am I bound, then?” Lincoln inquired.

“You have a choice. You may go south to Flagstaff, in New Mexico Territory, or north to Pocatello, in Idaho Territory, and points beyond. For the duration of the war, you are to be restricted to the Territories north or south of Utah Territory. I am to advise you that any attempt to evade the said restriction will, upon your recapture, result in punishment far more severe than this internal exile.”

“Ah, I see.” Lincoln nodded sagely. “I may go wherever I like, provided I go to a place with, for all practical purposes, no people in it.”

“Precisely.” Pope was almost as deaf to irony as Custer.

“If you wish to muzzle me, why not simply leave me in confinement here in Utah?” Lincoln asked.

“Confining you embarrasses the present administration, you being the only other Republican president besides the incumbent,” General Pope replied. “Leaving you to your own devices here in Utah, on the other hand, embarrasses
me
. You have already proved beyond the slightest fragment of a doubt that you are not to be trusted here, but delight in meddling in affairs properly none of your concern.”

“General, nothing that has happened in Utah since the outbreak of the war has delighted me,” Lincoln said: “neither the deeds of the Mormon leaders nor those undertaken since U.S. soldiers reoccupied this Territory.”

“If you equate the Mormons and the United States Army, we are well shut of you,” Pope declared. “Had John Taylor and his henchmen simply remained good citizens, none of what we have had to do would have been necessary.”

When phrased thus, that was true. But Lincoln had listened to Taylor and the other Mormons enough to know they thought every effort to abolish polygamy a persecution of beliefs they held dear. From what he had seen, they had a point. But did that matter? To anyone who took the view on polygamy of the vast majority of the American people, it mattered not at all.

Pope went on, “The time for coddling the rebels here is past. We have tried to persuade them to obedience, and failed. Persuasion having failed, we shall force them to obedience. One way or another, however, obedience we shall have.”

“What you shall have is hatred,” Lincoln said.

“I don’t care this much”—Pope snapped his fingers—”if every Mormon wakes up in the morning and goes to bed at night and spends all the time between praying that I roast in hell forever, so long as he obeys me while so praying. When you treat with Taylor, when you hold silence after treating with Taylor, you suggest to these poor ignorant folk that they too have some hope of successfully defying me. That I cannot tolerate, and that is why I am sending you out of this Territory.”

Lincoln sighed. If singleminded ruthlessness could bring the Mormons to heel, Pope was the right man for the job, and Custer a good right hand for him. The question, of course, was whether such ruthlessness could do the job. Lincoln had his doubts. If John Pope had ever had doubts about anything, he’d had them surgically removed at an early age.

“I would sooner send you out of this Territory to your eternal reward,” Pope said, “but, as I have noted, that is not among the choices President Blaine has left me. In fact, he has left the choice to you, and a better one than you deserve, too: north, Mr. Lincoln, or south?”

Lincoln wondered if promising to arrange the peaceable surrender of John Taylor would let him stay here and work to avert the tragedy he so plainly saw coming. Had he seen the slightest hope of success in keeping such a promise, he would have made it. But he did not think the Mormon president would surrender. Even had he reckoned Taylor willing, he did not think General Pope would let him make the arrangements. And he did not think that, if Taylor should surrender, Pope would do anything but hang him.

“North or south?” the military governor repeated. “That is the sole choice left you.”

He was right. Knowing he was right saddened Lincoln as he had not been saddened since having to recognize the independence of the Confederate States. “North,” he said.

Pope clapped his hands together. “And I win an eagle from Colonel Custer. He was ten dollars sure you’d say south. But for that, though, it matters little. During the War of Secession, you exiled me to Minnesota to fight redskins, and then lost the war anyhow. Now I get to return the favor, and, if you think it isn’t sweet, you’re wrong.”

“I hope you don’t lose the war here,” Lincoln said.

Being in Pope’s power, he was not suffered to have the last word. “There is no war here,” the military governor said harshly. “There shall be no war here. Your going makes that the more likely. You leave tomorrow.”

    General Orlando Willcox studied the map of Louisville. “Give me your frank opinion, Colonel Schlieffen,” he said. “Might I have been wiser to attempt a flanking movement than a frontal assault?”

Alfred von Schlieffen’s frank opinion was that General Willcox would have made an excellent country butcher, but was less than ideally suited to command an important army—or even an unimportant one. He did not think Willcox would appreciate his being so frank as that. Instead, he said, “Perhaps you might have made a small attack here to hold the foe, and a larger one on the flank to beat him.”

“That’s what I have in mind doing now,” the commander of the Army of the Ohio said. “I have reinforcements coming; President Blaine is committing the resources of the entire nation to this fight. Instead of sending them straight into Louisville, I purpose invading Kentucky at another point farther east, whence I can take the Confederates’ defenses of the city in the flank. What is your view of the matter?”

Again, Schlieffen could not make himself be so forthright as he might have liked. “What could have at the campaign’s beginning been done and what can now be done are different, one from the other,” he said.

“Oh, no doubt, no doubt,” Willcox said. “But we have the Rebs well and truly pinned down inside of Louisville now, thanks be to God. They won’t be able to shift quickly to respond to such a move now.”

Some truth lurked at the bottom of that. How much? Schlieffen admitted to himself he did not know. He did not think the world had ever known a battle like this one. Sieges had been fought around cities, yes, but in all history before now had a siege ever been fought in the heart of a city? That, in essence, was what the fight for Louisville had become.

When he said so aloud, Willcox nodded. “That’s just what it’s turned into,” he agreed. “The question is, are we the besiegers or the besieged?”

“Both at the same time,” Schlieffen answered. “Each of you
thinks you can the other force back, and so you both push forward—and you collide, and neither of you can go ahead or to fall back is willing. Have you ever seen rams bang heads together?”

“Oh, yes,” Willcox said. “That’s why I aim to try out this flanking maneuver. A ram that butted another in the ribs before it was ready to fight would tup a lot of ewes.”

“Before it was ready to fight? Yes, in this you have right—
are
right.” Schlieffen corrected himself with a grimace of annoyance at his imperfect English. Anything imperfect annoyed him. “But if the second ram were already fighting, it would be harder to surprise.”

“I don’t even know whether this flank move will surprise the Confederates,” Willcox said. “My bet is, surprised or not, they’ll be too badly beaten up to do anything save ingloriously flee.”

“You place on this bet a large stake,” Schlieffen said, in lieu of asking Willcox where he was hiding his wits these days.

“Our cause being just, God will provide,” the general said. “I have prayed over this decision, and I am confident it is the best thing we can do.”

“Prayer is good,” Schlieffen agreed from the bottom of his heart. “To prepare is also good. If you do not prepare, prayer asks of God a miracle. God will work a miracle when it suits Him, but suit Him it does not often.”

“No, indeed,” Willcox said. “If miracles were common, they would not be miracles.” Schlieffen waited from him to draw the proper lesson from that. He drew … some of it. “We shall get these men into Kentucky and hurl them against the foe as expeditiously as possible.”

Schlieffen took
expeditiously
to mean something like
expedition
, and had to have that straightened out, which Willcox did with patience and tact. The German military attaché admired Orlando Willcox the man, who from all he could see lived an exemplary Christian life. He wished his opinion of Orlando Willcox the commander were higher. The man did not lack courage. He had the ability to inspire his subordinates. Both of those were important parts of the general’s art. These days, though, the art entailed more.

“In Germany,” Schlieffen said, “we would have done more planning before this battle began. We would have looked at the choices we might make. If so-and-so happened in the fighting in
Louisville, we would have known we then needed to do this thing or that. We would have done the thing. We would not have had to think out on the spot what the thing would be to do.”

Willcox looked at him with wide eyes. “We haven’t got anything like that in the United States.”

“I know you have not this thing in your country,” Schlieffen said in the pitying tones he would have used to agree with a Turk that railroads were sadly lacking in the Ottoman Empire. “You have not in your country the understanding of a general staff.”

“General Rosecrans heads up a staff in the War Department,” Willcox said, shaking his head. “I have a staff here, and a sizable one, too.”

“Yes, I have seen this,” Schlieffen said. “It is not the sort of staff I mean. Your staff, when you decide the army will do thus-and-so, take your orders to the commanders of corps and divisions. They to you bring back any troubles these men may have with the orders.”