How Few Remain (9 page)

Stuart followed at a pace only a little more leisurely. Accompanied by Major Sellers and enough troopers to give the idea that he was someone of consequence, he rode up the dirt track that led northwest toward New Mexico.

He met Lieutenant Colonel Foulke’s party nearer three miles outside El Paso than five. One of Foulke’s aides was peering toward the Confederate garrison town with a telescope he folded up and put away when Stuart and his retinue came into sight. He could have done it sooner without Stuart’s seeing it. That he’d waited meant he wanted Stuart to know the Yankees had him under observation.

“Wait here,” Stuart told the troopers when they drew close to the U.S. soldiers. “They didn’t come here to start a fight, not under flag of truce.” He and his aide-de-camp rode on toward the men in blue.

Lieutenant Colonel Foulke and the officer who’d been using the telescope imitated his practice, so that the four leaders met between their small commands. “A very good morning to you, General,” Foulke said politely; seeing his baby-smooth skin and coal-black mustache reminded Stuart he himself would be fifty soon.

He didn’t let himself dwell on that. “The same to you, Lieutenant Colonel,” he answered. “I hope you will not mind my asking the purpose of your visit to the Confederacy here.”

“By no means, sir.” Hearing the polite phrase in Foulke’s Yankee accent—New York, Stuart thought—was strange. The U.S. officer went on, “I have been instructed by the secretary of war, Mr. Harrison, and by the general-in-chief of the United States Army to inform you personally that the United States will
view with great concern any movement of Confederate forces into the territory of the Empire of Mexico.”

“I would point out to you, sir, that, when and if the purchase arrangements between Mexico and the Confederacy are completed, the provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora shall no longer be the territory of the Empire of Mexico, but rather that of the Confederate States of America.” Stuart’s smile looked ingratiating, but was anything but. “Surely, Bill—”

“William,” Foulke said. “I prefer William. William Dudley Foulke, sir, at your service.”

“Beg your pardon, William,” Stuart said easily, wondering what such a pompous little fellow was doing so far out West. “As I was saying, surely the United States cannot be thinking of forbidding the Confederate States from moving their forces from one part of their own territory to another.”

William Dudley Foulke took a deep breath. “I am requested and required to inform you, General, as the government of the United States has informed President Longstreet in Richmond, that the United States consider the sale of Sonora and Chihuahua to be made under duress, and therefore to be invalid and of no consequence.”

“Oh, they do, do they?” Stuart had understood that to be the position of the United States, but had never heard it explicitly till now. The way it was stated … “William, I assure you I mean no offense by this, but you talk more like a lawyer than a soldier.”

Foulke smiled: he was amused, not angry. “I considered a career in the law in my early days, General Stuart. In the aftermath of the War of Secession, I determined that I could better use my talents in the service of my country as a soldier than as a jurist. As I am of Quaker stock, my family was distressed at my choice, but here I am today.”

“Here you are,” Stuart agreed. “And since you are here, Lieutenant Colonel Foulke, I have to tell you that the view of the Confederate States is that, if the sale of Sonora and Chihuahua be completed, those two provinces become territory belonging to the Confederate States of America, to be administered and garrisoned at the sole discretion of the government of the CSA. In plain English, sir, once they’re ours, we’ll do with them as we please.”

“In plain English, sir, the United States do not aim to let themselves be outflanked on the south,” Foulke said. “The United States do not aim to let the Confederacy take advantage of a weak
neighbor, as you did when you bullied Cuba out of Spain a few years ago. I expect you will wire a report of this meeting back to Richmond. Rest assured that I am telling you nothing different from what Minister Hay is telling President Longstreet there, or for that matter what President Blaine is telling Minister Benjamin in Washington.”

Major Horatio Sellers spoke up: “You Yankees keep barking that way, Lieutenant Colonel, you’re going to have to show whether you’ve got any bite to go with it.”

Foulke flushed: with his fine, fair skin, the darkening was quite noticeable. But his voice was cool as he replied, “Major, if your nation persists in its unwise course, you will feel our teeth, I assure you.”

“The United States have already felt our teeth, sir,” Jeb Stuart said. “It has been a while, I admit; perhaps you’ve forgotten. If you have, we are prepared to remind you. And, I will point out, we have good friends, which is more than the United States can say.”

Lieutenant Colonel Foulke shrugged. “Sir, I have delivered to you the message with which I was charged. I personally have no great use for war, nor does any man, nor any nation, of sense. But you are to know that the United States are firmly resolved in this matter. Good day.” Without waiting for a reply, he and the captain with him rode back toward their men.

Stuart watched until all the Yankees started riding off in the direction of New Mexico. When he’d been Foulke’s age—Lord, when he’d been even younger—he’d loved nothing better than riding to war. Now that he had sons of his own growing to manhood, he was no longer so sure.

He turned to Major Sellers. “The next time we see that Yankee, it will be on the battlefield.”

His aide-de-camp gave a sharp, short nod. “Good,” he said.

    Colonel Alfred von Schlieffen had heard that the British government designated diplomatic service in Washington, D.C., a hardship position on account of the abominable climate of the capital of the United States. He didn’t know for a fact that that was true. If it wasn’t, though, it should have been. The weather had already got hotter and muggier than it ever did in Berlin, and May was only a bit more than half done. Kaiser Wilhelm I’s military attaché in the United States ran a finger under the tight collar
of his blue Prussian uniform to try to let in some air. That helped little, if at all.

Sweating, Schlieffen stepped onto the black cast-iron balcony outside his office. He startled a pigeon on the rail. It flew away, wings flapping noisily. Schlieffen reckoned that a victory of sorts. Too many pigeon droppings streaked the dark red brick of the German ministry.

Against the humidity and heat, though, he won nothing. No breeze stirred the air; it was as hot outside as back in the office. Horses and buggies and wagons rattled up and down Massachusetts Avenue. The street was paved with bricks, so they didn’t raise great choking clouds of dust as they might have done, but the racket of iron-shod hooves and iron tires on the paving was terrible.

That racket drove whatever thoughts Schlieffen had had clean out of his head. For a man so intensely intellectual, that could not be borne. He went back inside, closing the French doors behind him. As the air was so still, he made the office no hotter, and, since they were almost all glass, he hardly made it dimmer.

Above his desk hung three framed portraits. A Catholic might have thought them images of a secular Trinity. That had never occurred to Schlieffen, a devout Hutterite. To him, they were merely the most important men in his life: ascetic-looking Field Marshal von Moltke, whose victories over Denmark, Austria, and France had made Prussian-led Germany a nation; plump, imperious Chancellor von Bismarck, whose diplomacy had made von Moltke’s victories possible; and, above them both, the Kaiser, bald now, his fringe of hair, mustache, and fuzzy side whiskers white, his chest full of well-earned medals, for he had been a formidable soldier in his own right before succeeding his brother as King of Prussia.

Whenever Schlieffen thought of the Kaiser’s soldierly career, he could only marvel, for Wilhelm had first seen action in the Prussian puppet forces that fought under Napoleon’s command when the century was young. “How many men still living can say that?” Schlieffen murmured. And afterwards, Wilhelm had helped guide Prussia’s rise to greatness, had known when to urge his brother to decline the throne of a united Germany after the revolutions of 1848, and had known when to accept it himself a generation later.

From the Kaiser’s portrait, Schlieffen’s eyes fell briefly to the
small photograph of a pretty young woman on his desk: the one bit of sentiment he permitted himself in a room otherwise utterly businesslike. Anna had been his cousin as well as, for four wonderful years, his wife. In the nine years since her death in childbed, he’d found it easier to care for the ideal of Germany than for any merely human being.

He inked his pen and wrote the last few sentences of the report he’d been working on. After scrawling his signature at the bottom, he checked his pocket watch: a few minutes past ten. He had a ten-thirty appointment at the War Department.

Precise as always, he signed the daybook in the front hall, noting his departure time to the minute. The guards outside the door saluted as he left the embassy. He punctiliously returned the courtesy.

He walked half a block southeast on Massachusetts, then turned right onto Vermont, which cut diagonally across Washington’s square grid and led straight toward the White House and the War Department building just west of it. Civilians waved to him, mistaking his light blue uniform for one belonging to the U.S. Army. He’d had U.S. soldiers make the same mistake and salute him.

He ignored the misdirected greetings, as he ignored most human contact. Then a fat man on a pony that didn’t seem up to bearing his weight recognized the uniform for what it was. “Hurrah for the Kaiser!” the fellow called, and tipped his hat. Schlieffen acknowledged that with a polite nod. The Kaiser was popular in the United States, not least because his army had beaten the French.

Newsboys hawked papers on every corner. Headlines screamed of coming war. Schlieffen’s glance lifted toward the Arlington Heights on the far side of the Potomac. Buildings screened most of his view of them, but he knew they were there. He also knew the Confederate States had guns mounted on them, and on other high ground along the southern bank of the river. If war came, Washington would suffer.

More soldiers were on the streets than usual, but not many more. Unlike Germany, the United States had no conscription law, relying instead on volunteers to fill out the relatively small professional army once war was declared. That struck Schlieffen as the next thing to insane, even if the Confederacy used the same system.
Mobs
, he thought scornfully.
Mobs with rifles, that’s what they’ll be
.

The War Department was a four-story brick building with a two-story entranceway fronted by half a dozen columns. To Schlieffen’s way of thinking, it would have been adequate for a provincial town, but hardly for a national capital. The Americans had talked for years of building something finer: talked, but spent no money. Still, the soldiers on duty at the entrance were almost as well drilled as the guards in front of the German embassy.

“Yes, Colonel,” one of them said. “The general is expecting you, so you just follow Willie here. He’ll take you to him.”

“Thank you,” Schlieffen said. The soldier named Willie led him up to the third-floor office where the general-in-chief of the U.S. Army carried out his duties.
“Guten Tag, Herr Oberst, “
said the general’s adjutant, a bright young captain named Saul Berryman.

“Guten Tag,”
Schlieffen answered, and then, as he usually did, fell back into English: “How are you today, Captain?”

“Ganz gut, danke. Und Sie?”
Berryman kept up the German for the same reason Schlieffen spoke English—neither was so fluent speaking the other’s language as he would have liked, and both enjoyed the chance to practice.
“Der General wird Sie sofort sehen.”

“I am glad he will see me at once,” Schlieffen said. “He must be very busy, with the crisis in your country.”

“Ja, er ist.”
Just then, the general opened the door to the outer room where Berryman worked. Seeing him, his adjutant returned to English himself: “Go ahead, Colonel.”

“Yes, always good to see you, Colonel,” Major General William Rosecrans echoed. “Come right in.”

“Thank you,” Schlieffen said, and took a chair across the desk from Rosecrans. The military attaché’s nostrils twitched. He’d smelled whiskey on Rosecrans before, but surely at a time like this—He gave a mental shrug.

“Good to see you,” Rosecrans repeated, as if he’d forgotten he’d said it the first time. He was somewhere in his early sixties, with graying hair, a fairly neat graying beard, and a nose with a formidable hook in it. His color was very good, but the whiskey might have had something to do with that. He looked shrewd, but, Schlieffen judged, wasn’t truly intelligent; he owed his position mostly to having come out of the War of Secession less disgraced than any other prominent U.S. commander.

“General, I am here to present my respects, and also to convey
to you the friendly good wishes of my sovereign, the Kaiser,” Schlieffen said.

“Of your suffering Kaiser?” Rosecrans said. “I hope he gets better, with all my heart I do. Germany has always been a country friendly to us, and we’re damned glad of that, believe me, considering the way so many of the other countries in Europe treat us.”

Schlieffen gave him a sharp look, or as sharp a look as could come from the military attaché’s nondescript, rather pinched features. Rosecrans showed not the slightest hint of embarrassment, nor even that he noticed the glare. Schlieffen concluded the fault lay in his own accented English, which Rosecrans must have innocently misunderstood. Having concluded that, the colonel dismissed the matter from his mind. If no insult had been offered, he could not take offense.

“I would be grateful, General, if you could make arrangements so that, in the event of war between the United States and the Confederate States, you might transport me to one of your armies so that I can observe the fighting and report on it to my government,” he said.