How Few Remain (19 page)

“In the Montana Territory, volunteers are only being accepted at U.S. Army posts,” Jasper St. John said. “This is by order of the secretary of war, as received here when war was declared against the Confederate States.”

Roosevelt felt ready to explode. “But there aren’t any forts within fifty miles of Helena!” he shouted.

“I understand that.” St. John was as unmoving as a hilltop fortress. “I can only follow the orders I was given. You are not the first patriotic citizen I’ve had to turn away, believe me.”

“Mr. St. John, sir, use your reason,” Roosevelt said, doing his best to keep a rein on his temper. “That order may possibly have made some sense when we were at war with only the Confederate States. I do not say it did; I deny it did; but it is a point on which reasonable men might differ. I understand that we are a long way from the Southern Confederacy here in Montana. But good God in the foothills, Mr. St. John”—he was shouting again; not for the life of him could he keep from shouting again—”that’s Canada right up over the border there! Has anyone back in Washington bothered to look at a map since England and the Dominion declared war on us? If they put a proper army over the border, the handful of regular troops we have in the Territory won’t be able to stop them. They’ll hardly be able to slow them down.”

“Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I accept you and your friends here as U.S. Volunteers, Mister … ?” St. John paused.

“Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt. Now you’re talking, sir!” Roosevelt said enthusiastically.

But the clerk shook his head. “No, not yet,” he said. “I’m just beginning. If I do that, you still will not
be U
.S. Volunteers, because I have no authority to make you such. And, as soon as the people above me find out I have done it, they will give me the sack for exceeding what authority I do have. You will be no better off, and I will be worse. Do you see my trouble now?”

“I see it, all right,” Roosevelt said, breathing hard. “The trouble is, you’re one hidebound paper-shuffler in a regime full of petty paper-shufflers. If your sort is the best this nation can afford to send out to the Territories, we
deserve
to lose this war. A stronger and more able race will supplant us here, as surely as we have supplanted the savage red man.”

Roosevelt’s farmhands burst into cheers. Jasper St. John remained unmoved. “That’s very pretty, Mr. Roosevelt,” he said, and paused to spit, almost accurately, at the cuspidor next to the desk of the other clerk, who, with his papers, seemed oblivious to the argument. “It’s very pretty,” St. John repeated. “You could run for the Territorial Legislature on it, no two ways about that. But it cuts no ice with me. I have not the power to do what you want. Good day.” He inked the pen that had been lying on his desk, ready to go back to his own bureaucratic minutiae.

“God damn it, you stupid fool, I am trying to help my country!” Roosevelt yelled.

Slowly, St. John put down the pen. Slowly, he got to his feet. He was half a head taller than Roosevelt, and looked half again as wide through the shoulders. “And I,” he said pointedly, “am tired of being shouted at. No matter how much you want to help your country, I am not authorized to help you do it.”

Regardless of his size, Roosevelt was about to punch him in the nose. He would have felt the same had he been in the office alone; that he had his men with him never entered his mind. But something else did, so the punch remained unthrown. “Then I’ll raise my own troops!” he exclaimed. “Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment, that’s what I’ll call ’em!”

His men pounded him on the back and shouted themselves hoarse. “Do whatever you please,” Jasper St. John said. “Do it somewhere else.”

“Come on, boys,” Roosevelt said. “We’ll show him not everybody in Montana Territory is stuck in the mud.”

As they left the Territorial capitol, Roosevelt’s mind whirled with plans. If he was going to recruit the Unauthorized Regiment, he would have to wire back to New York for money: the ranch, though profitable, didn’t make nearly enough to support a project of that size. He didn’t think he would have to arm the men he raised, not with Winchesters as common as weeds out here. A Winchester didn’t have the range or stopping power of an Army Springfield, but, with their tubular magazines, Winchesters put
more bullets in the air than single-shot Springfields. The regiment could take its chances there.

He would have to feed and shelter the men till such time as the Unauthorized Regiment really did pass under U.S. control. And not men alone—”We’ll be a cavalry regiment, of course,” he said, as if he’d known as much all along. “No use pounding along wearing out boot leather.”

“That’s it, boss,” Esau Hunt said. “First class all the way, that’s how the Unauthorized Regiment goes.”

The nucleus and, at the moment, the entire membership of Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment piled into Roosevelt’s Ranch Wagon (he was, he knew, thinking in capital letters). He drove over to the
Gazette
office, more sedately now than before: the horses hadn’t had a chance to cool down fully during his brief, unfortunate visit to the capitol.

At the newspaper, he bought a large advertisement seeking recruits for the unit he was forming. “Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment?” said the printer who took down the text he dictated. “I know they aren’t accepting volunteers—I tried—but this here—”

“May light a fire under them,” Roosevelt interrupted. “And even if it doesn’t, I’ll still have the troops to present to the U.S. Army. I’ll also want you to print up some handbills with the same information as goes into this advertisement. Can you hire someone to paste them up here in town?”

“Sure can,” the printer said, “but it’ll cost you two dollars extra per five hundred.”

“I’ll take a thousand,” Roosevelt declared. “I don’t want a man to be able to walk down any street in Helena without seeing one of them.”

“A thousand should do it,” the man in the ink-stained apron said, nodding. “That’ll be ten dollars for the advertisement, eight for the handbills—we’ll print from the same type, so I’ll cut you a break on that; would be ten otherwise—and four more to paper the town with ’em. Comes to twenty-two altogether … Colonel.”

Roosevelt had already tossed a double eagle and two big silver cartwheels onto the counter when that registered. “By jingo!” he said softly. If he was raising the regiment, he
would be
its colonel. That was how things had worked in the War of Secession, and the rules hadn’t changed since.

He stood straighter and pushed out his chest. Though he’d never fired a shot at anything more dangerous than a coyote, suddenly
he felt as one with Washington and Napoleon and Zachary Taylor: a leader of men, a conqueror. This was what he was meant to do with his life. He could feel it in his marrow.

He’d already felt a couple of other callings—writer, rancher—in his marrow during his twenty-two years on earth, but so what? He’d obviously been mistaken then. He wasn’t mistaken now. He couldn’t be mistaken now.

“Let’s find a saloon, boys,” he said. In Helena, that was harder than finding air to breathe, but not much. He had his choice, only a few doors away from the
Gazette
. He and the farmhands strode into the Silver Spoon. “Drinks on me!” he yelled, which made him friends in a hurry. “Let me tell you about Roosevelt’s Unauthorized Regiment, gents, if you’ll be so kind.” His new friends listened. Why not? He was buying.

    Up in Front Royal, Virginia, far to the northwest of Richmond, General Thomas Jackson felt like a man released from prison. Once real fighting started, he’d taken advantage of it to escape from the capitol to the front line. President Longstreet hadn’t liked that decision, not even a little.

Jackson smiled at the memory of how disingenuous he’d been. “But, Your Excellency,” he’d said, “surely the telegraph can bring me the same intelligence in the field as it can far behind the lines here. It can also convey to me any instructions you have as to the prosecution of the war. And I shall gain the important advantage of viewing some segments of the action at first hand.”

“You don’t fool me a bit,” Longstreet had answered. “You want to get out from under my thumb, and you want to get back into a camp.”

Having been a garrison soldier for more years than he cared to recall, Jackson had picked up a certain measure of guile. “Mr. President, my desires, whatever they may be”—he was not about to admit that Longstreet had hit the nail on the head—”are of no importance. All that matters is the country’s need. Can you deny my proposal possesses military merit?”

Try as he would, Old Pete Longstreet hadn’t been able to deny it. And so Jackson was encamped just north of Front Royal, in charge of a Confederate force that had fallen back in the face of the larger Yankee army that had come out of West Virginia and Maryland and was now occupying Winchester, near the head of the Shenandoah Valley.

More than the Confederate defenders had fallen back. Half the civilian population—half the white civilian population, at any rate—had fled Winchester before the invaders. Their tents and lean-tos were scattered promiscuously over the ground around the neat rows of gray and butternut canvas that marked the Confederate bivouac.

Jackson did not like having to deal with civilians. They clogged the roads, and they were eating up a good part of the supplies that should have gone to his men. And they possessed not the slightest clue about discipline or order. He feared lest they infect his troops with their chaotic stridency.

He also did not like his position. Front Royal sat at the confluence of two branches of the Shenandoah. An enterprising U.S. commander could move artillery to the high ground on either side of the town, much as Jackson himself had done against the United States during the War of Secession. Fortunately, the Yankees seemed so impressed with having taken Winchester as to have no notion of trying anything more at the moment.

That let Jackson enjoy the luxury of sitting on the top rail of a fence outside Front Royal and sucking on a lemon while he contemplated ways and means of doing unto the Yankees before they did unto him. It also let a plump, middle-aged civilian in a cutaway coat and a stovepipe hat—a gentleman who, if he was half so important as he thought himself to be, was a very important fellow indeed—come up to him and say, “See here, General, you simply must do something about the outrageous, illegal, and immoral way the damnyankees are confiscating our property. The first thing they did, sir, the very first thing, on marching into our fair city, was to proclaim the liberation of every last nigger in Winchester. Outrageous, I say!”

“I agree with you,” Jackson said. “They weren’t so blatant about it in the last war, but we had much property stolen then in the fashion you describe.”

“Well, sir, what do you propose to do about it?” the refugee from Winchester demanded. “I’ve lost thousands thanks to their thieving ways, thousands, I tell you!”

“How much do you suppose the nation has lost?” Jackson asked. The important—or, at least, self-important—man stared at him. As the general had thought, concern for the nation had never entered his mind. He cared only for himself. Jackson went on, “The best remedy I can conceive, sir, is retaking Winchester from
the United States. Then their actions are no longer of any consequence to us.”

That wasn’t strictly true, as he knew. Negroes who had been told they were free would believe it. They might try to escape to the USA—though the Yankees were anything but eager to have them there. If returned to bondage, they would surely prove fractious and unruly. President Longstreet, Jackson reflected unhappily, might well have known what he was about when he proposed manumission.

“What the devil are you doing perched there chawing on that damn thing”—the man in the stovepipe hat pointed to the lemon Jackson was holding—”when you could be liberating the city?”

“Contemplating the best way
to
liberate it.” Deliberately, Jackson began sucking on the lemon again. The plump man went right on expostulating. Jackson used the lemon as an excuse not to say another word. He looked through the fellow from Winchester, not at him. The man took a long time to get the message, but finally did. He went away, muttering dark things under his breath.

An orderly trotted up. Jackson did acknowledge his existence. “Telegram for you, sir,” the soldier said, and handed him the sheet.

Jackson rapidly read through it. “A brigade of volunteer infantry on its way up here, eh?” he said. That would better than double his force. He liked what he’d seen of the volunteer regiments in Richmond before leaving for the action: they had a solid leavening of men in their late thirties and early forties, War of Secession veterans, to help show the younger men what soldiering was about. “That’s good. That’s very good.”

Then, abruptly, he stared through the orderly—not with intentional rudeness, as he had with the plump man, but because his mind was for the moment elsewhere. Still clutching the telegram, he went back to the two-story brick house that served him as headquarters—and also as home for his family.

His son Jonathan was outside, playing with a dog. At fifteen, Jonathan was just too young to go to war, and wild with frustration because of it. “What’s up, sir?” he called. Jackson did not answer him. Jackson hardly heard him. Jonathan shrugged and threw the stick again; he’d seen his father like that many times before. The general went inside.

Several young officers in the parlor sprang to stiff attention. They were not studying the map spread over the table there: they
had been chatting with his pretty daughter, Julia, who was—where did the time go?—heading toward nineteen. Under his gaze, the officers soon found urgent reasons to go elsewhere. “Father!” Julia said reproachfully: she enjoyed the attention.

She got no more answer than had her brother, and flounced off in some dudgeon. Jackson never noticed. He studied the map for a while, traced a railroad line with his finger, and finally grunted in satisfaction. His wife had come into the parlor to see why Julia had left so abruptly. He walked past Anna without seeing her, either.

Only when he got to the telegraphy office did he recover the power of speech. “Send a wire at once to Rectorstown,” he told the operator before whom he stood. “The troops en route hither must disembark from their trains there, on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge Mountains.” He continued with a detailed stream of orders, which the telegrapher wrote down. At last, he finished: “‘The utmost celerity must be employed, to reach point named by time required.’ Now read that back to me, young man, if you’d be so kind.”