Robert tipped the porter who had carried the bags, and who now heaved them up behind the seats. The man lifted his cap, murmured thanks, and departed. To his driver, Robert Lincoln said, 'Take us home, Kraus.'
'Yes, sir.' By his accent, Kraus had not been in the United States long. He too tipped his cap, then flicked the reins and got the carriage rolling.
'Quite a nabob you're getting to be, son, everyone bowing and scraping over you as if you were an earl on the way to becoming a duke,' Lincoln said, hiding dismay behind facetiousness. Robert, who understood him very well without agreeing with him in the slightest, gave him a sharp look. Lincoln sighed; he hadn't really intended to provoke his son. He tried to smooth it over: 'As I told you, it is good to see you-better than setting eyes on anyone else I've seen lately, and that is a fact.'
'Unless I'm much mistaken, it's also faint praise.' But Robert, fortunately, sounded amused, not angry. He went on, 'Being held superior to John Pope, whom I suspect you have in mind, is closely similar to being reckoned taller than a snake, lighter than an elephant, or more in favor of abolition than an Alabama planter.' His tone grew more sympathetic: 'It was very unlucky for you, Father, that you had to fall foul of a man who bore you a grudge from the War of Secession.'
'Few U.S. soldiers from the War of Secession bear me no grudge.' Lincoln spoke with sadness but without resentment. 'They have their reasons: whom better to resent than a man who led them into a losing war? Suffering in war is hard enough in victory, but ten times harder in defeat.'
'Few of them are so resentful as to want to put a rope around your neck,' Robert said.
Lincoln thought of Pope. He thought of Colonel-now Brigadier General-Custer. He thought of the bloodthirsty guard he'd been assigned, who would still have been soiling his drawers when the War of Secession ended. He didn't answer.
Robert said, 'Now that you're here, Father, how do you aim to amuse yourself and stay out of mischief?'
'Amusing myself should be simple enough,' Lincoln replied, 'for I intend to get myself into as much mischief as I can: which is to say, I intend to struggle for the soul of the Republican Party. Our main plank can no longer be permanent, unyielding hostility toward the Confederate States. We have tried that twice now, and Blaine is failing with it as badly as I failed. The people will never give us a third chance, and I see no way to blame them for their reluctance. Fighting the Confederate States, England, and France, we are simply overmatched.'
'A conclusion I reached myself some time ago,' Robert said as they rolled into the fashionable North Side neighborhood he called home. He paused to get his pipe going, then asked the inevitable question: 'And what plank would you put in its place?'
'Justice for the working man, and freeing him from oppression at the hands of the capitalist who owns the factory in which he labours,' Lincoln said. 'We have lost sight of the fact that capital is only the fruit of labour, and could never have existed if labour had not first existed.'
'You intend to convene a meeting of Republican leaders and convince them of this doctrine?' Robert said.
'I do,' Lincoln answered simply.
'They will eat you up, Father, the way savages in the South Sea Islands eat up missionaries who are sent to convert them to a new faith they do not want.'
'Perhaps they will,' Lincoln said. 'I aim to make the effort regardless. For I tell you this, son: if the Republican Party will not build on this plank, some other party will, and will make a go of it.'
General Orlando Willcox held out his hand. 'Good-bye, Colonel. I have enjoyed your presence here, and I shall miss you.'
'I thank you,' Alfred von Schlieffen said.
'And I shall miss you as well,' Frederick Douglass said, his voice as deep and pure as a tone from the lower register of an organ. 'You always treat me as a man first, and as a black man after that if at all.'
'You are a man: so I have seen,' Schlieffen said, as he might have to a soldier who had fought well. Captain Oliver Richardson scowled at him. He took no notice of Willcox's adjutant, but climbed up behind the private who would take him to the train on which he'd return to Philadelphia.
South of the Ohio, cannon still bellowed and rifles still rattled. Schlieffen's driver let out a wistful sigh. 'Colonel, you reckon the president's going to take the Rebs up on that call for peace this time?'
'I am not the man to ask,' Schlieffen told him. 'Your own officers will a better idea have of what your president wills- wants — to do.' Had he worn Blaine 's shoes, he would have made peace on the instant, and then got down on his knees to thank the Lord for letting him off on such easy terms. But that was not the question the soldier had asked him.
After spitting a brown stream of what the Americans called tobacco juice into the road, the driver said, 'My officers won't give me the time of day. Hellfire, they won't tell me whether it's day or night. I was hopin' you might be different.'
A German officer would not give one of his common soldiers the time of day, either. A German common soldier would not expect to get the time of day from one of his officers. The American private sounded aggrieved that he was not made privy to all his superiors' opinions and secrets. Americans, Schlieffen thought, sometimes let the notion of equality run away with them.
He and a couple of U.S. officers-one with his arm in a sling, the other walking with the aid of a crutch-had a first-class car to themselves. One of the Americans produced a bottle. They were both drunk by the time the train left Indiana for Ohio.
They offered to share the whiskey with Schlieffen, and seemed surprised when he said no. Once they'd passed it back and forth a few times, they forgot he was there. That suited him fine till they started to sing. From them on, work got much harder.
He persevered. Minister von Schlozer would need a full report on the Battle of Louisville to send to Bismarck. Schlieffen himself would need an even fuller one to send to the General Staff.
The report did not go so well as he would have liked, and the music-for lack of a suitably malodorous word- was not the only reason. Parts flowed smoothly; as long as he was talking about matters tactical-the effects of breech-loading rifles and breech-loading artillery on the battlefield-he wrote with confidence. That was part of what the Chancellery and the General Staff had to have. But it was only part.
He sighed. He wished the strategic implications of the Louisville campaign were as easy to grasp as those pertaining to tactics. That breechloaders and improved artillery gave the defensive a great advantage was obvious. So strategists had been sure before the outbreak of the war, and so it proved, perhaps to a degree even greater than they had envisioned.
What remained unclear, while at the same time remaining vitally important, was what, if anything, an army taking the offensive could do to reduce the defenders' advantages. Unfortunately, he wrote, the U.S. forces did not conduct the campaign in such a way as to make such analysis easy, as they took little notice of the principles of surprise and misdirection. Based on what I observed, I can state with authority that headlong assaults against previously readied positions, even with artillery preparation by no means to be despised, is foredoomed to failure, regardless of the quality of the attacking troops, which was also high.
He sighed again. Every U.S. campaign he had studied, both here and in the War of Secession, had a ponderous obviousness to it. Like McClellan before him, Willcox seemed to have taken the elephant as his model. If he smashed to pieces everything between him and his goal, he could knock down the tree, reach out with his trunk, and pluck off the sweet fruit.
No U.S. general seemed to have figured out that, if he went around the tree instead of straight at it, the terrain might be easier than that right in front of it, and the fruit might fall of its own accord. The Confederates understood as much, even if their opponents didn't. Robert E. Lee hadn't gone straight for Washington, D.C., in 1862. No, he'd moved up into Pennsylvania and forced the USA to respond to his moves in a fluid situation. Lee seemed to have been blessed with an imagination. The only hint of such a feature U.S. commanders displayed was in their fond belief that they could batter their way through anything, and that had proved more nearly a madman's delusion than healthy imagination.
Schlieffen wrestled with his reports till evening, and then after dark by gaslight. By that time, the American officers had stopped singing. Having drunk themselves into a stupor, they were snoring instead. That racket was, if anything, even worse than the other had been, which Schlieffen hadn't reckoned possible.
They were monstrously hung over the next morning, an indication to Schlieffen that God did indeed mete out
