The Regulars deployed from column to line with a nonchalant ease that came from not just weeks but years of endless repetition on the practice field. Roosevelt 's Unauthorized Regiment was nowhere near so smooth. But the Volunteer cavalrymen weren't slow, either. Custer found nothing to complain about on that score. From the right flank, Roosevelt waved his hat to show he was ready to go forward.
Custer waved, too, so Roosevelt would know he'd seen him. The brevet brigadier general turned to the trumpeter beside him. 'Signal the advance,' he said. As the horn call rang out, the men of the Fifth Cavalry cheered loudly. Not to be outdone, so did the regiment Roosevelt had raised.
When Custer reached the top of a low swell of ground, he pointed ahead and cried out, 'There is the enemy. Let us sweep him from our sacred soil, as our forefathers did a hundred years ago in the Revolution.' The forefathers of a lot of his troopers had been grubbing potatoes out of the ground of Ireland a hundred years before, but no one complained about the rhetoric. The men raised another cheer.
General Gordon had ordered his army as the scout described: cavalry right and left, a screen of horsemen in front of the infantry, and the thin red line of foot soldiers stretching across the prairie. Off to the right of Custer, Roosevelt 's men shouted. Idly, Custer wondered what their colonel had told them.
The British army disappeared from sight for a while when Custer rode down the far slope of the rise. He wished the Englishmen would vanish as easily when the time for fighting came, as it would in mere minutes. Up another swell of ground he trotted, his men close behind. Thin over a couple of miles of ground, the enemy's cheer reached his hear.
'They've seen us!' he called. A moment later, he spied a flash, and then another one, from behind the line of British infantry. A couple of hundred yards ahead of him, dirt fountained up into the air as two shells landed. Custer laughed out loud. 'They can't hit the side of a barn, boys!'
Calmly, methodically, the British artillerymen served their field guns. The cannons flashed and roared again. One of the shells fell short. The other landed behind Custer. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw a horse down and kicking. His troopers cheered once more.
'This is nothing,' Tom called to him.
'You're right,' he said. 'During the War of Secession, a couple of miserable little popguns banging away like this wouldn't even have been enough to wake us up.' He pointed toward the British cavalry ahead. 'By God, they do still have lancers! I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.'
His own men rode in loose formation. The lancers, mounted on horses that might have carried knights of the Round Table, formed lines that were real lines. All their lances came down at once; sunlight glittered off steel. As one, those big horses began to trot.
'What a bully show!' Custer cried, nothing but admiration in him for his enemies' horsemanship.
'Yes, and now we're going to smash it all to pieces,' Tom replied. Custer nodded, and then felt his face grow hot. What they would smash it with were breech-loading carbines-modern industry set against medieval courage. Maybe Colonel Roosevelt had known what he was talking about after all.
Custer gauged the range. 'Fire at will!' he shouted. Behind him and to either side, the Springfields began to bark. He raised his own carbine to his shoulder, picked one of those lancers, and fired at him.
The man did not go down. Custer had not particularly expected him to, though he'd hoped he would. But a lot of troopers were blazing away at the Englishmen. All along the line of lancers, those big horses crashed to the ground. Men slid from the saddle or threw down their steel-shod spears to clutch at wounds. The ones who were not hit kept coming. Riders moved up from the second rank to take the places of those in the first who had fallen.
As the lancers drew nearer, Custer felt… not fear, for he had never known fear on a battlefield, but a certain amount of intimidation. The big, tough men looked ready to ride over the Fifth Cavalry and trample them into the grass and dirt of the prairie as if they had never been.
Then he shot at an Englishman and hit him square in the chest. The luckless fellow dropped his lance, threw up his hands, and slumped dead over his horse's neck. More and more Englishmen were falling as the range narrowed, and they could do nothing to hit back. None of them wavered, though.
'Christ, they're brave!' he shouted.
'Christ, they're stupid,' his brother shouted back, reloading his Springfield.
A lancer thundered toward Custer. He fired at the fellow and missed. The lancehead pointed straight at his breastbone. In another couple of seconds, the British soldier would spit him as if he were a prairie chicken roasting over a campfire. He yanked out his Colt revolver and fired three quick rounds. One of them missed, too, but one hit the horse and one the rider. Custer didn't think any of the wounds would kill, but the lancer lost interest in skewering him.
Here and there, British lancers did spear his men out of the saddle. Here and there, too, the Englishmen drew their own revolvers and blazed away at his troopers. But a lot of the horsemen in red tunics were down, and more of them fell every minute. Flesh and blood, even the bravest flesh and blood, could take only so much. After some minutes of desperate, overmatched fighting at close quarters, the lancers broke away from the Fifth Cavalry and galloped for their lives back toward their infantry or away to the wings to shelter among horsemen whose rifles could protect them.
Custer cheered and waved his hat. 'Forward, men!' he shouted-the order he always loved best. 'Follow me! We've given their horse a good lesson. Now to deal with the foot.'
He galloped past a dead redcoat, then past a British horse with a broken back trying to drag itself along with its forelegs. Then he and his troopers thundered toward the British infantry, who waited in a two-deep firing line to receive them. A shell chewed up the prairie off to his right. Fragments of the casing hissed past his head. He shrugged and kept riding.
Every so often, along that firing line, a red-coated soldier would go down. The British held their positions as steadily-indeed, as stolidly-as any troops Custer had seen during the War of Secession. As he rode toward the British line, doubt tried to rise in his bosom. Cavalry had had a devil of a time shifting steady infantry during the last war. True, his men carried breechloaders now, but so did their foes. The British lancers had been as brave as any men he'd ever seen. Would the foot soldiers be any different?
He did what he always did with doubt-he stifled it. 'Here we go!' he shouted. 'For the United States of America! Chaaarge!'
As if held by a single man, all the rifles along the British firing line leveled on the Fifth. As if held by a single man, all those rifles fired at the same instant. A great cloud of black-powder smoke rose above and around the enemy. Through it, flames thrust like bayonets from the muzzles of the Englishmen's Martini-Henrys.
Three balls snapped past Custer. Not all his men were so lucky as to have bullets miss them. The charge broke up almost as if the troopers had slammed into a wall. Men screamed. Horses screamedlouder, shriller, more terrible cries than could have burst from a human throat.
The British infantry fed more cartridges into their rifles. Precise as so many steam-driven machines, they gave the Fifth Cavalry another volley, and another, and another. The horsemen replied as best they could. Their best was not enough, not nearly. The redcoats not only outnumbered them but were also firing on foot rather than from the bounding backs of beasts. Englishmen, many Englishmen, toppled and writhed and cursed and shrieked. The Americans, though, melted away like snow on a warm spring afternoon.
'We can't do it, Autie!' Tom Custer shouted.
If Tom said a piece of fighting could not be done, no man on earth could do it. 'We'll have to fall back,' Custer said, and then, to the bugler, 'Blow Retreat.' But no call rang out. The bugler was dead. 'Retreat!' Custer yelled at the top of his lungs. 'Fall back!' The words were as bitter as the alkali dust of Utah in his mouth. So far as he could remember, he'd never used them before.
Fewer of his men heard him than would have heard the horn. But they would have fallen back whether he ordered it or not. They now made the same discovery the British lancers had not long before: some fires were too galling to bear.
Then Tom shouted again, wordlessly this time. The shout ended in a choking gurgle. Custer stared at his brother. Blood poured from Tom's mouth, and from a great wound in his chest. Ever so slowly, or so it seemed to Custer, Tom crumpled from his horse. When he hit the ground, he didn't move.
Custer let out one long howl of pain. The worst of it was, that was all he had time for. Even without Tom-and Tom, surely, would never rise again till Judgment Day-he had to save his force. His head swiveled wildly to east and west. Did the Volunteer cavalry know he couldn't maintain the fight? If they didn't, they would have to face the
