saying, 'from everything I saw in the War of Secession, any protection is a lot better than just standing out in the open and blazing away at the bastards on the other side.'
'All right, all right.' Custer threw his hands in the air. 'Have it your way, Henry. The dashed things are dug, and you can't very well undig them. But while you've been building like beavers, we've been fighting like fiends.'
'Yes, sir, I know that,' Henry Welton said. He nodded to Roosevelt. 'And was I right about the Unauthorized Regiment?'
'They fought well, I'll not deny it,' Custer replied. Theodore Roosevelt drew himself up straight at the praise. He thought his troopers deserved even better than that; they'd outfought the Regulars seven ways from Sunday. But, whatever else Custer might have been about to say, he didn't say it. Instead, he stared and pointed. 'Colonel, you've posted all my damned'-he didn't bother with dashed; he was exercised-'coffee mills in the forward trench? Don't you think we'd be better off with riflemen there?'
'Sir, I thought we might as well use the Gatling guns, since we've got them,' Welton answered. Roosevelt stared at them with interest; he'd never seen one before. They did look rather like a cross between a cannon and a coffee mill. Welton went on, 'If they perform as advertised, they should be well forward, I think. If they don't, we can always bring riflemen in alongside them.'
'They're the only artillery we've got,' Custer said worriedly. 'That means they belong in the rear.' He looked around-probably for his brother, Roosevelt thought. He did not see Tom Custer. He would never see Tom Custer again. Not seeing him, the brevet brigadier general settled for Roosevelt. 'What's your opinion in this matter, Colonel?'
'They're already emplaced,' Roosevelt answered, 'and they're not quite like artillery, are they, sir? If you're asking me, I say we leave them.'
Custer yielded, as he likely would not have done with Tom to back him: 'Have it your way, then. If they don't work, it doesn't matter where in creation they are. I reckon that likely, myself. As you say, though, Colonel Welton, we can always bring up riflemen.'
'Sir, with your permission, I'm going to throw out a wide net of cavalry pickets, to make sure the British don't try anything in the night,' Roosevelt said. 'When the real fight comes, I'll keep them off your flanks.'
'That's what you're here for,' Custer agreed. 'Go do it.' It wasn't quite a summary dismissal, but it was close. Roosevelt saluted and stomped off.
Occasional rifle shots punctuated the night, as American and British scouting parties collided in the darkness. The British weren't trying a night attack; their pickets rode out ahead of their main force to keep the Americans from unexpectedly descending on them. Roosevelt snatched a few hours of fitful sleep, interrupted time and again by riders coming in to report.
He drank hot, strong, vile coffee before sunup as he deployed his men. He commanded the right, as he had in the earlier fight against General Gordon's army. The left wing was largely on its own; he knew he wouldn't be able to keep in touch with it once the fighting started.
And it would start soon. When men found targets they could actually see, cavalry skirmishing picked up in a hurry. On came the British infantry, deployed in line of battle, rolling straight toward the position Custer and Welton were defending. Roosevelt 's men tried without much luck to delay them; their British counterparts held them off.
Behind the British line, the field guns accompanying the men in red opened up on the U.S. entrenchments. Custer and Welton had nothing with which they could reply; the Gatlings couldn't come close to reaching those cannon. In the trenches, the Regulars, infantry and dismounted cavalry alike, took what the enemy dished out. Roosevelt 's respect for them grew. That had to be harder than fighting in a battle where they could strike back at what was tormenting them.
'Once General Gordon has us properly softened up, or thinks he has, he'll send in the infantry,' Karl Jobst said.
Gordon let the two field guns pound away at the entrenchments for half an hour, his foot soldiers pausing just outside rifle range. Then the cannon fell silent. Thin in the distance, a bugle rang out. The British infantry lowered their bayoneted rifles, as the cavalry had lowered their lances. The bugle resounded once more. The Englishmen let out a great, wordless shout and marched forward.
'What a bully show!' Roosevelt exclaimed. 'Enemies they may be, but they are splendid men.' He raised his Winchester to his shoulder and tried at very long range to pot some of those splendid men.
Unlike the luckless lancers, the British infantry fired as they advanced; their breechloaders made reloading on the move, which had been next to impossible during the War of Secession, quick and easy. A cloud of smoke rose above them, thicker and thicker with every forward stride they took.
Smoke rose from the trenches where the bluecoats crouched, too. Englishmen began falling. Their comrades filled their places. No doubt Americans were falling, too, but Roosevelt couldn't sec that. What he could see was the red British wave flowing forward, steady and resistless as the tide. The redcoats drew within four hundred yards of the frontmost entrenchment, within three hundred…
'They're going to break in!' Roosevelt cried in bitter pain.
And then, through the din of the rifles, he heard a sound like none he'd ever known before, a fierce, explosive snarl that might have been a giant clearing his throat, and clearing it, and clearing it.
… Amazing puffs of smoke blossomed in the center of the U.S. front line. 'The Gatlings!' Karl Jobst yelled, somewhere between astonishment and ecstasy.
Roosevelt had no words, only awe. In what seemed the twinkling of an eye and was perhaps two or three minutes of actual time, those steadfast British lines abruptly ceased to exist, in much the same way as a slab of ice will rot when hot water pours over it. For the first half of that time, the infantry kept trying to go forward in the face of fire unlike anything they'd ever met or imagined. They dropped and dropped and dropped. Not one of them got within a hundred yards of the trench. After that, the foot soldiers, those of them still on their feet, realized the thing could not be done. They also realized they were dead men if they didn't get out of range of the terrible stream of bullets pouring from the Gatling guns.
It was not a retreat. Custer had led a retreat. It was a rout, a panic-stricken flight, a stampede. The British, surely, were as steady in the face of familiar danger as any men ever born. In the face of the snarling unknown, they broke. Some of them- Roosevelt took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes to be sure he was seeing straightthrew away their rifles to run the faster.
He spent only a little while luxuriating in amazement. Then he started thinking like a soldier again. 'After them!' he shouted. 'After them, by jingo! They thought they'd run over us like a train, did they? Well, they've just been train-wrecked, boys. Now we haul away the rubbish.'
Now his men, cheering as if their throats would burst, pressed hard upon the fleeing foe. The British horse, which had been screening an advance, suddenly had to try to screen a broken army falling back. The enemy's field guns fired a few rounds of canister before the men of the Unauthorized Regiment, coming at them from three directions at once, overran them and killed their crews.
'Captured guns,' Lieutenant Jobst said cheerfully. 'That's the true measure of victory. Has been as long as cannons have gone to war.'
'After them!' Roosevelt shouted. 'We don't want to let even a single one get away. No, maybe one, to tell his pals up in Canada what it means to invade the United States.' He fired at an English cavalryman and knocked him out of the saddle. 'Easy as shooting prong-horns!' he exulted.
North over the prairie went the pursuit, as it had gone south the day before. The troopers of the Unauthorized Regiment took rifles away from slightly wounded or exhausted Englishmen they passed and rode on after the main body. Roosevelt didn't think he had enough men to beat them, but they were so shaken he intended to try if he got the chance. They might all throw down their guns and give up at a show of force.
And then, from behind, he heard not one but several buglers blowing Halt. His men looked at one another in surprise, but most, obedient to the training he'd drilled into them, reined in. 'No!' he raged. 'God damn it, no! I didn't order that! I'll kill the idiot who ordered that. We've got 'em licked to a faretheewell.'
'Halt!' a great voice shouted: George Custer, who must have almost killed his horse catching up to Roosevelt 's men. To Roosevelt 's amazement, tears streaked Custer's cheeks, not just tears of grief but tears of fury. To his further amazement, Custer reeked of whiskey from twenty feet away. 'Halt, damn it to fucking hell!' he shouted again.
