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, Heir 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 attache'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 attache'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.
'Well, if the war's not over and done with before you catch up to it, I expect we'll be able to do that,' Rosecrans said. 'You'll have to move sharp, though, because we ought to lick the Rebs in jig time, or Bob's your uncle.'
Although Schlieffen knew he was missing some of that-the English spoken in the United States at times seemed only distantly related to what he'd learned back in Germany — the root meaning remained pretty clear. 'You believe you will win so quickly and easily, then?' He did his best to keep the surprise he felt out of his voice.
'Don't you?' Rosecrans made no effort to hide his own amazement. Very few Americans, as far as Schlieffen could see, had even the least skill in disguising their thoughts and feelings: indeed, they took an odd sort of pride in wearing them on their sleeves. When Schlieffen didn't answer right away, Rosecrans repeated, 'Don't you, sir? The plain fact of the matter is, they're afraid. It's plain in everything they do.'
'I am nothing more than an ignorant stranger in your country,' Schlieffen said, a stratagem that had often given him good results. 'Would you be so kind as to explain to me why you think this is so?'
Rosecrans swelled with self-importance. 'It strikes me as an obvious fact, Colonel. The government of the United States told Richmond in no uncertain terms that there would be hell to pay if a single Confederate soldier crossed over the Rio Grande. Not a one of 'em has done it. Q.E.D.'
'Is it not possible that the Confederate soldiers have not yet moved only because their own preparations remain incomplete?' Schlieffen asked.
'Possible, but not likely,' Rosecrans said. 'They put a large force of regulars into El Paso a couple of weeks ago-that was before we warned 'em we wouldn't stand for any funny business in Chihuahua and Sonora. And since that day, Colonel, since that day, not a one of the stinking sons of bitches has dared stir his nose out of their barracks. If that doesn't say they're afraid of us, I'd like to know what it does say.'
Schlieffen thought he'd already told General Rosecrans what it said. To the American, evidently, preparations meant nothing more than moving troops from one place to another. Schlieffen wondered if his own English was at fault again. He didn't think so. The problem lay in the way Rosecrans-and, presumably, President Blaine-saw the world.
'If you fight the Confederate States, General, will you fight them alone?' Schlieffen tried to put the concept in a new way, since the first one had met no success.
'Of course we'll fight 'em alone,' Rosecrans exclaimed. 'They're the ones who suck up to foreigners, not us.' That he was speaking with a foreigner did not cross his mind. His voice took on a petulant tone, almost a whine, that Schlieffen had heard before from other U.S. officers: 'If England and France hadn't stabbed us in the back during the War of Secession, we'd've licked the Confederates then, and we wouldn't have to be worrying about this nonsense now.'
'That may be true.' Schlieffen felt something close to despair. Rosecrans was not a stupid man; Schlieffen had seen as much. But it was hard to tell whether he was more naive than ignorant or the other way round. 'Could your diplomacy not try to keep Great Britain and France from doing in this war what they did in the last, or even more than they did in the last?'
'That's not my department,' Rosecrans said flatly. 'If they stay out, they stay out. If they come in, I suppose we'll deal with 'em. Stabbed in the back,' he muttered again.
'You have, I trust, made plans for fighting the Confederate States by themselves, for fighting them and Great Britain, for fighting them and France, and for fighting them and both Great Britain and France?' Schlieffen said.
Rosecrans gaped at him. After coughing a couple of times, the American general-in-chief said, 'We'll hit the Rebs a couple of hard licks, then we'll chase 'em, depending on where they try to run. Whatever they try themselves, we'll beat that back, and… Are you all right, Colonel?'
'Yes, thank you,' Schlieffen answered after a moment. He was briefly ashamed of his own coughing fit-was he an American, to reveal everything that was in his mind? But Rosecrans apparently saw nothing more than that he'd swallowed wrong. As gently as he could, Schlieffen went on, 'We have developed in advance more elabourate plans of battle, General. They served us well against the Austrians and later against the French.'
'I did enjoy watching the froggies get their ears pinned back,' Rosecrans agreed. 'But, Colonel, you don't understand.' He spoke with great earnestness: Americans weren't always right, any more than anyone else was, but they were always sure of themselves. 'Can't just go and plan things here, the way you do on your side of the Atlantic. The land's too big here, and there aren't enough people to fill it up. Too much room to manoeuvre, if you know what I mean, and that's hell on plans.'
He had a point-no, he had part of a point. 'We face the same difficulty when we think of war with Russia,' Schlieffen said. 'There is in Russia even more space than you have here, though I admit Russia has also more men. But this does not keep us from developing plans. If we can force the foe to respond to what our forces do, the game is ours.'
'Maybe,' Rosecrans said. 'And maybe you're smarter than the Russians you'd be fighting, too. The next general who's smarter than Stonewall Jackson hasn't come down the pike yet, seems to me.'
'I do not follow this,' Schlieffen said, but then, all at once, he did. His own ancestors must have gone off to
