'Oh yes, General. You make yourself very plain, I assure you.'
'For which I thank you. I am but a poor bluff soldier, unaccustomed to fancy flights of language.' Pope was a grandiloquent twit, given to nights of bombast. He didn't know it, cither; he was as blind about himself as he had been about Stonewall Jackson's intentions during the War of Secession.
'If you can't hang me and you can't put me at hard labour for the rest of my days, what do you propose to do with me?' Lincoln asked.
Pope looked even less happy than he had before. 'I have been given an order, Mr. Lincoln, for which, to make myself plain once more, I do not care to the extent of one pinch of owl dung. But I am a soldier, and I shall obey regardless of my personal feelings on the matter.'
'Commendable, I'm sure,' Lincoln said. 'What is the order?'
'To get you out of Utah Territory.' Pope truly did sound disgusted. 'To put you on a train and see your back and never see your face again. To make sure you interfere no further in the settling of affairs here.'
That was better than Lincoln had dared hope. He did his best to conceal how happy he was. 'If you must, General. I was bound for San Francisco when matters here became unfortunate. I shall have to set up some new engagements there, having been detained so long, but-'
'No,' Pope interrupted. 'You are not going to San Francisco. Neither are you going to Denver, nor Chicago, nor St. Louis, nor Boston, nor New York. President Blaine has shown so much sense, if no more.'
'Whither am I bound, then?' Lincoln inquired.
'You have a choice. You may go south to Flagstaff, in New Mexico Territory, or north to Pocatello, in Idaho Territory, and points beyond. For the duration of the war, you are to be restricted to the Territories north or south of Utah Territory. I am to advise you that any attempt to evade the said restriction will, upon your recapture, result in punishment far more severe than this internal exile.'
'Ah, I see.' Lincoln nodded sagely. 'I may go wherever I like, provided I go to a place with, for all practical purposes, no people in it.'
'Precisely.' Pope was almost as deaf to irony as Custer.
'If you wish to muzzle me, why not simply leave me in confinement here in Utah?' Lincoln asked.
'Confining you embarrasses the present administration, you being the only other Republican president besides the incumbent,' General Pope replied. 'Leaving you to your own devices here in Utah, on the other hand, embarrasses me. You have already proved beyond the slightest fragment of a doubt that you are not to be trusted here, but delight in meddling in affairs properly none of your concern.'
'General, nothing that has happened in Utah since the outbreak of the war has delighted me,' Lincoln said: 'neither the deeds of the Mormon leaders nor those undertaken since U.S. soldiers reoccupied this Territory.'
'If you equate the Mormons and the United States Army, we are well shut of you,' Pope declared. 'Had John Taylor and his henchmen simply remained good citizens, none of what we have had to do would have been necessary.'
When phrased thus, that was true. But Lincoln had listened to Taylor and the other Mormons enough to know they thought every effort to abolish polygamy a persecution of beliefs they held dear. From what he had seen, they had a point. But did that matter? To anyone who took the view on polygamy of the vast majority of the American people, it mattered not at all.
Pope went on, 'The time for coddling the rebels here is past. We have tried to persuade them to obedience, and failed. Persuasion having failed, we shall force them to obedience. One way or another, however, obedience we shall have.'
'What you shall have is hatred,' Lincoln said.
'I don't care this much'-Pope snapped his fingers-'if every Mormon wakes up in the morning and goes to bed at night and spends all the time between praying that I roast in hell forever, so long as he obeys me while so praying. When you treat with Taylor, when you hold silence after treating with Taylor, you suggest to these poor ignorant folk that they too have some hope of successfully defying me. That 1 cannot tolerate, and that is why I am sending you out of this Territory.'
Lincoln sighed. If singleminded ruthlessness could bring the Mormons to heel, Pope was the right man for the job, and Custer a good right hand for him. The question, of course, was whether such ruthlessness could do the job. Lincoln had his doubts. If John Pope had ever had doubts about anything, he'd had them surgically removed at an early age.
'I would sooner send you out of this Territory to your eternal reward,' Pope said, 'but, as I have noted, that is not among the choices President Blaine has left me. In fact, he has left the choice to you, and a better one than you deserve, too: north, Mr. Lincoln, or south?'
Lincoln wondered if promising to arrange the peaceable surrender of John Taylor would let him stay here and work to avert the tragedy he so plainly saw coming. Had he seen the slightest hope of success in keeping such a promise, he would have made it. But he did not think the Mormon president would surrender. Even had he reckoned Taylor willing, he did not think General Pope would let him make the arrangements. And he did not think that, if Taylor should surrender, Pope would do anything but hang him.
'North or south?' the military governor repeated. 'That is the sole choice left you.'
He was right. Knowing he was right saddened Lincoln as he had not been saddened since having to recognize the independence of the Confederate States. 'North,' he said.
Pope clapped his hands together. 'And I win an eagle from Colonel Custer. He was ten dollars sure you'd say south. But for that, though, it matters little. During the War of Secession, you exiled me to Minnesota to fight redskins, and then lost the war anyhow. Now I get to return the favor, and, if you think it isn't sweet, you're wrong.'
'I hope you don't lose the war here,' Lincoln said.
Being in Pope's power, he was not suffered to have the last word. 'There is no war here,' the military governor said harshly. 'There shall be no war here. Your going makes that the more likely. You leave tomorrow.'
General Orlando Willcox studied the map of Louisville. 'Give me your frank opinion, Colonel Schlieffen,' he said. 'Might I have been wiser to attempt a flanking movement than a frontal assault?'
Alfred von Schlieffen's frank opinion was that General Willcox would have made an excellent country butcher, but was less than ideally suited to command an important army-or even an unimportant one. He did not think Willcox would appreciate his being so frank as that. Instead, he said, 'Perhaps you might have made a small attack here to hold the foe, and a larger one on the flank to beat him.'
'That's what I have in mind doing now,' the commander of the Army of the Ohio said. 'I have reinforcements coming; President Blaine is committing the resources of the entire nation to this fight. Instead of sending them straight into Louisville, I purpose invading Kentucky at another point farther east, whence I can take the Confederates' defenses of the city in the flank. What is your view of the matter?'
Again, Schlieffen could not make himself be so forthright as he might have liked. 'What could have at the campaign's beginning been done and what can now be done are different, one from the other,' he said.
'Oh, no doubt, no doubt,' Willcox said. 'But we have the Rebs well and truly pinned down inside of Louisville now, thanks be to God. They won't be able to shift quickly to respond to such a move now.'
Some truth lurked at the bottom of that. How much? Schlieffen admitted to himself he did not know. He did not think the world had ever known a battle like this one. Sieges had been fought around cities, yes, but in all history before now had a siege ever been fought in the heart of a city? That, in essence, was what the fight for Louisville had become.
When he said so aloud, Willcox nodded. 'That's just what it's turned into,' he agreed. 'The question is, are we the besiegers or the besieged?'
'Both at the same time,' Schlieffen answered. 'Each of you thinks you can the other force back, and so you both push forward- and you collide, and neither of you can go ahead or to fall back is willing. Have you ever seen rams bang heads together?'
'Oh, yes,' Willcox said. 'That's why I aim to try out this flanking manoeuvre. A ram that butted another in the ribs before it was ready to fight would tup a lot of ewes.'
'Before it was ready to fight? Yes, in this you have right- are — right.' Schlieffen corrected himself with a grimace of annoyance at his imperfect English. Anything imperfect annoyed him. 'But if the second ram were
