How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove

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 ConfederateStates 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 elaborate 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 maneuver, if you know what I mean, and that’s hell on plans.”
    He had a point—no, he had pan 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