How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove

bite to go with it.”
    Foulke flushed: with his fine, fair skin, the darkening was quite noticeable. But his voice was cool as he replied, “Major, if your nation persists in its unwise course, you will feel our teeth, I assure you.”
    “The United States have already felt our teeth, sir,” Jeb Stuart said. “It has been a while, I admit; perhaps you’ve forgotten. If you have, we are prepared to remind you. And, I will point out, we have good friends, which is more than the United States can say.”
    Lieutenant Colonel Foulke shrugged. “Sir, I have delivered to you the message with which I was charged. I personally have no great use for war, nor does any man, nor any nation, of sense. But you are to know that the United States are firmly resolved in this matter. Good day.” Without waiting for a reply, he and the captain with him rode back toward their men.
    Stuart watched until all the Yankees started riding off in the direction of New Mexico. When he’d been Foulke’s age—Lord, when he’d been even younger—he’d loved nothing better than riding to war. Now that he had sons of his own growing to manhood, he was no longer so sure.
    He turned to Major Sellers. “The next time we see that Yankee, it will be on the battlefield.”
    His aide-de-camp gave a sharp, short nod. “Good,” he said.
        Colonel Alfred von Schlieffen had heard that the British government designated diplomatic service in Washington, D.C., a hardship position on account of the abominable climate of the capital of the United States. He didn’t know for a fact that that was true. If it wasn’t, though, it should have been. The weather had already got hotter and muggier than it ever did in Berlin, and May was only a bit more than half done. Kaiser Wilhelm I’s military attaché in the United States ran a finger under the tight collarof his blue Prussian uniform to try to let in some air. That helped little, if at all.
    Sweating, Schlieffen stepped onto the black cast-iron balcony outside his office. He startled a pigeon on the rail. It flew away, wings flapping noisily. Schlieffen reckoned that a victory of sorts. Too many pigeon droppings streaked the dark red brick of the German ministry.
    Against the humidity and heat, though, he won nothing. No breeze stirred the air; it was as hot outside as back in the office. Horses and buggies and wagons rattled up and down Massachusetts Avenue. The street was paved with bricks, so they didn’t raise great choking clouds of dust as they might have done, but the racket of iron-shod hooves and iron tires on the paving was terrible.
    That racket drove whatever thoughts Schlieffen had had clean out of his head. For a man so intensely intellectual, that could not be borne. He went back inside, closing the French doors behind him. As the air was so still, he made the office no hotter, and, since they were almost all glass, he hardly made it dimmer.
    Above his desk hung three framed portraits. A Catholic might have thought them images of a secular Trinity. That had never occurred to Schlieffen, a devout Hutterite. To him, they were merely the most important men in his life: ascetic-looking Field Marshal von Moltke, whose victories over Denmark, Austria, and France had made Prussian-led Germany a nation; plump, imperious Chancellor von Bismarck, whose diplomacy had made von Moltke’s victories possible; and, above them both, the Kaiser, bald now, his fringe of hair, mustache, and fuzzy side whiskers white, his chest full of well-earned medals, for he had been a formidable soldier in his own right before succeeding his brother as King of Prussia.
    Whenever Schlieffen thought of the Kaiser’s soldierly career, he could only marvel, for Wilhelm had first seen action in the Prussian puppet forces that fought under Napoleon’s command when the century was young. “How many men still living can say that?” Schlieffen murmured. And afterwards, Wilhelm had helped guide Prussia’s rise to greatness,