How Few Remain (96 page)

Take the three cigars around which Lee’s Special Order 191 was wrapped. In real history, two Union soldiers, Corporal Barton Mitchell and First Sergeant John Bloss, discovered them after a Confederate courier lost them. Learning Lee’s battle plan and how widely Lee had divided his army while invading U.S. territory let General McClellan win the battle of Antietam. That victory, in turn, let Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the moral character of the war. It effectively made sure that Britain and France, which were at the time trembling on the brink of recognizing the Confederate States and forcing mediation on the United States, did not do so.

Had those cigars and that order not been lost … the world would be a different place today.

I need to make a couple of remarks about my handling of the characters in this novel. All speeches and writings attributed to
Samuel Clemens, in particular, are of my own devising. The same does not apply to the political speeches I have put in the mouth of Abraham Lincoln. In them, I have frequently used his own words on the relationship between labor and capital and between employee and employer, sometimes verbatim, sometimes adapting his thought on slaves and owners to apply to workers and owners. I have done this not only for dramatic effect but also to show the plausibility (and what more can one demand of a novelist?) of the views I have ascribed to him in the changed circumstances I have envisioned here.

The stunning sequel to
How Few Remain
by Harry Turtledove

1914. As Europe is engulfed in the fires of World War I, the United States and the Confederacy, hitter enemies for five decades, enter the fray on opposite sides. The USA, led by President Theodore Roosevelt, aligns with the newly powerful Germany, while the Confederates, under Woodrow Wilson, join forces with their longtime allies, Britain and France.

For both sides, this fight will be different from any other—a war fraught with global consequences, and waged with the chilling innovations brought about by the dawning modern age: the machine gun, the airplane, and poison gas. The terrible bloodshed will take place all across the North American continent.

The events of How Few Remain—the Confederate victory and the subsequent division of America—set the stage for this extraordinary epic of the first World War as it might have been. THE GREAT WAR: AMERICAN FRONT begins a chronicle in which Harry Turtledove will create a vast, vibrant canvas, blending actual events and players with a brilliantly reinvented history. This unforgettable, deeply moving, and superbly original novel is a masterpiece of imagination and another triumph for its acclaimed creator, the recognized Master of Alternate History.

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