As to the sons – by 1640 Johann led his own mercenary army of three hundred well-trained, hand-picked men. They were provisioned and not allowed to forage or pillage on friendly lands. They were well paid and, unlike other mercenary troops such as the German lansquenet, uniformed for war instead of show: a tunic with a stiff, thick leather breastplate, boots of waterproof Russian leather, a tight fitting, unadorned helmet. The three hundred were cavalry unlike any other contemporary horsemen: they fought on the ground as often as on horse. In Spain the three hundred held the line against a thousand Spanish, beat them off three times, then attacked and chased them until dark. But the best aspect of the Slagsted of Krummel army was its reliability; contracts were signed for durations instead of months which meant that they wouldn't change sides in the middle of a battle, anyway.
This paid army, because of its compact size, survived the change from mercenary to national armies, and during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century fought and served as personal guards for every political organization which could afford them. Descendants of Jacob Slagsted controlled the army, maintained its size at three hundred, kept up the family literacy outside military academies, married fine horses of women, and by 1776 had spilled, in love and war, the bloods of Europe: Irish, Dutch, Polish, Magyar, Finn, Swede, Jewish, Alsatian, Prussian, and Greek, at least. But in 1781 the Slagsted-Krummel's, as they were known, came to the New World, and like all who came to America, lost everything in the coming.
They arrived in Boston only to discover the war was over. The ship with the men and arms was impounded by the authorites and guarded by a warship, a refitted cutter which had seen no duty. The brothers in charge, Johann and Otto, were obviously gentlemen because of the size of their bribes and were let ashore. Johann rode to Philadelphia to get the release order, and Otto gambled and drank away all the money in the waterfront pubs of Boston. When Johann returned with a release order, two slick colonialists had another for him, impounding his men as bond servants to fulfill Otto's debts. Johann traded his horse for the family chest, signed the papers, then he and Otto rode south on one horse, knowing, I suppose, what was going to happen. When the colonialists tried to collect their servants, the men – still armed because no one had the nerve to try to disarm them – killed the Americans, blew the cutter to hell, stole the ship, and sailed away into an untraceable sea, perhaps slipping ashore later to add themselves to the great number of scoundrels and cutthroats already in America. Otto managed a commission in the Virginia militia, but Johann, tired of Otto and armies, rode on south and west.
The Slagsted-Krummels were in a bad way by 1830, down to a single male survivor, one Joseph, who had a small ranch in South Texas along the Nueces River. He had come as a young man with a group of Irish settlers led by John Mullen, but left the settlement, San Patricio, to live some ten miles up the river, alone with Bible, bottle, and gun. He was able to trade with occasional roving bands of Lipan-Apaches because they thought he was crazy (primitives have always thought that madmen know too much truth to be killed). Joseph rejoined the Irish long enough during the Texas Revolution to attack Fort Lipantitlan – which guarded a ford on the Nueces – with Irish volunteers under Captain Ira Westover in 1835. In '42 he fought with the 192 men under General James Dix who defended the earthen fort aganst nearly a thousand Mexicans under General Antonio Canales, and successfully defended it. (It was a sort of reverse Alamo, except the drunks won this one.) Joseph lost an ear during the fighting and, the Irish of San Patriccio said, the rest of his senses.
He returned to his cabin to live alone, un-visited, mainly because he shot at potential visitors for no apparent reason, until the day he came across a Comanche buck slaughtering one of his cows. The buck was short and stocky like all Comanches, and as he leaned his long body over the steer, Joseph shot him high behind the shoulder as he would a deer. As he took the scalp (a man living alone needed all the good medicine he could get), the buck's squaw ran out of a gully, waving a skinning knife. Joseph knocked her down with his rifle butt, then finished with the buck. Turning to the squaw, he noticed that she had fallen forward over a mesquite log and her buckskin skirt had ripped and her butt was showing. It was brown, dirty, large, but it was an ass, and Joseph, as I said, lived alone. (Like the scalp, he took what he could get.) He mounted in the quickest, most obvious way.
When Face-like-Horse awoke, a sputtering, one-eared wild man at her like a stallion, his teeth sliding off her greasy neck, she naturally assumed that the spirit of her man had entered the white man. No white-eye knew the secrets of Comanche love – and after battle, too, because before it, it steals the strength of a warrior. When the meeting was over, Face-like-Horse returned to her camp, which had been cut off and run south by Rangers, and gathered the People. The next night the People slept on a flood island in the Nueces, and Face-like-Horse became my great-great-great grandmother. Once again the Slagsted-Krummels were fated to ride.
No one has ever directly accused old Joseph of having been a Comanchero, but some people wondered why only three of eight able sons went to the Civil War and why there was Comanche trouble in the south where there had never been any. Of the half-breed sons who went to fight for Jeff Davis, secession, cotton, slaves, and economics, one returned, Frederic, named Nose by the People. One was killed at Elkhorn Tavern (the Bluebellies called it Pea Ridge because they won) and the other deserted and went to Florida. When Nose, my great-great grandfather was buried, he was the richest man along the river. White sentiment necessitated that Nose be buried in the earth, but inside the coffin his hair was still braided and his hands, folded in Christian forms of peace, were crossed and held to his breast a secret blond scalp taken in Alabama on one of Forrest's railroad raids. Only the ranch, the family, and the Bible remained.
My grandfather joined the Canadian Army in 1915, and the only image he left me of that mad war in the mud was of creeping out of a trench on a night patrol and finding his arm sunk to the elbow in a rotted corpse. After only two months in the trenches, he said, he didn't even gag. (We had no one in the Spanish-American War: the Slagsted-Krummel who might have gone refused to join the Rough Riders in San Antone because the name sounded so damned silly.) My grandfather was also the one who changed the family name, leaving out the hyphen, and using Slagsted for a middle name for all male children. But except for my father, none of his children followed the tradition.
My father was thirty-one when the Second World War began, and he missed the draft. He enlisted anyway. The Army, of course, tried to make him a cook, but he cooked badly and became a private in a rifle company. He fought in Africa and France without distinction, but not without honor, I'm sure, and returned to say only that it had been bad. But I knew what he meant. I knew; in spite of his silence, I understood why he went, why he wouldn't talk, and how he came back.
I also knew all these things about the family because, as you've noticed, we Krummels are a verbose lot, and I joined the Army, the first time, in June of 1953. The truce was signed the next month. The old man had made me finish high school, and my education, as it will, cost me my war.
"And now we chose between tiny wars fought with booby traps and pamphlets and suicide… wars of attrition," I said to Gallard as I finished my tale, the history. "Perhaps there is even honor in these, though. But I am afraid. They are being fought for ideals and in the name of freedom and liberty and they are the dirtiest wars man has ever known. I trust greed and passion and lust, but God! never politics."