By the final months of the war, Sergeant Elijah Pembroke had carried the guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry through enough fighting to understand that a regimental banner was far more than a piece of cloth attached to a wooden staff. Men looked towards it when smoke and dust obscured their officers, rallied around it when formations began to break apart, and followed it when shouted orders could no longer be heard above musketry, artillery and the confusion of mounted combat. To Pembroke, the guidon had gradually become the physical embodiment of the regiment itself, carrying with it the memory of those who had ridden beneath it and the honour of those who had fallen defending it.
Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair understood its importance equally well. By this stage of the war the 27th had been reduced from the proud cavalry regiment that had first ridden into battle to a battered collection of exhausted veterans, many mounted on horses almost as worn down as their riders and carrying weapons that had been repaired and reused far beyond anything their makers had intended. The guidon, however, remained with them, faded by weather, torn by battle and stained by years of campaigning, but still visible whenever Augustus led what remained of his regiment into action. Close behind him rode Pembroke, holding the colours high and regarding their protection as the most important duty that could be entrusted to him.
That changed on the day of the regiment’s final charge, when Union cavalry threatened the headquarters of General Robert E. Lee and Augustus gathered the handful of men immediately available to him. There was neither time to seek reinforcements nor much opportunity to consider the likelihood of success, and Augustus decided that the only possible response was an immediate mounted attack. Pembroke moved automatically into his accustomed position behind the colonel, lowered the guidon into the position he had assumed so many times before and prepared to ride with the others.
Augustus ordered him out of the line.
For perhaps the only time during their years of service together, Pembroke openly challenged an order from his colonel, insisting that if the 27th Virginia Cavalry was going forward then its colours belonged at the head of the charge. Augustus refused to reconsider, telling him that the regiment might be destroyed in the coming fight but its banner would not be captured with it. Pembroke was ordered to withdraw with the guidon, preserve it whatever happened and ensure that no Federal soldier ever laid his hands upon the colours of the 27th Virginia Cavalry.
It was an order that Pembroke would spend the remainder of his life wishing he had disobeyed.
From a distance he watched Augustus and five of the regiment’s remaining cavalrymen charge the Union horsemen threatening Lee’s headquarters, their tiny formation disappearing momentarily amid dust, smoke and frightened horses before smashing into the Federal cavalry with enough violence to drive them back. Against every reasonable expectation the attack succeeded, and for a few glorious minutes Pembroke could almost imagine that the old 27th had returned, sweeping everything before it as it had done in better days. He gripped the guidon tightly as he watched his comrades pursue the retreating enemy, torn between obedience to his colonel’s final order and an almost overwhelming desire to ride after them.
Then came the artillery fire.
Augustus and his handful of Virginians, carried forward by the momentum of their success, had ridden directly into a Union battery. The guns opened at devastatingly close range and, when the smoke eventually drifted away, the men who had made the charge were gone and the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment had effectively ceased to exist. Pembroke remained where Augustus had ordered him to remain, still holding the colours of a regiment that no longer existed around him.
He obeyed the colonel’s final command with the same determination with which he had carried out every other order during the war. The guidon was carefully wrapped and concealed before Pembroke carried it away from the battlefield, keeping it hidden through the final collapse of the Confederacy and the confused months that followed. He refused every later suggestion that the banner should be surrendered, displayed or placed somewhere supposedly safer, because Augustus had entrusted it to him with a simple duty that Pembroke regarded as binding for as long as he lived. Whatever else happened to the Confederacy, no enemy soldier would ever possess the banner of the 27th.
Years passed, but obedience brought Pembroke little comfort because he could never forgive himself for surviving the regiment’s destruction. He understood perfectly why Augustus had excluded him from the charge and knew that protecting the colours had been an honour rather than an act of cowardice, yet reason did nothing to remove the shame he felt whenever he remembered those six riders disappearing into the smoke while he remained behind. He had been the guidon bearer of the 27th Virginia Cavalry, entrusted with carrying its colours wherever the regiment went, yet when his comrades made their final charge the banner that had accompanied them through so many battles had not ridden beside them.
The guidon remained hidden in Pembroke’s house, carefully folded inside a wooden chest that became almost a shrine to the regiment he had lost. Every few months he removed the banner, inspected the increasingly fragile cloth and carefully folded it again before returning it to its hiding place. To his family it gradually became an uncomfortable relic of a war that everyone else was trying to leave behind, but to Pembroke it remained something very different. As long as the guidon survived, some fragment of the 27th Virginia Cavalry survived with it, and in his own mind Sergeant Elijah Pembroke had never ceased to be its bearer.
Many years later, on an evening when the old soldier believed that both the regiment and its colonel belonged permanently to the past, a horse approached his house and stopped outside. Pembroke heard the rider dismount, followed by the slow tread of boots upon the porch, and when he opened the door he found Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair standing before him.
The figure was unmistakably Augustus, although death and whatever dark powers had subsequently returned him to the world had left their marks upon him. He wore the remnants of the uniform Pembroke remembered, carried himself with the same aristocratic confidence and regarded his former sergeant with the familiar expression of a commanding officer expecting his orders to be obeyed. Yet there was something cold and unnatural behind his eyes, and Pembroke knew without being told that the man standing before him had indeed ridden into the fire of that Union battery and had lain dead for years before Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair, master of Blackthorn Hall, called him back.
Pembroke stared at his colonel for several moments before decades of age and regret seemed to fall away. He straightened as far as his old body permitted and raised his hand in the salute he had given Augustus countless times during the war. The risen colonel regarded him silently before returning it.
Nothing more needed to be said.
Pembroke walked to the wooden chest that had remained closed for so many years, lifted its lid and removed the carefully wrapped bundle within. Slowly he uncovered the battered guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry, its cloth faded and scarred but still intact, before holding it out towards the officer who had ordered him to protect it all those years before.
“You ordered me to keep her safe, Colonel.”
For the first time since the regiment’s destruction, Pembroke understood that his duty had not ended on that battlefield. Augustus had ordered him to preserve the guidon because the colours represented the regiment, and now the colonel had returned to gather its remnants once again. The 27th Virginia Cavalry might consist of dead men, ageing veterans and whatever other desperate souls answered the call from Blackthorn Hall, but to Pembroke none of that mattered. His colonel had returned, the regiment was being summoned back to service, and its colours had been waiting for them.
The next time Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair rode to war, the battered guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry would once again fly behind him.
This time, Sergeant Elijah Pembroke would not be left behind.