There had been a time when the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment was a proud formation, its horses well fed, its uniforms respectable and its ranks filled with men who believed that the war would be decided long before either they or their mounts had worn out. Those days disappeared quickly. Campaign followed campaign, horses were killed or simply collapsed from exhaustion, uniforms became increasingly ragged, replacements became harder to find and the confident young volunteers who had first ridden beneath the regimental colours were gradually replaced by hardened veterans who had learned that cavalry warfare consisted as much of hunger, mud, exhaustion and sudden death as glorious charges across open fields.

Among the officers who came to define the regiment was Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair, a member of the old Virginia aristocracy whose family seat at Blackthorn Hall had produced generations of men accustomed to believing that leadership was both their duty and their natural right. Augustus possessed the pride expected of his class, but he also possessed considerable courage and a stubborn loyalty towards the men under his command. Whatever hardships the 27th endured, its colonel endured alongside it, and over the course of the war the relationship between Augustus and his surviving troopers became less that of an aristocratic officer commanding volunteers and more that of a veteran leading men who had followed him through too much bloodshed to consider serving under anyone else.

Always close behind the colonel rode Sergeant Elijah Pembroke, bearer of the regimental guidon. Pembroke had come to regard the colours as something almost sacred, not because of the cloth itself but because of everything it represented. Men looked towards the guidon when smoke and dust concealed their officers, rallied upon it when formations became confused and followed it into places that common sense suggested sensible men should avoid. Every tear and stain accumulated during the regiment’s campaigns became another part of its history, and Pembroke guarded the colours with the same determination with which another man might have protected his own family.

As the war turned against the Confederacy, the 27th suffered the same slow destruction experienced by so many other cavalry formations. Its strength dwindled, remounts became increasingly difficult to obtain and equipment that would once have been discarded was repaired repeatedly because there was nothing available to replace it. The surviving troopers became known as the Ragged Veterans, men whose appearance suggested that the war had already defeated them but whose continued willingness to fight demonstrated otherwise. They followed Augustus because he had never abandoned them, and because after years of campaigning the regiment had become as much their home as anywhere to which they might eventually return.

By the final months of the Confederacy, the 27th existed more in spirit than in numbers. Its scattered remnants continued operating wherever they were required, often with little support and fewer supplies, while Augustus stubbornly refused to accept that the cause was already lost. The end came when Union cavalry threatened the headquarters of General Robert E. Lee and Augustus found himself with only a handful of his remaining troopers immediately available. There was no time to gather the scattered survivors of the regiment and no guarantee that anyone else could intervene before the Federal horsemen reached their objective, so Augustus decided to do what he and the 27th had done throughout the war. He would attack.

Six men prepared to ride.

Sergeant Pembroke moved automatically into his accustomed place with the guidon, expecting to follow Augustus as he had followed him so many times before, but the colonel ordered him out of the line. Pembroke protested, arguing that if this was to be the final charge of the 27th then its colours belonged with the regiment, yet Augustus refused to reconsider. He understood what Pembroke perhaps could not accept at that moment. Men could be killed and a regiment destroyed, but if the colours survived then something of the regiment survived with them. Augustus therefore gave Pembroke what would become his final order of the war: preserve the guidon and ensure that it never fell into enemy hands.

Pembroke obeyed, and regretted his obedience for the rest of his life.

Augustus and five troopers charged the Union cavalry threatening Lee’s headquarters, striking them with such violence and determination that the Federal horsemen were driven back. For a few extraordinary minutes the handful of exhausted Virginians achieved what should have been impossible, and Pembroke watched from a distance as the enemy withdrew before the remnants of his regiment. Then Augustus made the decision that finally destroyed them. Carried forward by success, the Virginians pursued the retreating cavalry and rode directly into the path of a Union artillery battery.

The guns ended the 27th Virginia Cavalry Regiment.

Pembroke carried the guidon away as ordered, concealing it during the final collapse of the Confederacy and refusing afterwards to surrender it to anyone. He returned home with the banner carefully wrapped among his possessions and placed it inside a wooden chest where it remained hidden for years. To others it was a relic of a defeated cause and a war that had already consumed far too much, but to Pembroke it remained the last surviving piece of the regiment he had served. He had fulfilled Augustus’s final command perfectly, yet he regarded that obedience as his greatest failure because the colours of the 27th had not accompanied its colonel and troopers into their final battle.

Not every member of the regiment had been destroyed in that charge. Scattered survivors returned to ruined farms, impoverished families and communities transformed by war, carrying with them wounds and memories that proved considerably harder to discard than their uniforms. Some attempted to rebuild their lives, while others discovered that four years of violence had prepared them poorly for peace. The 27th ceased to exist as a military formation, but among its former members the regiment remained a powerful memory, and stories of Augustus Saint Clair and the final charge gradually became part of its legend.

For Augustus, however, death proved less permanent than anyone had expected.

Years later, at Blackthorn Hall, his cousin Lucien Beauregard Saint Clair began gathering the forces that would form his Dark Confederacy. Lucien required men capable of fighting the horrors that now stalked America, but he also possessed resources considerably darker than ordinary recruiting methods. The dead of the Saint Clair family had been resting beneath Virginia soil for generations, and Lucien saw little reason why death should prevent useful relatives from continuing to serve the family.

Among those he called back was Augustus.

The colonel who rose from the grave was no mindless corpse. Death had changed him, but it had not removed the qualities that had defined him in life, and foremost among these was his sense of duty towards the regiment he had commanded. Augustus had died with the 27th around him and, upon returning, discovered that fragments of that regiment still survived. Some of his former troopers had grown old, others had become hardened wanderers and gunmen, while still others could themselves be returned from graves that had seemed permanent. Slowly the remnants of the old cavalry regiment began to gather around Blackthorn Hall.

The Ragged Veterans answered first, drawn back towards the officer they had followed through the war and into its final disastrous months. They were no longer the young cavalrymen who had originally ridden beneath the regimental colours, but neither were they strangers to hardship, violence or causes that sensible men might have abandoned. Augustus offered them something that peace had never quite provided: the return of the regiment that had once given their lives purpose.

Yet something was missing.

The 27th Virginia Cavalry could have its colonel, its veterans and even some of its dead returned to service, but Augustus knew that without its colours the regiment remained incomplete. He remembered the order he had given before the final charge and knew that if Sergeant Elijah Pembroke had survived the war, then the guidon had survived with him.

Augustus went looking for both.

Pembroke had grown old while guarding the banner entrusted to him. For years he had kept it hidden inside the wooden chest, occasionally removing the fragile cloth to inspect it before carefully folding it away again. His family had learned not to question the ritual, although few understood that Pembroke still considered himself bound by an order issued on a battlefield many years before. Augustus had told him that the enemy must never possess the colours, and until someone released him from that duty he remained, at least in his own mind, the guidon bearer of the 27th Virginia Cavalry.

When the knock finally came at his door, Pembroke opened it to find his dead colonel standing on the porch.

Age had changed the sergeant and death had changed Augustus, but recognition was immediate. Pembroke saw the remnants of the uniform, the familiar bearing and the unmistakable authority of the man he had followed through years of war, while Augustus saw before him the soldier he had deliberately excluded from the final charge. Whatever explanations might have been offered were unnecessary. Pembroke straightened his ageing body and saluted his colonel, and after Augustus returned the gesture the old soldier walked to the chest he had guarded for so many years.

The battered guidon emerged faded, torn and fragile, but it had survived exactly as Augustus had commanded.

Pembroke had completed his duty.

More importantly, he now understood that his duty was not over.

The regiment had returned.

The 27th Virginia Cavalry that gathered at Blackthorn Hall was not the regiment that had first ridden to war. Its ranks were filled with ageing veterans, desperate gunmen and men who had already experienced death once and appeared remarkably willing to risk it again. At their head rode a colonel who had been killed by Union artillery years before, while behind him an old sergeant once again carried the battered colours he had protected for most of his life. They were an impossible remnant of another age, held together by loyalty, memory and the dark power that had reached beneath the Virginia soil and disturbed men who should have remained there.

When Augustus finally assembled his restored command in the grounds of Blackthorn Hall, Pembroke unfurled the old guidon and the names were called once more.

Behind them stood those members of the Saint Clair family whom Lucien had raised from their graves, Revenants from another generation who now found themselves serving beside the remnants of Augustus’s old command. They had never ridden with the 27th during the war, but blood, death and Lucien’s necromancy had made them part of the strange force gathering beneath its battered colours.

For Sergeant Elijah Pembroke, however, none of this seemed particularly complicated. The colonel was once again at the head of the column, the veterans were back in the ranks and the guidon of the 27th Virginia Cavalry was where it belonged.

Colonel Augustus Beauregard Saint Clair had returned.

The colours had returned.

And the 27th Virginia Cavalry was riding again.

Another project, which surprise surprise ended up going down several rabbit burrows, is now finished. “Forward Yo” to the next posse!