A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril an Alternate History (45 page)

Hooker was desperate. He had no reserves except the cadets. Williams's division was barely holding on, and Geary had had his hands
full pulling Candy's brigade back together to put it back into the fight.
Ireland's men were still fighting it out with the remnants of the enemy's
Kingston Brigade and the Scots Fusilier Guards. Neither Hooker nor
Paulet could pull a single man from that fight.

After the Scots Fusilier Guards had knocked Candy's brigade back
on its ear, Scarlett had reinforced the survivors of the Kingston Brigade.
Wolseley rode to the brave stand of the Borderers' colors and found
himself the senior officer present. Not an officer above lieutenant was left standing in the half circle formed by the survivors. Concentric rings
of bodies in scarlet showed the positions of the battalion as it had contracted inward from the attacks of Ireland's men. He took command, and
no one argued. If he spared a split second's time to think that this was
his father's regiment, he was not to remember. It was not much of a command by that point, but had it been only a handful, he would have done
no different. There were scarcely four hundred of the original thousand
Borderers, and not more than six hundred Canadians left of their three
battalions.

Back on the left, the British artillery had picked up to prepare the
way for the Guards. The knot of horsemen with the army and corps
flags was an obvious target, and the shells began to burst nearby as the
gunners sought the range. And find it they did, bursting a shell right
above the cadets, spewing shards of jagged iron among them. Hooker
turned to see the disordered ranks and the bodies strewn about, their
gray and white uniforms blotched with blood. With a voice that had
hardly even broken, a boy was screaming as his entrails spilled onto the
ground. Another cadet was cradling him in his arms while others stood
around, stunned and pale. The cadet captain pushed among them, and
with a deft touch, hardly raising his voice, got them in order as an ambulance from the nearby field hospital rushed over. Many had fought
at Cold Spring, but that had been an ambush. Here they saw their own
blood. Better now than when he had to send them in. But right now they
needed to get away from the blood and that poor boy. Hooker called out,
"Hardenburgh! Take them into that apple orchard." He pointed to the
trees two hundred yards back down Claverack Road. "Keep them under
cover until I need you." He galloped off with his staff on his heels as
shells burst just above where they had been.

It was clear to him that after the Guards crossed the bridge, they
would take the small Pennsylvanian brigade in the flank, and that's all it
would take. The Pennsylvanians had given their all to stop the advance
of the Rifles and the rest of the 2nd Montreal Brigade cold. To be taken in
the flank by almost one thousand Guardsmen would be too much.

The situation was just as clear to Paulet, who had crossed the bridge
with his staff behind the Guards. Like Hooker he would place himself
at the crisis of the battle. And like Hooker he knew how desperate the situation was. His right had nearly collapsed, center and left had been
fought to a standstill, his small force of cavalry was wiped out, his trains
had been savaged, and his 2nd Division had disappeared. It would have
been a comfort to each had they known the other's plight. Hooker's appraisal would have been that his right and center had been fought out,
his left repulsed, his cavalry defeated, his other corps missing, and reserves exhausted except for the few hundred cadets hiding in an apple
orchard.

Those boys scrambled in among the trees only to find it full with a
field hospital that groaned and shrieked with its work, artillery limbers,
field kitchens, and a prison pen with a few dozen men in scarlet sitting
dejected amid the discarded apples of the season's picking, whose ferment filled the orchard with its sweet, sour tang. The cadets had barely
time to catch their breath and watch from among the trees as one of
the great sights on any battlefield unfolded, the attack of the Grenadier
Guards. For cadets who prided themselves on drill, watching the evolutions of the Guards as they formed for the attack on the Pennsylvanian
brigade filled them with awe. The Guards were magnificent, keeping
perfect alignment on their colors and seeming to shrug off the shells that
spilled men from their ranks as the nearest American artillery battery
concentrated on them. The ranks of big men effortlessly closed up and
kept moving forward. In the rear of the battalion, its drummers banged
out, under the stern eye of the drum major, a virtuoso performance of
their regimental quick march, "The British Grenadiers," clearly audible
to the cadets in the trees. So well known was the song that many Americans knew the words that had accompanied the building of the empire
upon which the sun never set:

Behind the Guards, the brigade's attached Armstrong battery raced
across the bridge to deploy its guns in support. And the Grenadiers
began to wheel from companies in column to a battalion front. And the
drummers played:

The fighting nearest them seemed to come to a stop as first the
Rifles, the Queen's Own Rifles, and the Scots of the 5th Royal Light
Infantry of Montreal began to cheer. And the drummers played on:

The Pennsylvanian brigade in its thinned ranks stared in dread
silence to their left at the approaching spectacle. And the drummers
played on:

An observer could not be faulted for thinking that the very weight
of history itself was being raised to strike the American left. For on
the royal colors of this regiment were names such as Tangier, Namur,
Gibraltar, Blenheim, Oudenarde, Malplaquet, Dettington, Linselles,
Egmont-op-Zee, Corunna, Barrossa, Nive, Peninusla, Waterloo. Yes,
Waterloo, where they broke the Grenadiers of the French Old Guard and
were renamed Grenadiers themselves, their cap badge a flaming bomb.
And the drummers played on:

Fluttering above the center of the Guards were their colors -the
scarlet silk royal colors with the crown embroidered in gold in its center,
and the regimental colors, based on the Great Union flag, the marriage
of the crosses of St. George of England and St. Andrew of Scotland. In
the center vertical bar were the embroidered crown and unicorn, and on
the horizontal bar on either side were the crowded names of all the fields
upon which the Guards had fought -and won.

The mesmerized gaze of the cadets was broken as Hooker's white
horse carried the general through the trees among them. He looked
down at Hardenhurgh and returned the salute of the cadet captain. He
spurred his horse out of the orchard to look for a moment, then turned
his horse halfway to them. Standing in his stirrups, he pointed to the enemy. "West Point, seize those colors!"

Hardenburgh's practiced eye counted barely a few hundred yards
to those colors. There was no time to lose. He turned to see the boys had
instinctively formed their ranks. Hardenhurgh stepped out of the trees
and drew his sword, Cadet Captain Lydecker behind him.

Across the field, Paulet was directly behind the Guards with Brigadier General Lindsay, watching the men swing left toward the Pennsylvanians' flank. An aide said, "My Lord, look there at the orchard. The
enemy has emerged."

Paulet stopped to see the small band march forward in their oldfashioned uniforms and good order. He scanned their front with his
glasses. "A waste. The Guards will march right over them. If Hooker
thinks their fire will delay the Guards-" Then he leaned forward and
squinted his eyes to focus them better. The enemy had gone from the
march to the double-quick, then his bayonets at the level to a run. "Look,
they are charging the Guards!"

Colonel Preston was just as surprised to see this small band racing
toward his battalion. They were lucky to be one-third his number. He
halted the battalion when the cadets were barely a hundred yards away.
If the steady fire of the Guards could break a cavalry division's charge,
it would wipe out these few. "Fire!" A volley sent the cadets' first ranks
tumbling into the newly turned earth of the field. Hands reached down
to pick up their colors before they struck the ground as the rest jumped
over the bodies and swept on, converging on the British colors in the center of the line. Hardenhurgh fell wounded among his boys, staring
into the open gray eyes of the one who lay only inches from him. 24

Cadet Lydecker was still on his feet, his athletic body glory in motion as the cadets followed him. At twenty yards, the second rank of the
Guards fired. The first rank had loaded and was readying to fire again
when out of the smoke the handful of survivors still led by their captain
closed the last few feet. They met a fence of steel. British bayonet work
was the terror of battlefields. But even the Guards could not kill them
all, and their very momentum crashed through the two-man rank to the
British colors. Lydecker parried with his sword the bayonet of the firstrank man and shot the second-rank man before he could be stabbed from
the side. He was through with a handful of his cadets, the colors almost
within reach. The color guards on either side moved in front of the color
bearers. He shot one and lunged through the hole as the cadet behind
him killed another. He could see the lines in the bearded face of the color
bearer. The man's eyes had narrowed, and he did not flinch. The scarlet
and gold silken folds of the colors were within reach. Lydecker brought
up his sword, and the world went black.25