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Updated: May 21, 2025
For the cornets, guidons, and ensign-bearers had laid down their standards, banners, and colours by the wall sides: the drummers had knocked out the heads of their drums on one end to fill them with grapes: the trumpeters were loaded with great bundles of bunches and huge knots of clusters: in sum, everyone of them was out of array, and all in disorder.
Cranston's old home was decorated in style the day the cavalry marched away. Mrs. Mac had the old guidons and a big flag swung out on the porch, Mac in his most immaculate uniform standing at the salute.
The swallow-tailed national flags, the yellow guidons with their crossed sabres, the blue State colours, streamed above their shifting squadrons as they trotted hither and thither with the leisurely precision of a peaceful field day; but here and there from the trampled earth some fallen horse raised its head in agony; here and there the plain was dotted with dark heaps that never stirred.
Perhaps flag signalling had come into vogue making it necessary to abandon anything that might tend to confuse the colours. About the same time we abandoned the custom of making our ships gay with little flags, of red and white linen, in guidons like those on a trooper's lance. All through the Tudor reigns our ships carried them, but for some reason the practice was allowed to die out.
Another day and night of easy marching would bring his guidons fluttering through the woods about the Stockade at Andersonville, and give him a reinforcement of twelve or fifteen thousand able-bodied soldiers, with whom he could have held the whole Valley of the Chattahoochie, and become the nether millstone, against which Sherman could have ground Hood's army to powder.
Hey, you ain't got any old red silk stockings we can use for guidons, have you? Oh, Alonzo darling! curl my hair an' wet me with expensive cologne!"
As a memento of this brief visit, the Seventy-seventh New York received from the wife of the surgeon the gift of a pair of beautiful guidons, which the regiment boasted were unequaled in the army. The design was a white cross, the badge of our division, upon a ground of deep blue silk. In the center of the cross were wrought the figures "77."
This made a front of more than half a mile, three lines deep, of mounted men. That is to say, it was more than half a mile from Averell's right to Merritt's left. At almost the same moment of time, the entire line emerged from the woods into the sunlight. A more enlivening and imposing spectacle never was seen. Guidons fluttered and sabers glistened.
"Tramp, tramp, tramp, The boys are marching!" Along the brow of the hill, and but faintly seen through the smoky haze, came the pendulum-like swing of rank after rank of sturdy legs, with guidons fluttering along the columns and big, ghostly army wagons rumbling behind.
It was yet a little distant, horses at a trot, the declining sun making a stirring picture. Rapidly crescent to eye and ear, they came on. Their colours flew, the sound of their bugles raised the blood. Their pace changed to a gallop. The thundering hoofs, the braying trumpets, shook the air. Colours and guidons grew large. "By God, sir, Wyndham is coming to eat you up!
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