“Colonel, on your return to the Institute, you will continue to drill and train your artillerymen, but on a more pressing basis. We must have expert artillery if we are to be an army.
“Captain Canon, you will return on the morrow to your home and also step up the training of your cavalry unit. If war comes, Southern cavalry will be the one facet in which we far outstrip the enemy.
“Artillery needs scouts. I am assigning you, Captain, on a tentative basis to the Virginia brigade. If the national crisis worsens, you will join your friend the professor in Virginia. You will prepare yourself and your troop and remain in readiness for my call.
“We will not be invaders, gentlemen, but neither will we allow ourselves to be invaded. We will, as noted, defend our borders.”
Davis showed the two friends to the door, shook their hands warmly and bade them goodnight. The professor took his leave from Canon.
“I am happy to know, Rabe,” he said, “that in the unlikely case of war, you will be with my Virginians. But I doubt we will see a shot fired in anger, and that is my hope and prayer.”
Canon raised his hand to salute Davis goodnight.
Canon dropped his hand, and three hundred grayclad horsemen streamed screaming with him down the hill toward the blue coated soldiers on the road below.
Canon was confident of his men. They had trained hard the past six months. When he left President Davis and the professor and returned to Mulberry, he found that Mountain Eagle had the plantation on a war footing. Campsites dotted the plantation fields like a village of Indian tepees.
Throughout February and March, the men of Mulberry had driven their three hundred volunteers mercilessly. When Fort Sumter finally fell on April 14, 1861, the call from Montgomery came. Canon’s cavalry was to join the Southern troop build up in Virginia.
Next morning, Captain Canon took his three hundred cavalrymen, every man on a sleek black horse, down the river road leading away from his home. He looked back once at the splendidly shining manor house, before the winding way hid it from view.
He could see miniature figures of Buck, Mountain Eagle and the house servants waving until they passed from his sight. He wondered if the other riders felt as he did as they left their own homes. Canon thought he would never see his home again.
Entraining in Montgomery, the light brigade detrained a day later at Harper’s Ferry. The Federal arsenal there was abandoned four days after Sumter surrendered. Professor Tom Jackson had been placed in charge of it, and Harper’s Ferry was now a training ground for the Confederacy.
Canon found that the professor had been given a nickname by the raw Rebel volunteers he trained. The men, for the most part, were illiterate but willing. However, they did not understand such things as feints and forced marches. The professor, used to autocracy in the classroom and having a penchant for secrecy, did not deign to explain these things to the recruits. He merely gave orders and expected them to be carried out.
After a few weeks of having men march five miles in one direction, then turning them back on their tracks to send them ten miles the opposite way, the professor came to be a sort of bad joke to the boys he trained.
They called him “Fool Tom” or “Tom Fool.”
But Canon watched the professor engineer a great coup that had earned him fame in Montgomery. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran through Harper’s Ferry. The South had little rolling railroad stock, and coveted the locomotives which passed through the town every day. Davis hoped that Maryland would join the Confederacy and forbade interference with the trains.
When it became clear that Maryland would not join the secession, the professor was given leeway to act. He sent a telegram to the owner of the B and O. The trains passing through his camp disrupted the routine of his men, he said. Would the railroad please restrict its schedule to one day per week?
A very accommodating railroad president returned word that he would be happy to do so. For a month, trains ran through Harper’s Ferry only on Wednesdays. Then the railroad president, happy that his trains were safe, received another telegram.
It would be an inconvenience, the professor said, but the trains passing at all hours on Wednesday still disrupted his men. Would it be possible for them to run only during a four-hour period on Wednesdays? The railroad complied again, and for a couple of weeks, the B and O railroad was the busiest in the world for four hours Wednesday afternoons.
On the third Wednesday, the professor sent troops twenty miles down the tracks in each direction, cut the track and captured twelve locomotives. Each was loaded on a specially built flat bed and pulled ten miles by horse to the nearest Southern line.
The professor was a hero in Montgomery, but still “Fool Tom” to his men.
Early in the evening of June third, Canon was called to the professor’s headquarters. Union General George McClellan had that day attacked and routed a Confederate stronghold at Philippi in western Virginia. It was a small victory, but one which cast the South in a bad light.
As his friend outlined the day’s dreary event, Canon’s excitement grew. The South would retaliate: Canon’s cavalry had been chosen for the attack.
Word had come from agents in Washington that a Union detachment which had captured Fort McHenry, at the head of Chesapeake Bay, was about to attack a nearby Confederate camp. The raid, as reported, was to take place within the week. Canon would take his cavalry and stop the Northerners. When he took the word to his men, the surrounding woods echoed with their Rebel yells.
But time passed with no orders to ride. For five days, Canon fidgeted. On the sixth, it was reported that there was troop activity at the fort. Canon called for his bugler to blow boots and saddles. Fifteen minutes later, riding Old Scratch, he led his men out to war.
By late afternoon, Canon had chosen the site for his ambush. It was an open plain on the road from Fort McHenry to the Confederate camp, near Old Bethel Church. A rolling hill lay five hundred yards to the eastern side of the road, the church house on the other.
As the Confederates made cold camp in thick fog on the far side of the hill, Canon walked apart, and whispered a prayer that he be granted war weather for next morning, that the fog hold.
Canon wanted the element of surprise, but he desired even more the element of fear.
Mountain Eagle told him years before of the White Horse Band of plains Indians. Twenty braves had each obtained a white horse, a signal of their totem. When they raided the villages of other tribes, the band always attacked at dawn, out of fog or mist when possible.
The band’s reputation soon grew to the point of myth. It became so that when the pale ponies thundered in, enemy braves ran or huddled in wigwams as often as they fought.
Canon also appreciated the use of fog or mist as ground cover. He had learned at Heidelberg how ancient Celts used fear and fog as allies. He studied the fierce strike troops of the Celts known as the Black Watch.
There was little in the way of strategy and tactics in those wild days. Invading armies marched in, the home guard marched out. Wherever place the two armies came together became the battleground.
The Celtic Black Watch changed all that.
Members of the Watch, in black tartan kilts, were berserk bagpipers who led the Celts into battle. Berserk, the Norse word for bear, was the term for warriors who became so charged with energy they went into frenzy in battle.
Wearing bearskins, the berserkers would fight on with wounds that would have killed most people. Greatly feared, the berserkers led the old Norse Viking into battle.
So it was with the Black Watch.
When the Celts went out to meet an invading force, they marched to within a mile of the aggressor and set up camp. They always arrived at dusk. They were always certain there would be a heavy ground fog the following morning.
Once battle fires were