Part I
The opening section of the story is almost entirely comprised of a very detailed description of the topography of the geographical setting. Within the story’s framework as allegory, this attention to detail firmly ground the story in realism which becomes symbolic of the real history of the Civil War which has been undermined by mythologizing and romanticizing.
Laurel
Carter Druse is introduced in the first line of the story as laying in “a clump of laurel” and it is from this clump of laurel that he will ingloriously kill his father. Laurel would the plant of choice for the tradition which sprang up following the war of laying wreaths upon the grave sites of fallen soldiers. Laurel becomes the first symbolic element of the story to point to how future generations would honor the war.
Inglorious Patricide
The only death in this war story is a most dishonorable one unlikely to be commemorated as an example of the mythic heroism of war: the killing of a father by a son. Not only is the only death an act of patricide, but it is a particularly inglorious death: by an unseen sniper without warning by a bullet that doesn’t even enter his flesh. The coroner’s inquest here would deliver the cause of death as falling from a great height. The truth of war is always one in which death is very often not heroic and this particular death is symbolic of how this reality of war is conveniently overlooked in the revisionist mythologizing which inevitably takes place.
The Equestrian Statue
The vision that Carter Druse first has when she sees the Confederate soldier astride his horse on the cliff across the way is that of an equestrian statue which would become commonplace memories following the year, but were almost unknown in America at the time. This is the central symbolic image of the story as it links the reality of inglorious killing of a man with the substantially more illusory transformation of those men into heroic figures sculpted in stone and bronze.
The Officer
An officer who has violated protocol by slipping away from his hidden position does not see or hear Druse fire his rifle, but does see the consequence of that report which appeared to him only in the strange guise of a man sitting atop a horse flying through the air. He is so emotionally and mentally overcome by the unreality of this inexplicable sight that at first he thinks it must be some sort of apocalyptic vision, Biblical in nature and targeting him alone for the revelation that must be written and accounted for. Then he hears the sound of the bodies hitting the ground and realizes it must have been real, so he goes off in search of the bodies which he fails to find. His intellectual ability to believe equally and almost simultaneously in the reality and the fantasy make him symbolic incarnations of both those who know the true reality of the war and those future generations who will come to know and believe only the revisionist portrayal of history.
