The gunfire, which was so near that it seemed just a piece up the road now, stopped for long enough to count to twenty; and in that brief interval, a redcoat officer came tearing down the road, whipping his horse fit to kill. I don't know whether he was after our rider, who had gone by a minute before, or whether he was simply scouting conditions; but when he passed us by, a musket roared, and he reared his horse, swung it around, and began to whip it back in the direction from which he had come. He was a fine and showy rider, but his skill was wasted on us. From above me and somewhere behind me, a rifle cracked. The redcoat officer collapsed like a punctured bolster, and the horse reared and threw him from the saddle, except that one booted foot caught in the stirrup. Half crazed by the weight dragging, the dust, and the heat, the horse leaped our wall, dashing out the rider's brains against it, and leaving him lying there among us -- while the horse crashed away through the brush.

It was my initiation to war and the insane symphony war plays; for what had happened on the common was only terror and flight; but this grinning, broken head, not ten feet away from me, was the sharp definition of what my reality had become.

And now the redcoats were coming, and the gunfire was a part of the dust cloud on the road to the west of us. I must state that the faster things happened, the slower they happened; the passage and rhythm of time changed, and when I remember back to what happened then, each event is a separate and frozen incident. In my recollection, there was a long interval between the death of the officer and the appearance of the first of the retreating redcoats, and in that interval the dust cloud over the road seems to hover indefinitely. Yet it could not have been more than a matter of seconds, and then the front of the British army came into view.