Instrument, 1865
The thick elms and cottonwood of the bluff still bore
the scars of battle that had raged in this place four
long years before. Trunks of trees had been stripped
of bark and splintered by cannon shot. Branches
had been torn from the canopy of maple above,
and their loss gave the trees an aspect both unbalanced
and misshapen. Six months before, at Centralia, he
vowed he would never surrender. But that had been in
some other reality, the reality of battle frenzy, where
the world falls away and there is only the awful and
exhilarating and terrifying present, which is like the
face of God, where creation meets destruction with
man as God’s instrument.
by Desmond Barry
from The Chivalry of Crime
Little Brown and Company, 2002
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