The story starts out as the author introduces the reader to a young boy and fills the reader in on some of the boys upbringing from the son of a man who had been a soldier in the when he was young, giving the boy too, the spirit of a warrior. The boy makes himself a wooden sword to go on his own conquest much like that he imagines his daddy had been on. Wondering in the forest alone, conquering his imaginary foes as he goes gets startled by a rabbit. He ran back in the direction of home, so he thought. After wandering for over an hour he became exhausted and laid down crying himself to sleep. After the boy had been sleeping for hours, he woke up with new steam to keep going in search for home. It was night time now, and even though he was still scared, he pressed on. Hundreds of figures began to approach him. The way the author explains the figures, makes the reader think of them moving as one would picture a group of zombies. The boy recognizes them as men as the slowly crept on, dragging themselves, or crawling by. He also noticed that they were maimed and bloody. He just curiously moved amongst them looking them over until he came to one of the men crawling on his hands and knees. The boy hopped on the man’s back as to ride him like a horse, like he did with his father’s negroes back at home. The man threw him off, and when the boy saw his face he noticed that the man had no bottom jaw. One might wonder why the boy hadn’t been scared until then, maybe because of innocence or just naivety. The boy then ran and got up into a tree and watched as then men creep on. He did not stay scared for long because he got down out of the tree and put himself in front of the men as if he was leading a troop. For a moment the reader sees the description of how the muddy footprints go in both directions from the narrator’s perspective, because the boy was too young to have noticed. The narrators view helps the reader come to the conclusion that these men had already passed by in the other direction to go to battle and were now on their way back from the battle. The boy was too young to have really understood where these men had just come from, and why they were so maimed. The narrator also tells us that a battle had been fought all around the boy while he slept. The reader may be lead to believe that the boy was just that exhausted when he fell asleep the he just didn’t hear the battle going on all around him. Next the boy still in the lead sees that ahead there is a fire that as the get closer, is illuminating it surroundings, making it where he can see that everything is covered in blood. Even the creek that they are approaching is red with blood. Some of the men who attempted to get a drink from the creek
