One sunny afternoon in the autumn of the year 1861 a soldier lay in a clump of laurel by the side of a road in western Virginia.
The opening line immediately situates the setting of the story. The mention of the year and the mention of the state should automatically spark anyone with the slightest sense of American history to assume they are about to read a Civil War tale. It will turn out that setting plays an especially significant role in the story—much more essential than in a great many short stories—and so this turns out to be a precise and calculated choice by the author rather than just a simple case of a literary “establishing shot.”
For an instant Druse had a strange, half-defined feeling that he had slept to the end of the war and was looking upon a noble work of art reared upon that eminence to commemorate the deeds of an heroic past of which he had been an inglorious part.
The soldier in the clump of laurel turns out to be a native Virginian wearing not the gray of the Confederacy, but Union blues. His odd introductory comparison to looking like a dead soldier lying in that clump of laurel is explained as being the result of having fallen asleep. This is not good; he fell asleep while on sentry duty. The opening sentence has also set up a backstory—short version—to the centerpiece of the story: the soldier’s spotting an enemy combatant on a cliff across the valley. Because he fell asleep, he is in a state of drowsiness when he first spots the enemy and in this state the actual flesh and blood of the soldier and his horse momentarily take on the appearance of a statue of the sort, notably, that would not become commonplace until after the war had ended.
The duty of the soldier was plain: the man must be shot dead from ambush—without warning, without a moment’s spiritual preparation, with never so much as an unspoken prayer, he must be sent to his account.
Having quickly dismissed the momentary illusory quality of the man and horse being unreal, their transformation from immortal marble to mortal being changes everything for the sentry. Now that he has fulfilled that duty, his role switches to that of sniper. His duty is clear and with the lives of regiments of Union soldiers hanging in the balance, it is a duty which must be carried out swiftly. These thoughts of duty mingle with ironic remembrance. While he is a native Virginia fighting on the side of the forced deemed the enemy, his own father is a soldier fighting for the Confederate cause. This division steeped in tragically authentic historical fact plays in his mind as he targets the horseman in the scope of his rifle and remembers one of the last things his father said to him before he departed: “whatever may occur do what you conceive to be your duty.”
“My father.”
The full ironic dimension of the soldier’s remembrance of those parting words of his father is not realized until the end of the story, in what are almost its closing words. The man on the horse on the cliff opposite across the valley is not just any Confederate soldier, but the father of Carter Druse, the soldier lying in a clump of laurel as the story begins. He admits this fact to a soldier questioning whether it was he who shot his rifle and his reply is an admission of fulfilling his duty as a soldier, a Virginian and a son.
