Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
S He would come, hard and fast, out and down and from the flanks. He would come, but be hard pressed to find me until he gained my field of fire, for my cover was almost indistinguishable from the landscape itself. His aggression and passion would be his downfall. To complicate and control his advance, I would depend upon diversion and distraction, the abandonment created by deception. My small squad of decoys would provide the confusion, lead him to doom. I could see them faintly to fore, only a few yards removed, posturing in open Napaleonic rank under the gray mists of dawn. I smiled quietly. Their deployment was perfect. All was ready. The serenity of the morning lay like the soft hand of God upon the Virginia hills. With the first notes of my retort, would be loosed the Hounds of Hell. guard, charging into my trap under a vivid flourish of red, white and blue. Where one of his greatest generals had met his doom, flopping out his life and surrendering his spurs, his beard in the dirt, while his comrade fled in utter retreat. But now, the emerging morning was alive with his reveille. This time the challenge was his, and already three of his command had boomed the clarion herald of confrontation across the surrounding hills. Great thunderous gobbles that were clearly meant to declare his supremacy. In an instant my blood was up, though I was enjoined on three sides. His offensive would not lay unanswered. On every vantage he commanded the high ground. I must draw him down. Any attempt to better my position would be futile as Little Round Top. So I would divulge my presence, convince him I was vulnerable. Pretty now, the hill and valley, fresh with the mint-green nativity of another spring. Three days we had battled here, two years before. A clash of tactics, long before there was first blood. For my enemy knew better than I, then, this hallowed ground. Entrenched, I had sought magnificently to pull him out, by ploy, challenge or enticement. Yet for two days his movement had been silent as grave dust. His adversarial forces unseen, as he mounted a masterful counter of stealth and evasion. In this contest of life and death, there grew no malice between us. Just the blood passion that demanded we must meet. For either of us, there was no retreat. So I had pressed him, again and again. Though it was only in the waning hour of the final day that I had at last found his weakness, and he had surrendered his P O R T I N G C 22 L A S S I C S