The lines north of town went to pieces about four o’clock. You could hear the crowds of Confederates brawling closer as retreating Federal artillery roared south across the Diamond. Eva Duffey watched the distant flakes of red and white which were the national flags, being hurried away through the town, obliterated suddenly by opposite barns and houses, lancing out again into the dust, carried by lumbering groups of blue men who stumbled and fell and sometimes didn’t get up again. She had never thought that war could be like this, with such a desperate casualness about it. War was fought in fields: there was the field of Shiloh, the field of Antietam, the field of Fredericksburg. She knew; she had read the papers. The papers mentioned nothing of people running across back yards and knocking down the clothes-props as they went.

Suddenly she looked out, north through the window of the front parlor, and it gave her a thick feeling in her lungs to find that the entire end of the street was blocked by a mob of ragged men, white with dust, and lugging soiled cerise flags along with them. They came at a dog-trot, spread across the road and up over the cinder paths at each side, their feet resounding whenever they pounded across a section of board sidewalk. A horse flashed through them from the rear; its rider looked gaunt but graceful, he had a white silk shirt which had been badly torn and flapped in ribbons from his shoulders. He turned, and waved his hand at the trotting men … had long hair blowing in tangled gold as the sun found it. He called in a shrill voice, “Fo’m on the left of the Fifty-seventh at the next squeh!” and then dashed past the house, leaning low over his horse’s neck. A moment later Eva Duffey heard the rapid explosion of shots from the direction of York street. The ragged men began to scream. They sprinted ahead, no longer trotting, and two or three of them seemed to trip and fall forward on their hands and knees.