I enjoyed this story very much do to the military aspect of it. As a member of the Military I was able to appreciate Bierce's selection in vocabulary. Phrases such as "parade rest" was something that I was a to picture vividly in my mind do to the fact that I to stand on occasion in that stance. At first I followed along in the story reading as though the content was in chronological order. Then towards the middle of the story it said that he had some how become free from his restrains and swam to shore, it was at this point that I had become officially lost. As I read on the story stated that he had traveled through the woods and reach his house but just as he was going to embrace his wife he lost consciousness and woke up in the noose again. I was still a bit lost at this point but I was gaining awareness as to how this story is narrated. After Peyton Farquar had died I stayed there meditating for a while putting the pieces together. Than I realized this story is very much like a Quintin Tarantino film in that, it jumped around in the story. All the pieces then came together and I realized that he had been hallucinating this escaped or something like his life flashing before his eyes. The next time I went through the story I was able to follow it much better and pick up some more details and conspiracy theories. One would be the soldier dressed in gray, I believe he was deceiving Peyton and that he wasn't really a confederate soldier. He lied about how many people were guarding the bridge he said "only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of the bridge" (Ambrose Bierce, 169) but in the beginning of the story it mentioned that there was "a single company of infantry in line, at parade rest", (Ambrose Bierce, 167). A company size element is roughly 30 to 50 soldiers not at all what the soldier dressed in gray mentioned. I believe the soldier in grey was a member of the union military posing as a confederate to try and weed out any loyalist of the south.
