Unnamed Confederate Soldiers 2

There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. In Absalom! they appear in several different ways. First, as the idealized "figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes" whom Rosa Coldfield writes poems about (13): "maimed honor's veterans . . . fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers, who carried the pride and the hope of peace in honor's vanguard as they did the flags" (120). Less romanticized soldiers appear as the units that pass through or bivouac in Jefferson (64), some of whom loot Rosa's father's store (65), and the wounded "self-fouled bodies of strange injured and dead" who are treated in "the improvised hospital" in Jefferson (99). Somewhere between these representations is Quentin Compson's vision of "the ragged and starving troops without shoes, the gaunt powder-blackened faces . . ., the glaring eyes in which burned some indomitable desperation of undefeat" (154).