The Private History of a Campaign That Failed

The Private History of a Campaign that Failed is one of Mark Twain's sketches (1885), a short, highly fictionalized memoir of his two-week stint in the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard. It takes place in Marion County, Missouri, and is about a group of inexperienced militiamen, the Marion Rangers, who end up killing a stranger in panic. (In 1887 he claimed before Union veterans that he had been in one battle in which a stranger had been killed in the summer of 1861[1] In fact Twain saw no action; he quipped that during his service he spent more time retreating while being hunted then fighting)[2][3]