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. As Twain put it "I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating."