"Ambuscade," the first of the seven stories that compose The Unvanquished, shows Bayard, then twelve years old and the protagonist-narrator of the novel, acting out the siege of Vicksburg with his black friend, Ringo, before Loosh, a slave and Ringo's uncle, sweeps their model aside, suggesting that Vicksburg had already fallen. With the fall of Vicksburg the North controlled the Mississippi River and had split the South in two; Gettysburg, another Southern defeat which occurred at the same time, was the last major attempt by a Southern army to invade the North and capture Washington, D.C. Like most retrospective first-person narrators, Bayard is split in two; with respect to the action, he is a character in its time and place, but as a narrator he is looking backward from maturity and able to determine the significance.....
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