Opening paragraphs.............

     "He rode into the dark of the woods and dismounted.  He crawled upward on his belly over cool rocks out into the sunlight, and suddenly he was in the open and could see for miles, and there was the whole vast army  below him, filling the valley like a smoking river.  It came out of a blue rainstorm in the east and overflowed the narrow valley road, coiling along a stream, narrowing and choking at a white bridge, fading into the yellow dust of June but still visible on the farther road beyond the blue hills, spiked iwth flags and guidons like a great chopped bristly snake, the snake headless in a blue wall of summer rain."
-Michael Shaara, Killer Angels