Unlike Adam and Eve’s battle of the sexes, Twain highlights how a group of men in a militia are a slave to their pride and naiveté. They have a preconceived idea that with war comes glory, but they do not consider the truths of it. Instead of understanding war as bloodshed and deadly, the narrator is a “naïve young man whose alliance is less with the Confederacy than with the romance of soldiering itself” (Ladd 45). As young men, they see fighting and war as a masculine act to be part of. Their guns are a phallic imagery that symbolizes their masculinity, but it is the very same object that makes them realize what war truly is when they accidentally kill a man. As a result, they feel guilty instead of heroic like they initially thought