soldier

Was that friend or foe? It was almost impossible to tell. A large number of the casualties they were incurring were being inflicted upon men by their own side. In the dark, the uniforms worn by some of the British highlanders were hard to distinguish from the hunting shirts worn by most of Coffee's Tennessee militiamen.
So John froze, trying, as best he could, to balance himself motionlessly on the slippery and unstable log. He could sense the same militiaman who'd issued the curse a moment before doing the same. Only, in this case, the man had both the advantage and disadvantage of standing in pure muck.
A figure moved forward in the darkness. Slowly, stealthily, John raised his pistol.
Suddenly, plaintively, the figure called out: "Are you the Ninety-third?"
Immediately, the Tennessee militiaman replied: "Of course!" Stinking wet or not, angry or not, the man was quick-witted. He even had a passable Scot accent. That wasn't surprising since, like most American frontiersmen, he was probably only a generation—if that—removed from Scotland or the Scot settlements in Ireland.
Sighing audibly, the figure moved forward.
Within seconds, John could tell that he was one of the enemy highlanders. He was about to fire his pistol when the militiaman surged out of the water like an alligator and pressed his musket against the British soldier's chest.
"You are my prisoner!" he cried.
John was not surprised at all by the highlander's response. An even deeper sigh of relief.
"Well enough," the British soldier muttered, extending his own musket butt first. "Anything to get out of this fucking mess."
"Damn those guns!" Colonel Thornton snarled.
Another broadside from the Carolina swept a shower of grapeshot across the soldiers of the Eighty-fifth Regiment who were trying to find cover at the levee. Even in the dark, the American gunners were deadly. Thornton couldn't see it, of course, but he was quite sure that the huge and muddy Mississippi was stained by the blood