The Private History of a Campaign that Failed

This is I guess folksy and fun of Twainian flourishes, but really not a "short story" so much as history, a straight rendition of what "spirited lads" all over the border states were doing and going through around the outbreak of the Civil War. Twain intentionally plays it low-key and makes their band of goofballs kind of unremarkable and kind of iconic, and mostly you're left with the sense of this same story playing itself out fifty thousand times in the early weeks before anyone had any idea what kind of animal a "civil war" was or what they had on their hands here.

A decent short 19th-century military story.