Guns and Death in ColdMountain

Cold Mountain includes mention of many Civil War-era weapons. Some are standard-issue field arms, such as the Springfield and Enfield rifles, and the Colt army and navy revolvers. Others are rare, specialty items, like the powerful LeMat pistol or Whitworth sniper rifle. The question is, why these particulars out of the hundreds of devices that made a battlefield appearance during the war? There must be something between them that relates to the story and its …

…all that came before it. The focus of the story is death and the seeming cruelty of the universe. It easy to see why, then, that the weapons chosen for use therein are highly efficient and powerful for their time. Those firearms are just one way in a hundred little devices Frazier uses to impress the sense of sorrow and futility those living and working or fighting in the disintegrating late-war South must have felt.