One Hundred Years of Solitude

defeat was more and more
concrete. Toward the end of
March, before a dawn of
premature rain, the tense calm
of the previous weeks was
abruptly broken by the
desperate sounds of a cornet
and a cannon shot that
knocked down the steeple of
the church. Actually,
Arcadios decision to resist
was madness. He had only
fifty poorly armed men with a
ration of twenty cartridges