The Pyramid

A pyramid of round shot fills the right of the frame, stacked shoulder-high on its platform, each ball rusted to the same dark tone. Past it the parade runs to a bombproof arch and broken brick, and a man sits on the far edge of the pile with his back to the camera.

Ammunition outlives the need for it. By the spring of 1865 this shot had nothing left to be fired at, and the neat pyramid — the armory discipline of stacking rounds where the guns could feed — had become what the photographer plainly saw in it: a monument the garrison built to its own war, one ball at a time.