Allan sat down at his desk and pulled the chair in close. Opening a side drawer, he took out a piece of paper and his inkpot. After filling his pen, Allan looked at his paper in the orange glow from the lantern set back in the desk's right-hand corner. His pen cast a forbidding line of shadow slanting across the page, echoing the inky darkness crouching in the edges of the lantern's struggling glow. The only other illumination came from a lurid moonlight filtered through thin branches and clouds, casting its bone-pale glow onto the pine floorboards. Allan unfolded another page, this one crowded with ranks of letters in tight formation from left to right. The lines of letters stepped into their divisions, in the shape of a story's outline: the loose, dry skeleton of a tale lay exposed beneath their feet, awaiting tendons, muscle and blushing skin. Allan reviewed the troops, all prepared to disembark, their task to form the tale of a young man returning home from Life Abroad to find his childhood friend a bride to-be, thus upsetting the apple cart of his life's plan, clarified – of course – by his very time away from her he loved best. Although the concept was a simple one, Allan thought it had potential. Besides, the public liked a good, simple romance. Perhaps this will be more saleable, he thought and began to write. They gazed at each other, lost in the rapture of love based so deeply within their hearts that they had never seen it before. "What about Roger?" she asked, knowing that the answer no longer mattered. 
What phrases characterize the letters as a group of military men?
"upsetting the apple cart of his life's plan"