“Man is long ages dead in every zone,
The angels all are gone to graves unknown;
The devils, too, are cold enough at last,
And God lies dead before the great white throne!”
Upon a bed in the room a figure lay. He gazed down into its staring eyes and found that the eyes and features were his own! It was a singular experience and troubled him by its recurrence.
His early schooling was very rudimentary. With his brother Albert he attended a rural school where education was an improvised process. Each pupil was supposed to bring a book; seldom was a student able to bring more than one book, and it mattered not at all what type of volume he brought. It was from the library, gathered in this haphazard manner, that education was doled out to the pupils. The Bierce brothers contributed a volume, significant in the light of the younger Bierce’s writings in later years: “The Three Spaniards.” Both brothers, however, remembered that their father was a rather well read man and that he possessed a good library for a man of his circumstances.
But the influence of their father was always secondary to that of General Lucius Verus Bierce, their “illustrious” uncle, with his military gestures, gorgeous rhetoric, and fiery idealism. He it was who inspired Ambrose Bierce. In later years Bierce frankly admitted that he had modeled his career after that of his uncle. Marcus Aurelius, the father of the boys, was dogged by a remorseless fate and a prolific spouse. Undoubtedly a man of native intelligence, courage and ability equal to that of his brother Lucius, he was never other than a poor farmer. His career, after leaving Connecticut for Ohio, might be summed up as consisting of meager acres and many children. Ambrose naturally resented this state of affairs; he was proud and haughty, even as a boy, and was rather contemptuous of his parents. This natural bent was fostered by the days which he spent with his uncle, who was interested in him. Later, when Ambrose was about seventeen, his uncle arranged for his attendance at Kentucky Military Institute. It is impossible to verify the duration of Bierce’s stay at Kentucky, for the early records of the institute have been destroyed by fire. But that he did attend during the year 1859 is borne out by correspondence in my possession with a former classmate of Bierce’s, William E. Guy.
It is scarcely necessary to point out the character of Kentucky Military Institute, particularly during the years immediately following its establishment in 1847. It was one of the highest class institutions of its kind in this country, and it was there that Bierce acquired his fine military bearing, always so impressive, and it was there that he was drilled in military fundamentals. Those who have had occasion to examine the maps that Bierce prepared during the Civil War have invariably been amazed by their fine draftsmanship. The maps were not the work of a novice, and it is apparent that he acquired at least the first principles of topographical engineering while at the academy. The years at the school only emphasized Bierce’s sense of superiority; they only alienated him further from his family and early life. When he returned to Indiana in 1860, he was charged with impatience and eager for adventure.
Bierce always resented the limitations of his youth, although he never wasted much time over the incidents of fate. After the war he became a new individual and determined to forget the squalid landscape of his youth. During the summer months, and at odd moments, he had worked on the farm, in a saloon, and in a brickyard. This brickyard story was one that Joaquin Miller had heard and he would occasionally repeat it to people in the West, much to Bierce’s annoyance. Some suggestion of the privations and meagerness of Bierce’s early life may be found in the memoirs collected by Mr. Maurice Frink. (“A Sidelight on Ambrose Bierce,” Book Notes, August-September, 1923.) Bierce never hesitated to speak spitefully of his boyhood, and never loathed anything quite so much as the horrors of a small, rural community, encased, as such Middle Western communities are, in a cocoon of finely spun, impenetrable limitations. Such a life was provincial to an almost unbelievable degree, and it left its imprint on American character of the period. The war came just in time for Bierce. He was fortunate in escaping so soon to the war and in leaving immediately for California at its close, for whatever may have been the limitations of San Francisco in the sixties, it must be conceded that the life there was infinitely more interesting than the life at Elkhart, Indiana, circa, 1850.
Bierce’s own record of his boyhood is perhaps best summed up in some lines, taken from The Wasp, November 3, 1883:
“With what anguish of mind I remember my childhood,
Recalled in the light of a knowledge since gained;
The malarious farm, the wet, fungus grown wildwood,
The chills then contracted that since have remained.
The scum-covered duck pond, the pigstye close by it,
The ditch where the sour-smelling house drainage fell,
The damp, shaded dwelling, the foul barnyard nigh it,” etc.
The specific character of the images, the sharpness of the recollection after a period of forty years, sufficiently show the repellence which he felt for every vestige of that early experience that lingered in his memory.
His attitude towards his youth was characteristic of the man: he calmly decided to forget about the experience, and not to mention or refer to it again. It was a closed chapter. He did not whine or sniffle about early limitations; he ignored them and went his way. Of course, in later years, he was rather bitter about his entire life. He once remarked to George Sterling that his parents had been “unwashed savages.” This opinion was undoubtedly a passing irritation. But however unpleasant and uninteresting the early days may have been, the war was to destroy all memory of them, and the trip across the plains was to mitigate their recollection. The dazzling, shimmering splendor of the Shoshone falls and the swift, sharp beauty of the Golden Gate, would obliterate these images of farmyards. It was a fortunate escape. Whatever the horrors of the war may have been, they were nothing when compared with the horrors of an Indiana farm in 1850.
CHAPTER II. WAR DAYS 1861
“1861-
Armed year! year of the struggle!
Hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.”
WHITMAN
THERE was indeed something sad and distracted about the year 1861. All the wild, hurried rumors that had been gathering force and momentum during the preceding years broke with a resounding roar in the firing on Fort Sumter. Throughout the late fifties, abolitionist propaganda had been actively circulated in the North, and it is not surprising to find that General Lucius V. Bierce, who had so vigorously championed the patriots of Canada, was in the vanguard of the movement to strike the shackles from the slaves. John Brown was a friend of General Bierce and had gone to Akron to receive arms and supplies for his expeditions in Kansas. General Bierce managed to gain possession of the arms and ammunition of a disbanded company of militia of the State of Ohio. He turned these supplies over to Brown, and, as a personal talisman, gave to Brown the pistols and broadswords which he had used in the “Grand Eagles” and on which were engraved the emblem of that organization. These were the identical weapons used in the Pottawatomie affair. The violence of General Bierce’s abolitionist sentiments must have reached the ears of his admiring nephew, for the General left doubt in the minds of none as to where he stood on the issue of slavery. As an attorney he had occasion, not infrequently, to confer with abolitionists, and he participated, as counsel, in several of the leading cases involving the status of fugitive slaves. He was known throughout the Middle-West as a fearless abolitionist.
On the fatal 2nd day of December, 1859, when John Brown was executed, General Bierce appeared before the Court of Common Pleas at Akron, Ohio, and moved its adjournment. Court adjourned forthwith. At twelve o’clock noon all the stores were closed, bells tolled for an hour, and a flag, draped in mourning, was suspended from Empire Hall. That evening an enormous mass meeting was held in the Hall, at which General Bierce delivered an oration on the death of John Brown. His impassioned, violently emphatic denunciation of the
events which had preceded the Harper’s Ferry tragedy left nothing to be desired. Aside from its rhetorical manner, the address shows careful preparation and no little skill in the art of mobbaiting. The General could be as brusque and harsh in his utterance as his nephew came to be cruelly satirical. In exposing the so-called “valor” of the Virginians, the General said, during the course of his oration: “The dead of Brown’s army lay unburied, and the citizen soldiery exhibited their feats of valor on the dead bodies. The head of one seen floating in the Potomac drew a general fire from a Volunteer Company of the ‘first families,’ exhibiting a surplus of heroism conclusively proving that they feared no foe more than three days after he was dead.” In red-white-and-blue periods that waved and almost fired, the General swept forward to the climax of his plea. Partisan in his viewpoint, bitterly unjust and dogmatic in certain passages, the old warrior was undeniably eloquent in his vehement demand that justice be done. He closed his oration with these lines:
“The tragedy of Brown’s is freighted with awful lessons and consequences. It is like the clock striking the fatal hour that begins a new era in the conflict with slavery. Men like Brown may die, but their acts and principles will live forever. Call it fanaticism, folly, madness, wickedness, but until virtue becomes fanaticism, divine wisdom folly, obedience to God madness, and piety wickedness, John Brown, inspired with these high and holy teachings, will rise up before the world with his calm, marble features, more terrible in death, and defeat, than in life and victory. It is one of those acts of madness which history cherishes and poetry loves forever to adorn with her choicest wreaths of laurel.”
Whether it was with a sense of the impending catastrophe in mind or not, Ambrose left military school, as nearly as can be ascertained, during this same year, 1859. His early, pre-war state of mind was entirely idealistic. What boy would be other than idealistic with an uncle making fervid speeches to excited mobs who seemed to sense that the clouds of war were inevitably gathering? The fiery zeal of the old General was reflected in the boy of nineteen, who thought that the war was utterly a war of ideals and that the might of right was invincible.
Nor was the General entirely a forensic patriot. On April 15, 1861, when President Lincoln rather calmly announced that the enforcement of the laws of the Union was meeting with some opposition in the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and requested a volunteer force of seventy-five thousand to secure respect for the Union of the states and its laws, General Bierce was one of the first to respond. Although he was over sixty years of age, he organized and equipped two companies of marines at his own expense, supervised their drill work himself, and personally delivered them over to the government officials at the Washington navy-yards. On returning to Ohio, he organized two companies of artillery and would have led them into action himself but for his appointment as assistant adjutant-general of volunteers by President Lincoln.
The interest with which his nephews were following his work is attested by the fact that Albert Bierce enrolled in the 18th Ohio Field Artillery, one of the companies organized by General Bierce. Ambrose, however, had not waited for his uncle to return from Washington, but had enlisted immediately upon the call for volunteers, the date of his enrollment being April 19, 1861. He volunteered for the “three months” service at Elkhart and was assigned to Company C, 9th Indiana Infantry. His regiment trained at Camp Colfax and drilled in civilian clothes. It was a flushed and feverish period of pre-war — The Summit Beacon, Akron, Ohio, December 7, 1859. activity. Hostilities had broken out, to be sure, but no one realized the consequences; it was a period of bugles and drums, flashing colors, and the high promise of glory. It was confidently boasted that three months alone would suffice to down the rebel. The young men of the 9th Indiana were still raw recruits, when, in May of 1861, they were ferried across the Ohio River and received their baptism of fire at the engagement of Philippi under Capt. George McClellan.
At the end of the three months’ period of service the Confederates were still at large. It was then rather somberly forecast that three years would be required for the task of subduing the rebellion. Accordingly, Bierce reënlisted at LaPorte, Indiana, on August 27th, 1861, in the same company he had joined in April. He was enrolled this time, however, as sergeant of Company C. The date of his actual muster into service was September 5, 1861. He was to remain sergeant until one year later, when he was infinitely promoted to the rank of sergeant-major.
During the three months’ service, the 9th Indiana was sent into Virginia. Years later Bierce spent a summer at Aurora, West Virginia, near the Maryland line, overlooking the Cheat River Valley in the Allegheny Mountains. He wrote an account of the experience which was read to the veterans of his regiment who assembled at Logansport, Indiana, October, 1904, in reunion. Of this Cheat River Valley, the scene of their early soldiering, he wrote: “That region had ever since been to me, as I suppose it has to you, a kind of dreamland. I was reluctant to descend into it for fear of dispelling the illusion, but finally I did so, and passed a few of the most interesting Weeks of my life, following the track of the Ninth, visiting its camps, the forts that it helped to build, those that it assisted to take, or try to take, the graves of the fallen and those of the misguided gentlemen whom it sent to their long rest, and who, doubtless, sleep not less soundly than the others.” It was an enchanted land for Bierce, and he often revisited the scenes of his first soldiering. It is the background for two of his stories: “A Horseman in the Sky” and “The Story of a Conscience.”
If, years later, it was still so fascinating, what must have been its charm at nineteen?
The first engagements of the war were sham battles; opéra bouffe affairs. At Philippi the Ninth came charging down a road into the little town, thinking it had the enemy surrounded, when, as a matter of fact, it was charging into his arms. A battery of guns posted on a hill began to shell the town, and, incidentally, to shell its own men. This was an incident that Bierce was later to use in a dramatic story: “One Kind of Officer.” About the only effect the shelling had, however, in real life, was to take the leg off a Confederate. Bierce found the gentleman in 1903 still living near Philippi, but, as he added, “still minus the leg; no new one had grown on.”
In this region, too, was the town of Belington, then just a village crossroads with a blacksmith shop. Two or three miles out from this town the regiment engaged in a sharp exchange of arms known as the Battle of Laurel Hill. Garnett, a Confederate officer, had erected some breastworks and the Union forces peppered away without any definite plan of attack, and, for the most part, without orders. It was in a forest, and Bierce found a clump of trees where, “just before nightfall one day occurred the one really sharp little fight that we had. It has been represented as a victory for us, but it was not. A few dozen of us, who had been swapping shots with the enemy’s skirmishers, grew tired of the resultless battle, and by a common impulse, and I think without orders or officers, ran forward into the woods and attacked the Confederate works. We did well enough, considering the hopeless folly of the movement, but we came out of the woods faster than we went in, a good deal. This was the affair in which Corporal Dyson Boothroyd of Company ‘A’ fell with a mortal wound. I found the very rock against which he lay. Our camp is now a race track.” Bierce never failed to record the ironies that time invariably worked. The field of a heroic battle in ten years became a race track. Where monuments marked the graves of fallen heroes, cowards had fled the ground. Time was an echoing irony.
Bierce’s account of the engagement at Belington was written, however, with his customary modesty, for it omitted an act of heroism on his part. It seems that during the fighting, which lasted for several days, Company C charged forward and took an advanced position known as Girard Hill, where they were exposed to a deadly fire. When about fifteen steps from the fortifications of the enemy, Corporal Dyson Boothroyd was shot through the neck and fell, unable to move. Bierce was near, picked Boothro
yd up and carried him more than one hundred yards in the open under a galling fire, and succeeded in getting to safety. No officer was in sight to report the rescue, and Bierce always refused to mention the occurrence, but it was recorded in an Indiana history of the War, and was remembered by his old friend, Judge C. F. Moore.
Upon the reorganization of the regiment for the three years’ service, it returned to the same region. The Cheat River Valley was a strategic point and both armies guarded the old Staunton and Parkersburg turnpike, the Confederates at the southern outlet and the Union forces at the north. The young soldiers of the Ninth were so anxious lest they be encircled that they built their camp and fortress straddling the road. Here, during the months of’61, they could gaze across the valley and watch the blue smoke of Confederate camp fires curling lazily towards heaven in a perfect sky.
It was on the return of the Ninth, after the three months’ service, that the affairs of Green Brier and Buffalo Mountain occurred. Green Brier was fought while they were encamped at Huttonsville, near the foot of the Cheat Mountains. The Confederates had erected breastworks near Green Brier River and an attack was planned which resulted in the Union forces being repulsed with heavy losses. These early years of the war were not entirely a matter of pleasant marching through forests, for Green Brier took the first heavy toll of the war. Then, too, Buffalo Mountain was a sharp battle. It occurred at the southern end of the valley. “Here,” as Bierce wrote, “the regiment had its hardest fight in Western Virginia, and was most gloriously thrashed. When I saw the place (with better opportunities for observation than we had then), I knew why. The works are skillfully constructed and nearly a half mile in length, with placements for several batteries. They are built on a narrow ridge and are hardly more than one hundred and fifty yards wide at any point. At the rear, where our attack was made, (after the garrison having defeated our cooperating force in front, and got ‘good and ready for us to surprise them), there was but one approach and that by way of a narrow road, through acres of slashed timber, impenetrable to a cat. The trunks of the trees are still there, all pointing away from the fort, all decaying and none of them having even their largest branches. A big head-log across the embrasure commanding the road is so rotten that one can pick it to pieces with the fingers. I fancy the Yankee bullets have all been picked out of it; I found none. The slashed timber, which prevented us from attacking in line, saved our lives, — most of them — when we attacked in column. We took cover in it and pot-shotted the fellows behind the parapet all day, as I recollect it, and then withdrew and began our long retreat in a frame of mind that would have done credit to an imp of Satan. The road that penetrated the slashed timber is easily traced; I recognize the spot where Capt. Madden fell, at the extreme head of the column. Lord! how close to the works it was — I had thought it farther away.” Always something of a professional militarist, as well he might be with such a soldierly tradition, Bierce took a keen interest in recounting manoeuvers, attacks, strategies and campaigns. The memories of action were always more vividly recalled, in later years, than the impressions of the imagination. Strange as it may seem, his war writing grew more concerned with the details and mechanics of war the older he grew. His best imaginative work about the war was done early in his career.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 339