It was a magical interlude for these young soldiers, this year among the pines and firs. Full of the dreams of valorousness inspired by a not-too-dangerous war (they were to know a very different form of fighting at Shiloh), they talked excitedly of promotion, honor and glory. It was an almost idyllic period. The setting was perfect and life was charged with a pleasant anticipation of danger. Bierce always referred to the Cheat Mountains as the “Delectable Mountains” and they were touched in his imagination with the bright colors of romance. Life was an unsheathed sword, brilliant in the sun with its sharp edge cutting the blue of the sky. How could he have helped being romantic, this nineteen-year-old sergeant? To these young farmer boys (and the men of his company were quite young), fresh from the low, flat regions of Indiana and Ohio, there was magic in the mountains. Many of them had never seen a mountain before, and now they were perched at the crest of the Alleghenies watching the “faint graying of the blue above the main range — the smoke of an enemy’s camp.” As Bierce wrote of the experience later (Collected Works, Volume I, Page 228): “The flatlanders who invaded the Cheat Mountain country had been suckled in another creed, and to them western Virginia — there was, as yet, no West Virginia — was an enchanted land. How we reveled in its savage beauties! With what pure delight we inhaled its fragrances of spruce and pine! How we stared with something like awe at its clumps of laurel! — real laurel, as we understood the matter, whose foliage had been once accounted excellent for the heads of illustrious Romans and such — mayhap to reduce the swelling. We carved its roots into finger-rings and pipes. We gathered spruce-gum and sent it to our sweethearts in letters. We ascended every hill within our picket lines and called it a ‘peak’.”
Throughout the winter of’62, they stayed on in this Enchanted Land, hunting and drilling and playing at war. There were bear and deer in quantity and the snow came in flurries about the pines. It was not entirely a desultory winter. To make a little excitement, the regiment would occasionally engage in “affairs of outposts.” They would make miniature “campaigns” against the enemy, and were invariably driven back across the snow-carpeted valley. Bierce wrote an account of their return from one of these periodic forays for his Collected Works (Volume I, Page 232). “All one bright wintry day we marched down from our eyrie; all one bright wintry night we climbed the great ridge opposite. How romantic it was; the sunset valleys full of visible sleep; the glades suffused and interpenetrated with moonlight; the long valley of the Green Brier stretching away to we knew not what silent cities; the river itself unseen under its ‘astral body’ of mist!” (The italics are mine.) This is a typical bit of Biercian reminiscence; flooded with romantic sentiment for the “glad” days of the war, when the quality of life was pitched higher and there was a spice of danger and daring and romance to life. But it was not all romance, even during the halcyon days of the war. On returning from one of these expeditions, they found that the faces were gone from the dead bodies of their fallen comrades — eaten away by the wild swine of the mountains!
* * *
WITH the coming of spring, the regiment was ordered west, and it said farewell to the Enchanted Land for many a day, some to see it never again. Sergeant Bierce was not to see it until nearly fifty years later, when all life had swept past and he romantically wished that he had fallen with the brave chaps like Captain Madden and Corporal Boothroyd, who met violent deaths and escaped the “contracting circle” of boredom and spiritual disintegration. Gone were the beautiful days in the mountains and in their stead:
“By Pittsburg Landing, the turbid Tennessee
Sucks against black, soaked spiles with soil-colored waters.
Country of muddy rivers, somber and swollen,
Country of bronze wild turkeys and catfish-fries
And brushpile landings going back to the brush.”
The face of War was no longer averted. The hour of revealment had struck.
Camped on a triangle of land was General Grant’s Army of the Tennessee. Eight or ten miles distant at Savannah was General Buell with the rest of the Union forces of the West, and attached to his division was the Ninth Indiana. Grant had not waited for Buell to arrive from Savannah, but had impatiently crossed the river at Pittsburg Landing and was camped on the enemy’s side of the river, with his army backed against the rushing, turbulent waters of the Tennessee. It was springtime and the river was roaring to its banks. Thus the scene. The date was April 6, 1862, and it was Sunday morning, but no church bells were ringing at Shiloh Chapel. The sky was still indolent with sleep when General Johnston’s swarming hordes of gray Confederates, furious with recent defeats, fell upon Grant’s slumbering army. Men rushed out naked from tents to die on waiting bayonets; a roaring confusion supplanted the tranquillity of an April dawn.
Far away at Savannah, General Grant realized his folly and rushed to join his men huddled up against the banks of the Tennessee. That morning at Savannah, Bierce noted that “the flag hanging limp and lifeless at headquarters was seen to lift itself spiritedly from the staff. At the same instant was heard a dull, distant sound like the heavy breathing of some great animal below the horizon. The Flag lifted its head to listen.” Men instinctively rushed to arms; mess-cooks lifted camp kettles off the fire before breakfast; mounted orderlies disappeared in the distance; headquarters was a swarming hive of activity. Within a few seconds General Buell’s army was running, actually running, the eight miles to Pittsburg Landing. As they approached they heard “the strong, full pulse of the fever of battle,” the “assembly call of the bugles” which “goes to the heart as wine and stirs the blood like the kisses of a beautiful woman. Who that has heard it calling to him above the grumble of great guns can forget the wild intoxication of its music?” They were nearing Shiloh. Such a race was not to be run again during the war. Some regiments lost a third of their number from fatigue. As they rushed nearer and nearer the Landing, the rumble of the guns shook the earth with a slow, terrific energy.
Rushing breathless, arms flying, they topped the last intervening hill and a strange sight met their gaze. “Before us ran the turbulent river, vexed with plunging shells and obscured in spots by blue sheets of low-lying smoke. The two little steamers were doing their duty well. They came over to us empty and went back crowded, sitting very low in the water, apparently on the point of capsizing. The farther edge of the water could not be seen; the boats came out of obscurity, took on their passengers and vanished in the darkness. But on the heights above, the battle was burning brightly enough; a thousand lights kindled and expired every second of time. There were broad flushings in the sky, against which the branches of the trees showed black. Suddenly flames burst out here and there, single and in dozens. Fleeting streaks of fire crossed over to us by way of welcome.” It was dusk now. Buell’s forces had arrived just in time. Left alone for two hours more, the remainder of General Grant’s army would have been annihilated. Against the red flare at the bluff’s edge “could be seen moving black figures, singularly distinct but apparently no longer than a thumb. They seemed to me ludicrously like the fingers of demons in old allegorical prints of hell.” This, then, was Bierce’s first glimpse of Shiloh. The quotations are taken from “What! Saw of Shiloh,” a paper that he began in England, printed in The Wasp, reprinted in The Examiner, and later carried over into his “Collected Works” (Volume I, page 234). It represents some of his best war writing, although it is slightly marred by that elegant diction which he inherited from a pompous age and just succeeded in saving from the purple emptiness of the rhetorical flourish.
At night “we could just discern the black bodies of the boats, looking very much like turtles. But when they let off their big guns there was a conflagration. The river shuddered in its banks, and hurried on, bloody, wounded, terrified.” The regiment was ferried across the river on board a little steamboat. Crossing the river in the rays of a “sad, red, splendid sunset,” Bierce noticed the figure of a woman standing on the upper deck. “She stood on the upper
deck with the red blaze of battle bathing her beautiful face, the twinkle of a thousand rifles mirrored in her eyes; and displaying a small ivory-handled pistol, she told me in a sentence punctuated by the thunder of great guns that if it came to the worst she would do her duty like a man! I am proud to remember that I took off my hat to this little fool.”
Such was the sense of battle that Bierce knew and loved. The sketch was written prior to the series of war stories that were to make his fame as a “realist.” Whether it was a result of his military training, or whether the idea was simply a part of the times, Bierce firmly believed in a universe of rigid and immutable law. The principles of morality were to be determined with mathematical certainty, and since they could be calculated with such certainty, their violation would not be tolerated. Poetry was to be written only in accordance with the strictest “laws” of prosody. Art was a matter of fixed principles. The writer must hue to the formula. He must create a “dominant” impression; he must be dramatic. It was a theory of life and art that emphasized the formal; existence was a pattern that could be unerringly traced. There was no understanding of convictions as merely psychological states of mind; the world was a hard and fast equation and the idea of its appearance as discontinuous phenomena was unthinkable. Hence Bierce’s short stories are warped to fit a pattern. The very meagerness of his work is attributable to the fact that he could obtain few incidents sufficiently dramatic to fit his theory. His war stories are seldom realistic. But so great was his force as a personality, that one can almost feel him trying to escape from the hard framework of his stories. Thus it becomes necessary to turn to such pieces as “Shiloh” to get his genuine reaction to war; the stories are misleading, colored as they are by artifice and made to a pattern.
Reverting to his picture of Shiloh, he noticed the thousands of men huddled under the bluff on the other side of the river as the boat neared the shore. These men who huddled in abject terror were beaten and cowed. They were paralyzed by the shock of that early morning attack; no force could have driven them up the bluff and onto the fatal plateau above. When the boat landed, the disembarking Ninth had to beat these poor devils back with rifle stocks. By the time the regiment reached the plateau, the firing had largely ceased for the day. Occasionally there would be a blaze of firing or a shell would pass overhead. The gunboats continued to shell the enemy. The regiments marched through the night, shifting position, not knowing where they were going, hearing much whispering from the smoke-grimed faces of the men who had been on the plateau during the day. And then it began to rain. They marched through a rain-drenched forest, and at dawn were arrayed in battle formation facing a clearing. Then came “assembly.”
“It was directly before us. It rose with a low, clear, deliberate warble, and seemed to float in the gray sky like the note of a lark. — As it died away I observed that the atmosphere had suffered a change; despite the equilibrium established by the storm, it was electric. Wings were growing on blistered feet. Bruised muscles and jolted bones, shoulders pounded by the cruel knapsacks, eyelids leaden from lack of sleep, — all were pervaded by the subtle fluid, all were unconscious of their clay.”
The last vestiges of the forest were passed and they came upon the open fields where the battle had raged the previous day. It had been a clearing, slightly forested, but the battle had stripped it of vegetation; not a tree had escaped. Pools of rainwater filled the depressions of the earth, “discs of rainwater tinged with blood.” The force of the battle was shown by the leafless trees, the blackened stumps. Knapsacks were strewn about and the débris of battle littered the field. The bodies of dead horses were pitched against trees and cannon cases; ammunition wagons were capsized; and broken timbers dotted the ground as though thrown about by the wind of a hurricane. Men? “There were men enough; all dead, apparently, except one, who lay near where I halted my platoon to await the slower movements of the line — a Federal sergeant, variously hurt, who had been a fine giant in his time. He lay face upward, taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts, and blowing it out in sputters of froth which crawled creamily down his cheek, piling itself alongside his neck and ears. A bullet had clipped a groove in his skull, above the temple; from this the brain protruded in bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings.”
Still they encountered none of the enemy; the word ran along the line that the Confederates had left in the night. The line surged forward across the clearing. “Then, — I can’t describe it — the forest seemed all at once to flame up and disappear with a crash like that of a great wave upon the beach — a crash that expired in hot hissings, and the sickening ‘spat’ of lead against flesh.” Back across the clearing they retreated, spattered with the mud tossed up by bullets and shells. Some field pieces were rushed into position and had to be guarded. No more charges into the smoking jungle of the battle, but a seemingly interminable period of crouching beside the guns that roared away with unabating fury. Finally, when the last of the guns had been demolished by the fire of the enemy, Bierce’s company moved into a nearby wood.
He obtained leave to visit a ravine where a company of Illinois soldiers had been surrounded, and, refusing to surrender, had been shot to the man. The woods had caught fire and the bodies had been cremated. “They lay, half buried in ashes; some in the unlovely looseness of attitude denoting sudden death by the bullet, but by far the greater number in postures of agony that told of the tormenting flames. Their clothing was half burnt away — their hair and beard entirely; the rain had come too late to save their nails. Some were swollen to double girth; others shriveled to manikins. According to degree of exposure, their faces were bloated and black or yellow and shrunken. The contraction of muscles which had given claws for hands had cursed each countenance with a hideous grin. Faugh! I cannot catalogue the charms of these gallant gentlemen who had got what they enlisted for.”
When he rejoined his company, his “reprehensible curiosity” satisfied, he found that the battle raged on, with charge after charge rolling in irregular waves across the field only to be driven back by deadly rifle fire. It was always to be so: the heroic giving way to the prosaic. Suddenly a great lull came. “Had we become stone deaf? See; here comes a stretcher-bearer, and there a surgeon! Good heavens! a chaplain! The battle indeed was at an end.” Thus closed the day at Shiloh.
Bierce never forgot that first major battle. It was imperishably etched in his memory. He never could shake the grip that those fifteen hours had on his soul. He made war story after war story based on some incident garnered from his experience at Shiloh. The battle meant something more to him than just a shocking experience. He had participated in many engagements before and the following years were replete with battles equally severe. But Shiloh came to signify the turning point in his life. He wrote of it sadly, lovingly, as though upon its blood-drenched fields he had lost the perishable illusion of youth. In those hours of battle he saw the pageantry of the heroic go down to unutterable defeat before the ruthless idiocy of chance. The dark rioting forces of an unseen fate rolled across that plateau. Men and mules were reduced to a mass of burning and indistinguishable flesh; arms and legs, bits of steel, smoked-grimed rifles, and blood-soaked uniforms, were covered with the ashes of a great, blind impartiality. The experience seared a white-hot streak across his memory, like the trace of the scalp-wound he received at Kenesaw Mountain.
Whatever he was to do or be, the memory of Shiloh would not fade. It would serve forever as a token to his mind that forces were at work in the world, subtle elements of the tragic, that spelt the inevitable and eternal undoing of the brave, the valiant and the heroic. It might mean the sharp, swift, accidental thrust of a bayonet, or the malice of a friend, the embittering neagerness of experience, or the shocking loneliness of death. But it was all a game dealt out by this hand unseen, this face averted, that mocked at animate and inanimate alike. It was not the thought of Death, for its image was lovely and kind. It was the sense of an indescribable malevolence that was mixed up in
a strangely inseparable manner with the good and beautiful. Life was a battle of imponderables in which nothingness triumphed. Here was the “waste land” that he could never cross; this was the experience that wedded horror and beauty forever and inseparably in his thoughts. No matter what historians might say, Confederate victory or Union triumph, Shiloh meant to Bierce the triumph of chance. As he wrote years later in The Examiner, (Aug. 31, 1889): “I believe that in the word ‘chance,’ we have the human name of a malign and soulless intelligence bestirring himself in earthly affairs with the brute unrest of Euceladus underneath his mountain.”
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 340