Later Bierce transposed the experience. In the course of time the war became a pleasant memory. Wearying of thrusting at shadows, he waxed poetical over Shiloh and saw in it the trivial lifted to the grandeur of tragedy. The recollection of it tasted sweet and he could write:
“O days when all the world was beautiful and strange; when unfamiliar constellations burned in the Southern midnights, and the mocking-bird poured out his heart in the moon-gilded magnolia; when there was something new under a new sun; will your fine, far memories ever cease to lay contrasting pictures athwart the harsher features of this later world, accentuating the ugliness of the longer and tamer life?
Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so fair a grace and look with so tender eyes? — that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque?”
It was ever so, this recollection of the war typified by “Shiloh,” that tormented (“will your memories ever cease”) his thoughts with contrasting images of horror and beauty. He never thought of the one without thinking of the other. Then, too, the memory created through the years an ever present consciousness of death, a mocking well of echoes that belittled every effort to which he turned his hand. What mattered ambitions, love, honor, gratitude, friends? Is it to be marveled by any sane or thoughtful person, that this man was something of a cynic? Must the eminent doctors of abnormal psychology make a “sadist” of this man who sometimes thought of severed limbs, broken skulls and the agonies of death? In his experiences during the war, prior to his majority, may be found the origin of his sense of an engulfing futility, a belittling fate, of the horrible allied with the beautiful. He was shocked into an attitude which became a habit. He could no more relax the tension of his mind, after that experience, than he could remove the scar from his scalp. If Dr. Goldberg had suggested that he was a “poet” instead of a sadist, he would have come much closer to the facts.
* * *
FAR down the Tennessee River a woman was seeing something of Shiloh. Josephine Clifford, the “Jo” of those most charming of Bierce letters, was on board a steamer which her brother, Albert, piloted up and down the river, bringing the wounded from Shiloh. Of these scenes, she wrote to Bierce in later years: “it was a long procession of litters and stretchers moving from the steamer lying at the levee at St. Louis to the hastily erected military hospital farther uptown. Most of the wounded soldiers had their faces covered; but wherever a hand was seen, the skin on it was shriveled and wrinkled, from the rain that had fallen on these poor fellows so long.” She wrote this long afterwards, when these two strange souls came to know each other in the twilight of their lives at Wrights. They met and talked in the deep quiet of the Santa Cruz Mountains, when they were white with age. He argued to her, with studied disdain and implacable certainty, that nothing mattered, but he could never shake her beautiful belief that tenderness would have its triumph. It was a far cry from Shiloh to Wrights, as though the currents that had so nearly touched in 1862 were finally to drift close enough together in 1898 to permit of a final and belated whispering. But by 1898 they were both victims of the tragedy of time and rather regretted that they had survived Shiloh, for it had touched them deeply and unforgettably.
CHAPTER III. WAR DAYS 1862-1865
After Shiloh both armies were shocked into a state of watchful waiting, with minor engagements throughout the summer. In the fall of 1862, General Beauregard was removed from command of the Confederate forces in the West and the energetic Braxton Bragg replaced him. General Bragg immediately carried into execution the campaign which resulted in the sacking of Kentucky and the determination, on the part of the North, to close up the west. The Ninth Indiana participated in the severe fighting around Corinth and Perryville, leading up to the fall of Nashville. When Thomas and his army were besieged in Nashville, General Hood’s army was in the precarious position of having to shell a Southern city. Every shell fired might mean the demolition of the gunner’s home. That Bierce appreciated the horror of the situation is shown by “The Major’s Tale” (“Collected Works,” Vol. VIII, page 65), and by “The Affairs at Coulter’s Watch.”
Shortly after the Battle of Corinth, Bierce had been commissioned Second Lieutenant (November 25th, 1862), and during the Nashville campaign he was assigned to the staff of General Sam Beatty of Ohio. One day while Beatty’s forces were scattered in pursuit of the enemy, it was discovered that a detached brigade held a peculiarly exposed position some ten miles from headquarters. General Beatty saw that the brigade was imperiled, or so he thought, and dispatched some reserves to its assistance. Bierce was directed to pilot this expedition to the rescue. As he told the story:
“I never felt so brave in all my life. I rode a hundred yards in advance, prepared to expostulate single handed with the victorious enemy at whatever point I might encounter him. I dashed forward through every open space into every suspicious looking wood and spurred to the crest of every hill, exposing myself recklessly to draw the Confederate fire and disclose their position. I told the commander of the relief column that he need not throw out any advance guard as a precaution against the ambuscade — I would myself act in that perilous capacity, and by driving in the rebel skirmishers gain time for him to form his line of battle in case I should not be numerically strong enough to scoop on the entire opposition at one wild dash. I begged him, however, to recover my body if I fell.”
When the reserves arrived, however, it was found that the danger was over and that their heroic movement had been in vain. Despite the superfluous heroism, Bierce was mentioned in general orders for his gallantry on this occasion. It is interesting to note that out of this incident he evolved, “A Son of the Gods,” perhaps his most popular story. But with what changes! The story is romanticized to an unbelievable degree; the young officer who rides in advance of the command to draw the enemy’s fire is shot down and rises to salute his comrades while two armies stand breathless and agog at his heroism! The gallant fellow then dies and our hearts are broken. It is a good illustration of how Bierce invariably chose the wrong incident for his stories. To see his great energy and vitality being cramped and beaten into the obsolete riggings of the story form is a pitiful sight. After Poe the story must be “unusual”; it must be weird. All of Mr. Bierce’s western imitators, W. C. Morrow, R. D. Milne, E. H. Clough and Emma Frances Dawson, were of the same opinion. The short story became a mechanical toy, devoid of grace, ease and charm. The characters spoke with an elegance not of this earth. There was never a more flagrant offender on the score of unnatural dialogue than Bierce. In his fanatical effort to escape the commonplace, he made his characters talk in a diction that suggests nothing so much as the sepulchral conversation of very elegant and romantic ghosts.
The day after Christmas, having permitted his soldiers to muse over the birth of their Lord and Savior twenty-four hours, General Rosecrans left Nashville with a large force and set out to drive Bragg south. The movement culminated in the Battle of Stone River, which proved to be one of the fiercest battles of the year. Towards the end of that day of hard fighting, the Ninth Indiana was stationed behind a railroad embankment. As dusk descended on the scene, Major Braden, who was commanding the regiment, fell seriously wounded. Sergeant N. V. Bowers remembered that it was Bierce who caught the Major in his arms and carried him back to a place of safety. Stone River, or Murfreesboro, as it was sometimes called, was a holocaust of slaughter: General Breckenridge lost two thousand men in the space of a few minutes. It became a dark memory for Bierce.
He revisited the scene in the winter of his life, and was amazed to stand in the enveloping and unbelievable silence of the night on a ridge that had once been trampled with the feet of marching armies. He could read, through the dim unreality of twilight, the inscription on an elaborate monument in the center of the field: “Hazen’s Brigade, To the Memory of Its Soldiers Who Fell at Stone River, December 31, 1862.” It was like reading the inscr
iption on his own tomb. It was such an amazing experience to stand on this field of death alone, that he suddenly felt all the sensations of the battle come surging upon him. Had it actually happened? But this period of fifty intervening years, was it not really the part that was grotesquely unreal? He could not be sure about these shifting scenes, and he wrote “A Resumed Identity.” It is the story of a lieutenant on Hazen’s staff, who awoke on the battlefield years later and thought that the fighting still raged. That the experience, with its feeling of a lost reality, was genuine and personal is borne out by the fact that the story did not appear in the early editions. It was written after his residence in Washington and after he had made his first visit to the old battlefields. Time had strange gaps, there were air pockets in its continuity, and those years after the war seemed as unreal as a nightmare. He had seen the face of death with the mask removed at Stone River in 1862, and the years that followed failed to impress him with even the substantiality of a dream. Such experiences are not forgotten: they become more vivid with time and blot out the meaningless. The story closes with this sentence: “His arms gave way; he fell, face downward, into a pool and yielded up the life that had spanned another life.”
It was at Murfreesboro that an incident occurred which Bierce often related. The army was paraded to witness a hanging. Two men had committed a particularly atrocious murder outside of the issues of war; they were all murderers, but whether they were publicly shot as such depended on whether they were obedient assassins or free lances. These gentlemen were free lances. To instill in the soldiers a proper fear of the consequences of such irregular murders, the army was assembled to witness the punishment. At the critical moment, as one of the men mounted the scaffold, he began to shout that he was “going home to Jesus.” As the words left his mouth, the engineer on a nearby railroad track emitted a loud, unmistakably derisive, “Hoot! Hoot!” It expressed, as Bierce remarked, “‘the sense of the meeting better than a leg’s length of resolutions; and when the drop fell from beneath the feet of that picnic assassin and his mate, the ropes about their necks were practically kept slack for some seconds by the gusts of laughter ascending from below. They are the only persons I know in the other world who enjoyed the ghastly distinction of leaving this to the sound of inextinguishable merriment.”
It was in the same issue of The Argonaut that he told the incident of the cavalry officer who was to be shot for desertion. The man was blindfolded and placed astride his own coffin. The firing squad was ready to fire the fatal volley, when the doomed man spoke to the officer in charge of the execution. No one heard what was said. Later Bierce questioned the officer and was informed that the unfortunate deserter had requested that a saddle be placed on the coffin!
On February 14th, 1862, Bierce was commissioned First Lieutenant of Company C, Ninth Indiana. His fellow officers and comrades said that they remembered the date because he was commissioned shortly after Captain Risley, who had mustered Bierce into the service, was captured. During the confusion that followed, Bierce commanded the company with precision and competency. It was for his courage and resourcefulness on this occasion that he was made a first lieutenant at twenty-one. But he was not long for Company C, as he was soon transferred to General Hazen’s staff to act as topographical engineer. The Ninth Indiana had been assigned to Hazen after Nashville.
General W. B. Hazen became more than just Bierce’s chief: he was another hero, a model, such as General Lucius V. Bierce had been. Hazen and Bierce were close personal friends during the war, crossed the plains together, and in after years always corresponded. The two figures who most influenced Bierce during his twenties, Hazen and General Bierce, were soldiers and such ardent, bellicose militarists at that! The early ideal with Bierce was the military; the pen did not supplant the sword until he was nearly thirty. This matter of heroes is not unimportant and it is doubtful if Bierce had even heard of Swift or Voltaire until he reached San Francisco. Hazen lacked the poetic, idealistic cast of General Lucius Bierce. He was taciturn, grim, and adamant. Famed throughout the service as a great disciplinarian, he was feared and respected wherever he was known. He was proud and sensitive and suspicious. His career was blotched by bad luck, his ugly disposition, and the jealousy of rivals. Instead of turning politician and getting better opportunities, he cursed darkly to himself and became more saturnine. As a strategist and commander, he was probably the equal of Sherman or Thomas, but he was always falling into unfortunate quarrels. His junior officers felt, and with some justification perhaps, that other Generals who knew and feared his ability, deliberately forced impossible tasks upon him to ruin his chances of promotion. His habit of bickering did not cease with the war, as he became involved in a rather notorious dispute with a “brother” officer in later years. It is altogether likely that this old campaigner rather disillusioned Bierce about the integrity of generals and the altruism of brother officers who have relatives in politics.
Bierce was serving on Hazen’s staff in the fall of 1863, at the Battle of Chickamauga. This was another ghastly battle which, like Shiloh, could have been avoided if the Union commander had been more alert. It was a battle for a road, and for years the argument raged among strategists as to whether it was necessary for Rosecrans to offer battle or not. The better opinion seems to be that the battle could have been avoided, if he had used his wits. The battle occurred Sept. 20, 1863, and was, of course, one of the great engagements of the war. Shortly after the firing began, the Union force was cut in two. Bierce happened to be in the middle of the line when the Confederates came crashing through. He rushed to the left and joined General Thomas’ brigade which was holding the ground with that remarkable tenacity which made for its commander the title of “rock of Chickamauga.” Not having sufficient troops to sustain a general attack, General Thomas withdrew his right wing and was in danger of being completely surrounded. Bierce noticed the gleam of arms in the distance, and called Thomas’ attention to the fact. He was dispatched to ascertain what force approached. He dashed off and soon reported back that it was General Gordon Granger with his brigade. Granger, alone of the Union field commanders, had kept his senses. Without waiting for orders, he had moved to join Thomas on the left at a time when Rosecrans had fled the field, wiring complete defeat to Washington. The discussion of such costly blunders as Chickamauga must have dealt Bierce’s fine anti-slavery idealism a severe blow.
But if the blunders were appalling, incidents occurred which served to restore one’s sense of humor. In reporting back to General Hazen’s headquarters later in the day, Bierce noticed General Negley in hot retreat, and volunteered to escort him back to the scene of battle. The General indignantly refused the assistance and rushed to the rear. Bierce said that there was something absent-minded about Negley on this occasion, as though his mind were back in Chattanooga behind a breastwork!
While Bierce was cut off from Hazen’s staff, he galloped away to visit his brother Albert, who was now a first lieutenant in the 18th Ohio Field Artillery in Granger’s command. Chatting quite casually while the battle raged — Ambrose astride his horse and Albert directing the fire of the field pieces — their visit was momentarily interrupted by a rebel bullet that killed one of Albert’s gunners. Not at all daunted, these young veterans propped the dead man up against a tree and went on talking, probably observing that it was a rather warm day. Albert’s battery was to perform gallant service for the Union before the day was over, as will be noted in “The Truth About Chickamauga,” (Archibald Gracie, Houghton Mifflin & Company, 1911). Old “Sloots,” as Ambrose called his brother, was rather shy about relating his feats of gallantry, but he finally wrote an account of what he saw of Chickamauga for Mr. Gracie, who was his brother’s friend. Ambrose was rather shocked at the document and forwarded it to Mr. Gracie with a word of apology for the style!
The battle raged all day. Towards evening General Brannan was in dire need of assistance on the left of Thomas’ line, near what came to be called Snodgrass Hill. In res
ponse to his call for help, General Hazen detached the Ninth Indiana under the command of Colonel Suman, along with the 18th Ohio Field Artillery in which Albert Bierce was an officer. The fighting that took place late that evening at Snodgrass Hill was perhaps the bitterest of the day. It occurred in a cornfield at the crest of a hill, and the fighting was at close range, without orders, and with no opportunity for formations. It degenerated into a regular gang fight in the dark. Colonel Suman was momentarily captured and it looked like the entire regiment had surrendered, when, upon the magical reappearance of Suman in their midst again, they took up the fight anew. The Confederates later indignantly argued that the Ninth Indiana had actually surrendered and then, when they saw they had a chance to win, had picked up their arms and caught them off guard. In any event, the Ninth was the last regiment to leave the field that day, and the two brothers must have exchanged some great yarns next morning. The Park Commission allowed the Ninth Indiana to mark five places on the field at Chickamauga, and it was there, too, that a statue was erected in honor of General W. B. Hazen. Years later Major Henry S. Foote, a Confederate, author of “Recollections of the Chickamauga Campaign,” and Bierce incarnadined the walls of Judge Boalt’s law offices in San Francisco with their tales of gory Chickamauga. The Judge finally silenced the debate by remarking that they would both be talking about Chickamauga when he was a “celestial musician.”
It is interesting to compare Bierce’s description of Chickamauga, written in 1898, with his account of Shiloh, which was begun as early as 1875. The difference in time had a marked effect on Bierce’s attitude. The trembling indignation, the flashes of poetry, that make Shiloh a fine bit of writing, are absent from Chickamauga. In the latter piece he merely set down the facts with yawning indifference. It is in even sharper contrast with his story about Chickamauga, to be found in “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians.” This story is one of the most successful of all Bierce’s fiction pieces, if only for the reason that it manages to escape, after a fashion, from his conception of the short story as an iron corset with dramatic buckles, — something that fitted together like the parts of a puzzle, a matter of manufacture rather than of imaginative creation. It is the story of a child who is playing in the woods at Chickamauga, or “river of death,” as it is called in the Indian language. The child encounters the wounded and dying remnant of a regiment, creeping away to the rear, and struts in front of this grotesque army:
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 341