His observations about the nature of war were exceptionally keen and sharp. To be sure, his writing was spoiled by the attitude of the professional militarist, but even with this limitation he seemed to divine the nature of the focalizing forces at work in the Civil War. There were times when he perceived the true significance of that terrible welding, that profoundly revolutionary war, born in smoke and blood and the high cries of battle. The sense of sharp precision in a battle thrilled him, probably because it suggested form and order and symmetry in which his early experience had been so deficient. He envisaged this tendency to concentration and order in one of his stories as follows:
“An army in line-of-battle awaiting attack, or prepared to deliver it, presents strange contrasts. At the front are precisions, formality, fixity, and silence. Toward the rear these characteristics are less and less conspicuous, and finally, in point of space, are lost altogether in confusion, motion and noise. The homogeneous becomes heterogeneous. Definition is lacking; repose is replaced by an apparently purposeless activity; harmony vanishes in hubbub, form in disorder. Commotion everywhere and ceaseless unrest. The men who do not fight are never ready.”
The tension of the battle line, its suburb orderliness, gave Bierce a feeling of definiteness and a sense of harmony that the hopeless disorder and endless confusion behind the lines could not possibly have given. The strange elation of battle was dear to his heart, however much the details revolted his sensitive nature. The war acted in a two-fold manner: it liberated him from the trivial, and brought him face to face with the great dark music of death; and it stung him into an awareness of the dull edges and slothfulness of life. He sensed the duality of the experience in one of his stories, when he wrote:
“The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to him, but the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes and stiff bodies, which when not unnaturally shrunken were unnaturally swollen, had always intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless antipathy that was something more than the physical and spiritual repugnance common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to his unusually acute sensibilities — his keen sense of the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of resentment.”
Most of his war stories are romantic but occasionally he would become horribly facetious, writing of death in a manner that would shock the cruelest jester. His heartlessness on such occasions would indicate something of the great resentment he felt towards death; his unwillingness to be reconciled to experience. This resentment, growing out of the war, took two forms of expression: a sharp, pungent criticism of the world of corruption and emptiness that grew out of the collapse of idealism, and, second, a resentment at the gruesomeness of the struggle itself. There is really nothing contradictory about his writing; the stories and his satire both sprang from the same experience. With particular reference to his stories, the war created in his mind an image of beauty as being, in some strange way, an aspect of horror. The thrilling exultation of a far-flung battle line with the sweet assembly call running like music down the ranks of blue, was always shattered by the unforgettable image of the burning bodies at Shiloh. This vision came to be fixed in his imagination and he wrote of beauty and horror as one.
The other type of resentment was purely mental and found expression in his satire. He keenly resented the bombastic heroes of peace: such men, for example, as General W. H. L. Barnes and General Salomon, and the other “Generals” and “Colonels” whose very presence made one feel ashamed of having been a soldier. One of these gentlemen actually claimed to have been the true hero of the charge at Missionary Ridge, and it remained for Bierce to point out, in his “Prattle,” the nature of a lie. Of General Salomon, who was always making speeches, he wrote: “General Salomon drew his tongue, marched against the Confederate dead and laid down his honor for his country.” And when Salomon spoke against the fallen rebels, Bierce wrote:
“What, Salomon! such words from you
Who call yourself a soldier? Well
The Southern brother where he fell
Slept all your base oration through.
Are you not he who makes to-day
A merchandise of old renown
Which he persuades this easy town
He won in regions far away?”
Illustrations of the same sort of satire may be found in all his journalism. His abuse of scoundrels, of the whole period of stagnation that followed the war, is traceable to this same influence. The war gave him a background against which to measure the petty puppets of peace. The violence of his satire was a survival of pre-war idealism.
Only a few of the more important influences of the war on Bierce’s character have been traced. It would be impossible to catalogue the ramifications of this experience. One cannot overestimate the importance of those years of soldiering; they must be kept constantly in mind. He was only nineteen when he enlisted and his services extended over practically six years, considering his post-war work in the South. During these years, he witnessed some of the hardest fighting of the war. He was captured and seriously wounded. He had actively participated in four of the most important engagements of the war: Shiloh, Stone River, Chickamauga and Franklin, not to mention a list of other engagements. Moreover, he had seen the show from a very interesting viewpoint, that of a staff officer, which permitted of some objectivity. He was always a soldier.
During these wild, mad years, Bierce was leading a life of intense action. There were few intervals for rest or reflection during his enlistment. The rhythms that such a life stressed became unalterable. Bierce was always restless when physically inactive; he longed, in old age, for the unrestricted, strenuous, and unpredictable life of a military campaign. It meant movement, new scenes and excitement. He had soldiered in the mountains of West Virginia, along the Mississippi, and had marched through Georgia. It was his initiation into life, for his soldiering came when he was a fit age for preparatory school. There was no preliminary schooling in irony: his awakening came like a slap in the face, the irritation and shock of which were unforgettable. Overnight he became a soldier and remained such for six impressionable years. Fetid swamps and ambling fences and the indescribable despair of makeshift farming, were replaced by the crimson precision of battle. It was an experience that made him restless and impatient under physical inactivity; leisure annoyed him; he sometimes wrote, like he had soldiered, for excitement and danger. His sentences were neat, orderly and obedient. There was, literally, a swordlike thrust to his wit. His column of “Prattle” sounded, on occasions, like it had been written under fire. After he had reached sixty, Bierce’s views were easily recognizable as those of an “old soldier” (a very intelligent old soldier, of course). All that was most distinctive about the man in after life was a carry-over from his military career. There was something of the cold informality and unquestionable finality of the court-martial in his judgment on men and events. It is interesting to compare his writings of the war with Harold Frederic’s “Marsena and Other Stories of the Wartime” and Francis Grierson’s “The Valley of Shadows.” The difference is that between a soldier and civilians. Frederic and Grierson were young men who caught the distant rumble of war behind the lines: naturally their work was slow, rather mystical, and full of the soft lights. Bierce never thought of war without becoming excited.
The war was a troubling memory. It never left him; he mused and puzzled about it all his life. He was still thinking about it when, an old man over seventy, he made that last inspection of the old battlefields. Reading his journalism from its inception to the day of its last appearance, one is impressed with the frequency of his references to war, the constant presence in his mind of its images, and the color that it gave his thinking and even his vocabulary. On more than one occasion, he would drop the castigating of rascale long enough to write, in that ornate poetic style of his, such lines as:
“Along the troubled valley
The evening shed its rest;
A last faint troubled gleam of day
Sank slowly down the west.
The river of the valley
Crept sighing to the sea;
And crimson with the red, red blood
That ran for victory.
The stars lean’d from their chambers,
And through a rain of light
They quiver’d, shiver’d, in amaze
And watch’d the dead all night.”
He suddenly ceased, in the days of the Spanish-American War, from lambasting Sampson and the other militarists of the day, to sigh: “Jo Wheeler!” A news dispatch had mentioned the name of General Joseph Wheeler, late of the Confederate Army. Suddenly the Spanish-American fiasco was forgotten; gone, too, were the memories of London, of San Rafael, of San Francisco. Everything slipped away into the obscurity of time and only that one experience stood forth, and he exclaimed:
“Is it not all a dream — all these thirty-odd years of peace and reconciliation, ending in a fantastic Federal-Confederate War with Spain? Shall I not be waked in a few hours by the shuffling feet of the men as they form silently in line and stand at arms in the dark of the morning to repel an expected attack by Jo Wheeler?”
The war was a great emotional adventure that carried Bierce from his early life on an Indiana farm deep into the darkest recesses of experience. It was an adventure that swept him to the stars and then left him on a high note to drift in a narrowing circle of small things, petty details, withering and fetid atmospheres, down to the zero hour of his final jest with death in Mexico. It was a long span of years that stretched like a miraculous bridge from the homely, earthly prose of Abraham Lincoln, to the majestic nonsense of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, at whom Bierce sniffed suspiciously, and, with great good fortune, escaped into Mexico as though he had some premonition of the maudlin days to follow. There was much in the years 1914-1918 that would scarcely have made him smile. “Ideas run recurrent on an endless track,” he once said, and it was an act of divine justice and grace to spare him the agony of witnessing Warren G. Harding enacting the role of a latter-day Rutherford Hayes. His friends should rejoice in his disappearance into Mexico in 1914. He saw enough of this world in seventy years for an eternity of sleeping, and Bierce was “sleepy for death” when he turned his back on his country, with magnificent disdain, on the eve of its adoption of prohibition, Wilsonian idealism and the doctrine that silent men are inevitably wise, and went south to see what death was like among the operatic scenes near Chihuahua. If he had lived to compare “The Backwash of War” by Ellen N. LaMotte, with his “Tales of Soldiers and Civilians,” it would only have increased his loneliness and impressed him more deeply with the nature of man’s sorry plight. It was better that he should forget the endless mimicry of man and turn to the “sacred steep unconsciousness” of Robinson Jeffers, “the great kingdoms of dust and stone, the blown storms, the stream’s-end ocean.”
CHAPTER IV. NEW SCENES
IT has been frequently stated that Bierce returned to Indiana after the war and that he remained there until he left for San Francisco and the West. But the known facts would indicate that he never revisited his home after the war. When he was mustered out of the service, he immediately accepted a post in the Treasury Department, as a minor official, in charge of captured and abandoned property. He was stationed in Alabama, but the headquarters of the division was in New Orleans.
At the close of the war there was, of course, no semblance of government in the South. Military officials took charge of the situation and attempted, after a fashion, to restore order. The national government had placed treasury officials throughout the South to take charge of “captured, abandoned or confiscable” property. In the last days of the war the Confederacy had floated a Produce Loan in which huge quantities of cotton had been pledged to the government. This property was, of course, subject to confiscation. It was the duty of the treasury agents to seize all confiscable cotton and to collect a duty of twenty-five per cent on all sales of cotton made by owners after the war. The commissions of the agents were paid out of the proceeds of sales. Naturally a most deplorable condition resulted. Practically all of the confiscable cotton was centered in Alabama, where Bierce was stationed as a treasury agent. It was found in the reports of the Ku Klux Klan that millions of dollars were filched and stolen from southerners by dishonest treasury agents. To show the value of such posts as Treasury Inspector, prices as high as $25,000 would sometimes be paid for the appointment. Huge quantities of cotton were actually stolen and spirited north to Mellen, a large broker at Cincinnati. Two treasury officials in Alabama, T. C. A. Dexter and T. J. Carver, were actually indicted by Federal grand juries. S. B. Eaton, the inspector in whose division Bierce was an agent, was moderately honest, but even some of his accounts to the government are rather amusing. One reads:
Cotton sold — $15,963.01
Total Receipts —— 27,799.48
Total Expenses —— 27,799.48
Such clever accounting can only be described as ingenuous and typical of the time. The conduct of these inspectors resulted in a grave scandal; every report that was made, as, for example, the report of Ben Truman to the President, only darkened the guilt of these unscrupulous agents. Of course, much of the damage was done by men who merely represented themselves to be treasury agents, so that it was difficult to fix responsibility. The life of even the honest agents was most exciting. A state of actual war existed between the agents and the cotton planters. Agents were driven out of Choctaw County and had to receive the support of cavalry units. It was this régime of irresponsible, disorderly, and chaotic administration that Bierce had to witness and to help enforce. It gave a fatal pause to his idealism.
Not only was the entire system of the treasury agent wrong — for the government profited nothing by the system, as the rascally agents stole the revenue collected — but it kept the South in a state of delayed and arrested reconstruction for years. It would have been difficult enough to rebuild the South under the circumstances that existed at the close of the war, without the handicap of this system of espionage and graft. Selma, Alabama, where Bierce was stationed for a time, had been the scene of a raid by General Wilson’s cavalry in the last days of the war. Wilson had sacked the valley. The disorderly conduct of his drunken soldiers was a scandal even in war time. His raid was eloquently denounced in every history of reconstruction in the South. He not only destroyed the town of Selma but he drove 800 horses and mules into the town and killed them, so that the roads leading into the village could not be traversed for months because of the dreadful stench. The trail of his raid could be marked for years afterwards by the charred ruins of villages, burned stumps that once were homes, and the miscellaneous débris of destruction. Bierce lived in this valley of death at a time when the fires kindled by the union raiders were still smoldering. It is small wonder, then, that he wrote such a story as “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” which might have been a memoir of his experiences in Coosa County, Alabama. It is the story of a man who returns to his homeland and finds it empty of life:
“No signs of human life were anywhere visible nor audible; no rising smoke, no watch-dog’s bark, no lowing of cattle, no shouts of children at play — nothing but that dismal burial-place, with its air of mystery and dread, due to my own disordered brain. Was I not becoming again delirious, there beyond human aid? Was it not all an illusion of my madness? I called aloud the names of my wives and sons, reached out my hands in search of theirs, even as I walked among the crumbling stones and in the withered grass.”
During his occasional trips to New Orleans to report to his chief, S. B. Eaton, Bierce had occasion to see something of the notorious “Ben Butler” régime, an experience that never ceased to cause him mortification and annoyance. He once remarked that, at the outbreak of the Civil War, his imagination drew him irresistibly to the Union cause and that he was convinced beyond doubt or skepticism of the
ideals of the antislavery faction. After witnessing the depredations of Ben Butler in Louisiana, he regretted his zeal in fighting so strenuously for the North. His understanding of the carpetbag régime in the South came as the first shock to his illusions about the war. He was to see the soldiers whose lives had been devoted to “principles” loot the people their comrades had offered their lives to bring back into the Union. Some died that others might rob. Bierce once expressed his feeling in his column of “Prattle”: “Time was, in that far fair world of youth where I went a-soldiering for Freedom, when the moral character of every thought and word and deed was determined by reference to a set of infinitely precious ‘principles’ — infallible criteria — moral solvents, mordant to all base metals, and warranted by the manufacturers and vendors to disclose the gold in every proposition submitted to its tenets. I have no longer the advantage of their service, but must judge everything on its own merits — each case as it comes up.”
The period may be summarized in several stories that Bierce told of his experiences. Once, in company with several comrades, a number of whom had been rebel soldiers, he was returning from a tavern. They noticed that a man kept shadowing them. Not heeding their warning to stop, he kept on following the group and was shot dead by one of Bierce’s companions. A Justice of the Peace heard the complaint and at once dismissed the charges against all defendants except as against the man who fired the fatal shot. He was fined five dollars and costs! While bringing some confiscated cotton down the Tombigbee River, Bierce was fired upon from ambush and a battle royal ensued in which he narrowly escaped with his life. His days were full of such adventures and the experience was not altogether unpleasant, yet the tenor of the reconstruction period disgusted him beyond measure.
Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics) Page 343