I have the honor to be, &c, your Excellencies' very humble servant,
HANS PFAALL
***
Upon finishing the perusal of this very extraordinary document, Professor Rubadub, it is said, dropped his pipe upon the ground in the extremity of his surprise, and Mynheer Superbus Von Underduk having taken off his spectacles, wiped them, and deposited them in his pocket, so far forgot both himself and his dignity, as to turn round three times upon his heel in the quintessence of astonishment and admiration. There was no doubt about the matter – the pardon should be obtained. So at least swore, with a round oath, Professor Rubadub, and so finally thought the illustrious Von Underduk, as he took the arm of his brother in science, and without saying a word, began to make the best of his way home to deliberate upon the measures to be adopted. Having reached the door, however, of the burgomaster's dwelling, the professor ventured to suggest that as the messenger had thought proper to disappear – no doubt frightened to death by the savage appearance of the burghers of Rotterdam – the pardon would be of little use, as no one but a man of the moon would undertake a voyage to so vast a distance. To the truth of this observation the burgomaster assented, and the matter was therefore at an end. Not so, however, rumors and speculations. The letter, having been published, gave rise to a variety of gossip and opinion. Some of the over-wise even made themselves ridiculous by decrying the whole business as nothing better than a hoax. But hoax, with these sort of people, is, I believe, a general term for all matters above their comprehension. For my part, I cannot conceive upon what data they have founded such an accusation. Let us see what they say:
Imprimis. That certain wags in Rotterdam have certain especial antipathies to certain burgomasters and astronomers.
Secondly. That an odd little dwarf and bottle conjurer, both of whose ears, for some misdemeanor, have been cut off close to his head, has been missing for several days from the neighboring city of Bruges.
Thirdly. That the newspapers which were stuck all over the little balloon, were newspapers of Holland, and therefore could not have been made in the moon. They were dirty papers – very dirty – and Gluck, the printer, would take his bible oath to their having been printed in Rotterdam.
Fourthly, That Hans Pfaall himself, the drunken villain, and the three very idle gentlemen styled his creditors, were all seen, no longer than two or three days ago, in a tippling house in the suburbs, having just returned, with money in their pockets, from a trip beyond the sea.
Lastly. That it is an opinion very generally received, or which ought to be generally received, that the College of Astronomers in the city of Rotterdam, as well as all other colleges in all other parts of the world, – not to mention colleges and astronomers in general, – are, to say the least of the matter, not a whit better, nor greater, nor wiser than they ought to be.
AMBROSE BIERCE
(1842 - 1913?)
“I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is 'Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' by Ambrose Bierce.”
Kurt Vonnegut
PRINTER'S DEVIL AND UNION SOLDIER
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born in the settlement of Horse Cave Creek, Ohio, one of thirteen children. His parents were deeply religious members of the First Congregationalist Church of Christ and his siblings were called Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, Arthur, Adelia, and Aurelia. Though they were poor, they were a literary family and Ambrose grew up with a deep respect for books and a love for the written word.
Bierce left home at 15 to become an apprentice or 'Printer's Devil' (so called for the black ink which constantly stained their hands) at the Northern Indianiannewspaper. After serving his apprenticeship he enrolled at 17 in the Kentucky Military Institute and was there able to gain the rudiments of a classical education, studying Latin, history and political science.
When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Bierce joined the Union Army. He served with distinction in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment at the first Battle of Philippi and the Battle of Rich Mountain. Promoted to First Lieutenant, he took part in the brutal Battle of Shiloh in 1862, the bloodiest in the history of the United States at that time. He would later write the memoir What I Saw at Shiloh about the harrowing experience.
Having been invalided out of the conflict at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, he left the army to become a clerk in Alabama. He later moved to California, which would remain his home state for the rest of his life. Bierce had written some fiction during the war, but it was in San Francisco that he began to build a career from writing.
BITTER BIERCE
Working for a number of local newspapers, Bierce supplied essays, journalism, stories and sketches on numerous subjects – from political intrigue to lambasting society figures. It was while writing for these newspapers, particularly the San Francisco Examiner and The Wasp (where he had a weekly column called ‘Prattle’), that Bierce became a national figure, known for his sharp wit and satire, earning the ire of many leading figures of the day, including Oscar Wilde, whom he referred to as an ‘intellectual jellyfish’.
In 1871 Bierce met and married Mary Ellen (Mollie) Day, with whom he had three children. A keen traveller, Bierce journeyed extensively across the United States and Europe as a correspondent for the San Francisco Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst (the inspiration for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane). He became one of Hearst's most trusted reporters. Between 1879 and 1881 he also tried his hand at running a mine in Deadwood, South Dakota. However, the venture swiftly collapsed, forcing Bierce and his family to return to California.
Whilst working for Hearst's newspapers, Bierce wrote some of his best-known fiction, including the stories 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' and 'Killed at Resaca', in which he relived the horrors of the Civil War. The quintessential master of ‘pure’ English, he was also an accomplished poet, often using his skills to attack his contemporaries. However, he would become known around the world for his collection of highly witty and caustic definitions, The Devil’s Dictionary. Eminently quotable, the work reinvented English words to reveal a seemingly endless litany of foolishness and hypocrisy.
For example:
CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters.
First appearing in his column for San Francisco’s News Letter, they earned Bierce the nickname ‘Bitter Bierce’.
As a journalist he was heavily involved in a number of political scandals. A poem he published in 1900 seemed to demand the assassination of President McKinley, and when McKinley was shot a year later there was a national outcry. Bierce was protected by his benefactor Hearst, his identity as the author of the poem kept secret.
AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY
By the turn of the century Bierce had become a hugely respected journalist and writer. However, his personal life was in tatters. He had separated from Mollie in 1888; a year later his eldest son, Day, killed himself allegedly over a woman. In 1901 his second son, Leigh, also died suddenly of pneumonia. Outliving his sons had a debilitating effect on Bierce. He wrote less and wound down his career writing for Hearst’s newspapers. In 1909 the 71-year-old Bierce took to travelling across the country, visiting the sites of the battles of the Civil War.
In October 1913 Bierce's niece claimed to have received a letter from him, mentioning a plan to go to Mexico, at the time in the grips of a bloody revolution. Very little is known about this journey, or even if it took place, though it has been suggested that he joined Pancho Villa’s army as an observer and witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca. There are also stories amongst the locals in the Sierra Madre that he was captured and executed in the town of S
ierra Mojada in early 1914. However, no categorical evidence exists and to this day, his disappearance remains an unsolved mystery.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce
I
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack feel to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the ties supporting the rails of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners - two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as "support," that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest - a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.
Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground - a gentle slope topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Midway up the slope between the bridge and fort were the spectators - a single company of infantry in line, at 'parade rest,' the butts of their rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group of four at the center of the bridge, not a man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.
The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good - a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well fitting frock coat. He wore a moustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.
The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgement as simple and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his 'unsteadfast footing,' then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift - all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by - it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each new stroke with impatience and - he knew not why - apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the trust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.
He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. "If I could free my hands," he thought, "I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader's farthest advance."
As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.
II
Peyton Fahrquhar was a well to do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician, he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with that gallant army which had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in wartime. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to perform in the aid of the South, no adventure to perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.
One evening while Fahrquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water. Mrs. Fahrquhar was only too happy to serve him with her own white hands. While she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired eagerly for news from the front.
"The Yanks are repairing the railroads," said the man, "and are getting ready for another advance. They have reached the Owl Creek bridge, put it in order and built a stockade on the north bank. The commandant has issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels, or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order."
"How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?" Fahrquhar asked.
"About thirty miles."
"Is there no force on this side of the creek?"
"Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of the bridge."
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One Page 12