Understated Horror continued…
Noted Bierce scholar Ernest Jerome Hopkins referred to Bierce’s Civil War fiction as anti-war stories. Whether or not Bierce intended to create a powerful body of anti-war literature, the effect was achieved. These brief, realistic tales, unsparing in their depiction of human suffering, are not tempered by sentiment or reflection. Their power derives, in part, from their understated narration, which stands in contrast to the graphic scenes depicted, a technique, which anticipated Hemingway by more than a generation.
Readers behold a roving landscape of horror. The child in “Chickamauga” observes a trail of hopelessly wounded men creeping through the mud “upon their hands and knees. They used their hands only, dragging their legs. They used their knees only, their arms hanging idle at their sides. They strove to rise to their feet, but fell prone in the attempt.”
In “The Affair at Coulter’s Notch,” Bierce more than suggests Dante’s Inferno, as poor Captain Coulter appears beside the blackened corpses of his wife and child. “A fiend seven times damned sprang out of the smoke to take his place, but paused and gazed up at the mounted officer with an unearthly regard, his teeth flashing between his black lips, his eyes, fierce and expanded, burning like coals beneath his bloody brow.”
The ten stories presented here were initially published, one by one, in the San Francisco Examiner, between 1887 and 1893, and later included in Bierce’s collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. In addition, Bierce’s autobiographical essay, “What I Saw at Shiloh,” is included. Originally published in The Wasp, a San Francisco weekly, in 1881, “What I Saw at Shiloh” is considered by some to be the author’s most important single contribution. The elegiac tone of the essay stands in profound contrast to the stoic voice of the tales, and seems the work of a writer much older than thirty-nine.
Return to Ambrose Bierce Cove
Ambrose Bierce enlisted at eighteen, just days after President Lincoln called for volunteers. He joined in the Ninth Indiana Infantry and served nearly to the end of the war when forced to resign due to the recurring effects of a head wound suffered during the battle at Kenesaw Mountain.
After the fighting at Stones River, in 1863, Bierce was promoted to first lieutenant. Later, he’d serve as a topographical engineer for General Babcock Hazen. Bierce’s specialized knowledge of topography gives the landscape its centrality in these stories. It is a landscape as devastated as the men whose blood it wears, and whose bones it swallows.
Bierce creates a physical world of enormous range. He breaks the landscape into distinct planes, and the field of vision is always relevant to the character that beholds it. We see the sky through the eyes of a bound man on the scaffold, and the earth from the vantage of gravely wounded soldiers flailing through the mud. In The Devil’s Dictionary, Bierce defines realism, as “The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads,” seeming to malign his own method.
The inclusion of twenty-one color plates from paintings by the widely admired Northern California realist Chester Arnold, adds immeasurably to the timeless quality of this edition. Although Arnold’s paintings bear no direct reference to the Civil War, and were painted nearly a century and a half after its last battle, they share with Bierce a profound sense of the hollow devastation that human violence and desecration leave behind. Arnold, an American, grew up in post-World War II Germany. His recent painting of the bombing of Dresden, “A Natural History of Disaster,” stands in well for the destruction of Fredericksburg, Virginia, just as Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War tales apply to all wars.
Bart Schneider August, 2011