Pass in Review
an inspection of the literature
A book may be as great a thing as a battle.
Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield
"War is sacred; it is instilled by God; it upholds in men all the
great and noble sentiments — honor, self-sacrifice, virtue
and courage. It is War alone that saves men from falling into the
grossest materialism."
by Helmuth Johannes von Moltke
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Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
by Ambrose Bierce; Penguin Books [$12.95] (©1892, 2000)
This collection of stories is a rare forgotten gem of American
literature. The same can be said of its author, a dark, cranky,
brilliant cynic and iconoclast, mentor to the young H.L. Mencken
and role model for Westbrook Pegler, two titans of twentieth
century journalism. Unfortunately for American readers, Bierce's
fiction has been unjustifiably neglected by the Academy –
perhaps because the short story as an art form is moribund in
this postmodern age – and he is now remembered chiefly as a
prolific newspaper writer and author of some witty aphorisms. He
was, also, however, a magnificent short story writer, a true
master of the genre and every inch the equal of such virtuosos as
Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, and William Faulkner.
It is a curious and fascinating fact that a disproportionate
number of American short story writers belong to what might be
termed the toxic school of fiction. Included are
contaminated geniuses like Edgar Allan Poe, a pedophile and
drug-addict; Nathaniel Hawthorne, a sex-obsessed Puritan; Mark
Twain, a churl and a misanthrope; Jack London, a racist savage;
and Ernest Hemingway, a literary necrophiliac. Ambrose Bierce, to
be sure, is comfortably at home among this group, both for his
tremendous talent and his morbid fascination with cruelty,
suffering, and death.
Bierce is certainly a diseased writer. What other type of mind
would devote years of effort to composing a bilious,
gall-and-wormwood work like The Devil's Dictionary, droll
and bitingly brilliant though it undoubtedly is? If the essence
of humor lies in deconstructing current mores, then Bierce
eclipses most humorists by debunking every convention known to
Western man. The Dictionary is a volcanic eruption of
burning ridicule.
Having fought bravely in the Civil War's western theater of
operations – he saw action at the great battles of Shiloh,
Missionary Ridge, and Atlanta – for the entire four years
as an officer and cartographer with the 9th Indiana
Infantry – the only writer of stature courageous enough to
have done so – Bierce, who suffered a serious head wound in
the war's final months, migrated to England in 1872 and wrote
vitriolic articles, his wicked wit earning him the sobriquet
Bitter Bierce. Returning home in 1876, he found his
niche and went to work for William Randolph Hearst newspapers in
California and became a columnist in the San Francisco
Examiner.
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians presents Bierce at his
very best: imaginative, dynamic, grim, sardonic, sadistic, and as
a technical innovator. He was a born storyteller, and these
riveting tales, full of diabolical twists and turns, are
concerned chiefly with how and why men die. Sometimes they die
courageously, sometimes uselessly, sometimes just to prove a
point; often they die horrifically, agonizingly. Bierce's theme
is that although war is hell, men are still eager to fight
because fighting satisfies a deep and powerful need. Bierce saw
firsthand how human beings sacrificed and willingly laid down
their lives for a transcendent cause, whether that cause was
called The Union or Southern Independence or
Emancipation. The tragedy of the war for him was that
both sides were right. And both were wrong, albeit for different
reasons.
The most well-known piece in this collection, An Occurrence
at Owl Creek Bridge, while masterful and structurally
ground-breaking, is not the best; Chickamauga is. The
scene of a fierce battle in northwest Georgia in which 35,000 men
died, the battle is never once mentioned except as the title. The
piece could easily have been called Vicksburg or
Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania or Fredericksburg. Bierce
impressively depicts the destructiveness of the encounter, not
with combat scenes, but solely by describing the aftermath. A
six-year old boy, playing soldier and lost in the woods outside a
farmhouse, happens upon a ghastly company of maimed men crawling
weakly through the fog-shrouded forest. We are not told if they
are Federal or Confederate, and it does not matter. With their
flesh in tatters, their bloody, grotesque faces shot half away,
they delight the child by reminding him of painted clowns he has
seen in a circus. Pretending to be their general, he leaps upon
their backs to ride them as horses and urges them forward with
blows from his wooden sword. Eventually he comes across a smoking
wreck of burning buildings and is shocked to discover his own
home. He spots a female form on the ground, his mother. The story
concludes with a grisly flourish:
"Conspicuous in the light of the conflagration lay
the dead body of a woman — the white face turned upward,
the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing
deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted
blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from
the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a
frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson. The child
moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He
uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries –
something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a
turkey – a startling, soulless, an unholy sound, the
language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute."
Typically, it is not enough for Bierce that the boy should
discover his ruined home and dead mother. Anxious to give the
screw another turn, he describes her mutilation in lurid detail,
forehead gone and frothy brain oozing out. And to pump
up the pathos, Bierce turns the child into a defective, a device
totally superfluous to the plot and necessary only if one finds
pleasure in imperfection and misfortune.
In another potent story, The Coup De Grace, the war's
brutality is shown as being all the more reprehensible when it is
unintentional. Behind the lines, wounded men are dying painfully
and in droves because doctors are overwhelmed and medicines are
in short supply. The title refers to mercy-killing, what Bierce
labels a rite of compassion. But even his compassion is
tinged with cruelty. With exquisite irony he has a soldier shoot
a wounded horse, yet when the soldier presses the revolver to the
temple of his best friend who is writhing in agony with a gaping
belly-wound, the hammer merely clicks; the cylinder is empty. The
soldier has spent his last round on the horse. He manages finally
to dispatch his friend, and in barbarous fashion — hacking
him to death with a sword-thrust through the chest. Such
situations recur constantly throughout these tales.
Another story, Killed at Resaca, deals with a lieutenant
who is thought by his comrades to excessively vaunt his courage
by constantly exposing himself to enemy fire. After he is killed,
the story's narrator finds a love letter indicating that the dead
man may have been responsible for one hundred deaths due to his
cowardice. Only then does it become apparent that the lieutenant
was not swaggering but seeking expiation of guilt through a
suicidal act.
This is the kind of profound insight of which Bierce was capable.
With his uniquely cynical illustrations of man's desire for
martial glory – beautifully symbolized by the six- year old
boy – set beside the gruesome reality of the Civil War, he
is revealed as a shrewd psychologist as well as an artist of the
first rank.
In appraising Bierce, it is worth recalling the dictum of his
contemporary, Henry James: we must not quibble with an
author's choice of subject; what he makes of it is our only
legitimate concern. What Bierce understandably made of the
war and incorporated into all his work thereafter was the idea of
humanity's wickedness and savagery. It is a true enough vision as
far as it goes, but is only half the picture, because it never
takes account of the opposite side of human nature. To put a
Freudian slant on it, Bierce sees all Id and no Superego.
Despite his wizardry with words – his prose at times soars
to poetical heights – Bierce still has limitations. He can
depict friendship but not tenderness, loyalty but not devotion,
sacrifice but not love, because he is incapable of any real
warmth or affection. The impetus behind his work is a purely
negative energy. Yet his jaundiced outlook is precisely what
gives his writing its vitality and force.
We do not know the origin of Bierce's pessimism. Perhaps it was
caused by the horrors of the war, or perhaps it was something
innate that the war exacerbated. In any event, that morbid strain
in his nature apparently found its logical conclusion in his end.
Death came for him just as it did for the lieutenant in
Killed at Resaca — by personal invitation. Here is
what he wrote in his last letter in 1914, at age 71, from Mexico,
where he had gone to find Pancho Villa and observe the
Revolution:
"If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall
and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good
way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling
down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that
is euthanasia!"
Bierce vanished south of the border and was never seen or heard
from again. It was a perfect ending for him, exactly as he
himself would have written it. Come to think of it, he did.
contributed by Christopher S. Baldwin
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