“Successive scores of rifles spat at him [Lieutenant
Herman Brayle of the Union Army] viciously as he came within range, and our
line in the edge of the timber broke out in visible and audible defense. No
longer regardful of themselves or their orders, our fellows sprang to their
feet, and swarming into the open sent broad sheets of bullets against the
blazing crest of the offending works, which poured an answering fire into their
unprotected groups with deadly effect. The artillery on both sides joined the
battle, punctuating the rattle and roar with deep, earth-shaking explosions and
tearing the air with storms of screaming grape, which from the enemy's side
splintered the trees and spattered them with blood, and from ours defiled the
smoke of his arms with banks and clouds of dust from his parapet.”—Ambrose
Bierce, “Killed at Resaca,” in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the
opening battle in Union General William T. Sherman’s campaign for Atlanta: the Battle of Resaca, Ga. The clash between Federal and Confederate forces mirrored
what was happening hundreds of miles north in Virginia, where Ulysses S. Grant
and Robert E. Lee’s game of probing, parry, and continual maneuver was yielding
startling losses. The duel between Sherman and rebel commander Joseph E. Johnston was not quite as
deadly, but at least initially, it seemed just as dispiriting to Federal troops,
with seemingly little appreciable ground gained. Ambrose Bierce, a Union veteran of this Western theater of
operations, is best known to readers for his cynical Devil's Dictionary and his mysterious disappearance in 1914. But he recorded decidedly modern, disillusioned impressions of the madness
of the Atlanta campaign in particular and all wars in general, in this classic war
story.
When the butcher’s bill came due from the 48 hours
of fighting, the Union and Confederate armies had lost about 2,800 men each,
with the latter showing that they could slow, but not stop, their foes’ advance
upon the Rebel industrial center of the Deep South. The fighting was marked by the usual incompetence and folly even on this first day of battle,
when the Federals lost precious time coordinating assaults because a commander was
drunk.
The results of the battle might have been
inconclusive for Sherman and Johnston, but they confirmed Bierce in what critic
Edmund Wilson has called his “obsession with death.” The young man saw all the
war he could ever want at Shiloh, Corinth, Stones River, Chickamauga,
Missionary Ridge, and Franklin. Like the narrator of “Killed at Resaca,” Bierce
was a topographical engineer who knew better than to make insinuations about
any spots that afforded protection.
Not so with the force behind “the best soldier of
our staff”: Lieutenant Herman Brayle, who takes constant chances with his life
in the face of the enemy: “He would sit his horse like an equestrian statue, in
a storm of bullets and grape, in the most exposed places--wherever, in fact,
duty, requiring him to go, permitted him to remain--when, without trouble and
with distinct advantage to his reputation for common sense, he might have been
in such security as is possible on a battlefield in the brief intervals of
personal inaction.”
Inevitably, Brayle is shot by the enemy. In going
through the effects of the bravest man he ever knew, the narrator discovers a
motive for his complete disregard for safety: a letter from the dead man’s
sweetheart, advising him of a “rumor” she had heard that “at some battle in
Virginia…you were seen crouching behind a tree….I could bear to hear of my
soldier lover's death, but not of his cowardice."
In the story’s stunning conclusion, Bierce—a
decorated veteran himself, forced out of the fighting because of a head
wound—vents his frustration with the vast incomprehension of soldiers’
experiences, as well as his pronounced misogyny. His narrator visits Brayle’s
girlfriend, a remarkable beauty who, upon receiving her stained letter to the
dead man, tosses it on the fire because she can’t stand the sight of blood.
Then, trying to overcome this impression of her callousness, she asks how
Brayle died.
The short, bitter reply that ends the story evokes
far more than it can begin to suggest: “Bitten by a snake.” It implies
everything about the faithlessness of women—something in which Bierce believed
in wholeheartedly in his personal life. (His marriage collapsed because he
wrongly believed his wife was guilty of adultery. Then, as if to confirm that
he was not completely crazy about female perfidy, his son Day’s fiancée left
him for another man, leading Day to shoot both before his own suicide.)
The story’s ending brings the reader up short, in
the same manner as Ernest Hemingway’s
famous final line of The Sun Also Rises:
“Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?” In fact, the relation between the two
authors’ war fiction and lives is instructive.
As Roy Morris notes in his biography of Bierce, both
men (Bierce, of course, in the Civil War, and Hemingway, as an ambulance
driver, in WWI) carried wounded soldiers, at enormous risk to their own safety,
back to their own lines, only to see the men die anyway. It only seemed to confirm
their belief in war’s absurdity.
I don’t know why Hemingway praised Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage as "the first
great American war story" while ignoring Bierce’s contribution. Crane had
not witnessed a minute of combat before he wrote his masterpiece; in fact, he was
born six years after the Civil War ended, so he had no firsthand knowledge of
the conflict. In contrast, Bierce’s work was informed by what he saw, and he
made no attempt to make it less ugly for readers.
If Bierce’s work was every bit as realistic as Crane’s,
then how could Hemingway have ignored it? I think it has to do with two
factors: Bierce’s frequent resort to supernatural or fantastic fiction, and his
lack of a consistent, compelling single figure.
Whether it’s called horror, supernatural or
fantastic fiction, this genre deals overwhelmingly with altered interior
states, the breakdown of the self. And few phenomena on earth accelerate such
psychic disorientation and disintegration as much as war.
Thus, the experience of battle might have confirmed Bierce’s disbelief in a rational God, the increasingly thin line between life and death in war led him to write eerie pieces in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, including the much-anthologized “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In contrast, Hemingway might have felt haunted by a world without God, but he desperately tried to believe in a deity—just as tenaciously, in fact, as Lt. Frederic Henry struggles to hold onto reality after his convulsive wound gives him what feels like an out-of-body experience in A Farewell to Arms. He felt greater affinity for Crane’s naturalistic style than for Bierce’s occasional resort to ghosts and vague life-after-life in his stories.
Thus, the experience of battle might have confirmed Bierce’s disbelief in a rational God, the increasingly thin line between life and death in war led him to write eerie pieces in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, including the much-anthologized “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In contrast, Hemingway might have felt haunted by a world without God, but he desperately tried to believe in a deity—just as tenaciously, in fact, as Lt. Frederic Henry struggles to hold onto reality after his convulsive wound gives him what feels like an out-of-body experience in A Farewell to Arms. He felt greater affinity for Crane’s naturalistic style than for Bierce’s occasional resort to ghosts and vague life-after-life in his stories.
Second, with Henry Fleming, Crane found a single youthful
figure whose struggles would parallel the novel and short-story characters who
served as stand-ins for himself: Lt. Henry, Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises, Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Paul Krebs of “Soldier’s Home” and Nick
Adams in a whole slew of stories. Lt. Brayle and other characters in Bierce’s
stories might be easy to visualize, but the author offers little about their thinking.
The greatness of his short fiction rests not on psychological exploration, but
on unsparing, exact descriptions of “the rattle and roar” of war.
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