“De-Anthologizing Ambrose Bierce: A New Look at `What I Saw of

M a r t i n B u i n i c k i a n d D av i d O w e n s
“De-Anthologizing Ambrose Bierce: A
New Look at ‘What I Saw of Shiloh.’”
It is my opinion that he [Colonel J.P. Jackson] was never a
soldier at all or he would have known better than to make
statements so easily refuted. He is not the only military
imposter in California whose bubble of glory I can prick
when so disposed. I have hitherto abstained because the
bubbles are so gorgeous that I admire them myself.
—Ambrose Bierce in The San Francisco Examiner,
November, 1888
F
or American readers of the late nineteenth century familiar with the
writings of Ambrose “Bitter Bierce,” the acid-penned San Francisco
newspaper columnist whose editorials consistently called out the
pretentious and the powerful, there would have been little surprising in the
notion that the Union veteran could and would pop the “bubble[s] of glory” of
self-proclaimed Civil War heroes. While generals in the 1880s increasingly argued
over their own exploits and shortcomings, rewriting history as the war receded
ever further in the national memory, Ambrose Bierce would “tell it like it was,”
disproving Whitman’s oft-quoted maxim, “The real war will never get in the
books.” As Bierce scholars Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster note drily, “He
obviously never read Bierce.”1 While others “used forms and symbols of the truth,
not necessarily the truth itself, for their own glorification and justification. […]
Bierce’s stories are honest, trustworthy, and highly personal.”2 This description
would clearly have pleased Bierce, and recent scholarship has demonstrated just how
closely many of his stories track with his own experiences as an enlisted volunteer
and later an officer in the Union Army.3 Particularly during the late 1880s and into
the 1890s, Bierce wrote editorial columns, memoirs, and stories much more likely
to discomfit his readers than to reassure them of the glory of the conflict. His works
came to epitomize a kind of realism foreshadowed in John W. De Forest’s battle
scenes in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion and became required inclusions in almost
every twentieth-century anthology of war writing or American short fiction. In
some anthologized form is, indeed, how most readers now first encounter Ambrose
Bierce. However, such was not the case for most of Bierce’s readers in the 1870s and
‘80s.
As Civil War writing became increasing popular during those decades, advances in
printing and transportation, including greatly expanded railway lines, encouraged
prominent publications to pursue a national circulation that technology, sectional
rivalry, and the bitter politics of Reconstruction had previously barred. Such
commercial demands dovetailed with a national political scene that, following the
end of Reconstruction, seemed more eager than ever to “bury the hatchet.”4 For his
part, Bierce employed the freedom of his position at a far-western newspaper to tell
the kind of story that the editors of major eastern journals would not publish. Far
from the scenes of old battles and the pressures of a national market, the author had
the space to write about the war in ways that formed a stinging counter-narrative to
the triumphalism that dominated the Eastern press. Readers whose only experience
of Bierce comes from anthologies, however, would find it difficult to appreciate
the extent to which Bierce originally deployed his war writing as a form of social
commentary. Reading these works in their original publication venues, rather than
as parts of collections, reveals how Bierce’s Civil War writing, both fiction and nonfiction, increasingly came to serve as his critical lens on contemporary events. This
is most striking in the case of his groundbreaking narrative “What I Saw of Shiloh.”
A close examination of the text, published first in 1881 and then later in 1898,
reveals how the author in fact revised it to offer a strong critique of the jingoism
surrounding the Spanish-American War. The revision—largely unexamined until
now—published in the San Francisco Examiner, demonstrates how Bierce’s war
writing is always as much about the present moment as it is about the Civil War.5
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That Bierce would find presenting the war in a manner that ran against the
grain irresistible should come as no surprise. It is perfectly consistent with the
way he wrote about most everything. Anywhere Bierce saw hypocrisy, inflated
egos, exaggeration, outright falsehoods, or fraud, be it in politics, religion, or
government, he felt compelled to comment. Bierce’s regular editorial skewering of
politicians, businessmen, journalists, churchmen, writers, and public figures of all
stripes had rocketed him to fame on the West Coast by the very early 1870s and was
even gaining him notice in the Eastern publishing establishment. In a column in
late 1870, for example, Bierce complained with obvious delight about the increasing
number of his columns that other papers were pirating from “the Atlantic side and
European press” and who were, in fact, guilty of “transferring them to their own
columns without credit”.6
Throughout his career as an editorial writer, however, Bierce seemed to find
commenting on military subjects particularly irresistible. Even before his
outpouring of Civil War fiction writing that began in 1883, Bierce had already
commented in print on military and Civil War topics. One of his very earliest war
pieces is a “Prattle” column that appeared in December, 1878, in The Argonaut, a
widely-read San Francisco literary weekly that Bierce edited and that contained his
weekly editorial columns along with many of his poems and sketches as well. In
it, Bierce describes the decidedly unglamorous summary executions of three unheroic Union soldiers. Two were hanged for a particularly brutal murder, the third,
shot by firing squad for desertion. Bierce manages to find macabre humor in both
executions. Immediately after one of the murderers exclaims that he was “going
home to Jesus” a nearby train “uttered a loud and unmistakably derisive Hoot—
hoot!” to gales of laughter from the spectators.7 Both the subject matter—soldiers
acting in ways that ran directly counter to the popular portrayals of the day—and
the manner of presentation, with its comic denouement, demonstrate how even in
his early work Bierce was already crafting a unique approach to the genre of war
writing.
Bierce’s clear-eyed and carefully crafted narratives set him apart from the
numerous other veterans who sought to “tell it like it was.” Indeed, he was far
from the only former soldier who proclaimed publicly that his writings would
burst bubbles of ill-deserved Civil War glory. Ulysses S. Grant addressed the issue
indirectly in the preface to his 1885 memoirs, saying only, “In preparing these
volumes for the public, I have entered upon the task with the sincere desire to avoid
doing injustice to any one, whether on the National or Confederate side, other
than the unavoidable injustice of not making mention often where special mention
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is due. There must be many errors of omission in this work, because the subject
is too large to be treated of in two volumes in such way as to do justice to all the
officers and men engaged.”8 His widow was a bit more direct. In an interview in
1890, Mrs. Grant explained, “There was nothing that General Grant liked more
than simplicity. There was nothing he disliked more than exaggeration. . . . His
great aim in all his writing was to tell the truth, to picture things just as they took
place.”9 And, indeed, a hallmark of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant is
their straightforward, spare, readable prose. Although Bierce was not especially
enamored of Grant, they both appear to have shared similar feelings about
exaggeration and embellishment in re-tellings of the war.
In Grant’s case there was, of course, no need of building one’s reputation as a
field commander. Grant’s success at winning the war and his subsequent election
to the presidency bear that out. Thus Grant was not in the position of lower-level
generals, some on the losing side, who were immersed in defending or assailing the
tactical decisions made in a particular battle or campaign. And, General Grant
was writing from the perspective of the highest levels of command; his view was
far, far removed from that of the individual, common soldier. Despite the fact that
Grant appears uninterested in building or defending his own reputation, he had to
be sensitive to the pressures of the publishing marketplace. When Grant wrote his
memoirs, he was dying of cancer and facing bankruptcy. The memoirs were a means
to provide some degree of financial security to his family, and if they did not sell
well, that security would be absent.
One attempt to challenge glorified accounts of the work of the ordinary soldier
occurred in 1887 when Frank Wilkeson of New York published a book-length
memoir entitled Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac. In
his preface, Wilkeson makes clear that his project is to tell a truthful account of
the war as only an enlisted soldier can do. Wilkeson claims that the war’s history
has thus far been the work of commanding generals and this “epauletted history
has been largely inspired by vanity or jealousy, saving and excepting forever the
immortal record, Grant’s dying gift to his countrymen, which is as just as it is
modest. Most of the war history has been written to repair damaged or wholly
ruined military reputations. It has been made additionally untrustworthy by the
jealousy which seeks to belittle the work of others, or to falsify or obscure it, in
order to render more conspicuous the achievements of the historians”.10 Wilkeson
further states that only enlisted soldiers can truthfully and rightfully “supplement
the wonderful contribution made by Grant” with his autobiography. Indeed,
Wilkeson’s memoir does not paint a romanticized picture: when he enlists in 1863,
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bounty jumpers abound in the Union ranks as do summary executions and harsh
corporal punishment; during battles, pickets are frequently posted to the rear of
Union lines to detain or kill those deserting the front; looting the dead is standard
practice as is stealing fellow soldiers supplies; senior officers are portrayed as often
wastefully and foolishly sacrificing enlisted soldiers. Clearly Wilkeson fancies
himself a truth teller, and in this regard, he shares a fundamental affinity with
Bierce. One even finds individual scenes or vignettes in Recollections of a Private
Soldier that appear in Bierce’s fiction as well. But there are significant differences.
Bierce fought for virtually the entire war, first as an enlisted volunteer, then as an
officer. Wilkeson was in the Army for just over a year: from very late 1863 until early
1865. Although he was commissioned as an artillery lieutenant late in his service,
he never performed an officer’s duties and resigned his commission before actually
commanding any troops.
Although all three writers declare their fidelity to telling the truth about the
war, some distinctions among them need highlighting. Bierce had a far wider
scope of experience and vision of the war than Wilkeson, and he had a far different
perspective than Grant. Bierce was promoted up through the enlisted ranks, an
experience that neither Grant nor Wilkeson can match. Bierce’s service as a Union
officer included duty on generals’ staffs; thus, his view of things by no means
had the scope of Grant’s, yet it was not limited to that of his regiment, brigade,
or even his division. Wilkeson saw fierce combat for seven weeks in 1864 from
the Wilderness through Petersburg, certainly an impressive record, but one
must remember that Bierce survived the entire war to take part in three of its ten
costliest battles: Shiloh, Stone’s River, and Chickamauga. As a result, Bierce’s war
writing displays a depth and astuteness, militarily, psychologically, and historically
that Wilkeson lacks. Bierce can also speak with an authentic empathy for both
the enlisted soldier as well as the lower ranking officer in a way that Grant and
Wilkeson simply cannot. Furthermore, Wilkeson’s desire to “supplement” Grant’s
story reveals that the two authors are engaged in substantially the same project.
That is to say, both offer a more or less documentary account of the war as seen from
the author’s point of view: Grant’s at the top levels of the Army, Wilkeson’s from
the bottom. However, neither writer seems particularly concerned with conveying
the complex psychological and emotional dimensions of combat.
And, of course, there is the issue of genre. Wilkeson and Grant use the
medium of the memoir for their truth-telling, whereas Bierce, whose business
as a newspaperman was the written word, chose not only memoir, but editorial
comment, poetry, and short fiction as well. Therein lies another important
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distinction. Commencing with “What I Saw of Shiloh,” Bierce began weaving
literary devices into memoir, which is a feature largely absent in Grant and
Wilkeson’s writings. Thus the title “What I Saw of Shiloh” sounds very journalistic
and much in line with what veterans like Grant and Wilkeson were publishing, but
it was the beginning of a form of war literature unique to Ambrose Bierce. Rather
than one more soldier’s perspective on a famous battle, Bierce would do his best to
drag his readers directly into the fray.
“What I Saw of Shiloh” was Bierce’s first significant piece of Civil War writing,
and it is widely considered one of his best. The small but influential western paper
The Wasp serialized the memoir in two installments during Christmas week of 1881.
As memoirs go, the piece is relatively short, but it was Bierce’s longest. Significant
about “What I Saw of Shiloh” was its publication just before what was to be a
nationwide surge of non-fiction writing about the war that began in the mid-1880s.
It predated Grant’s “The Battle of Shiloh” in Century Magazine by just over three
years, for example.
“What I Saw of Shiloh” does not focus on grand strategy and sweeping descriptions
of maneuvering armies; instead, it gives the personal experiences and observations
of Sergeant Bierce as the 9th Indiana Infantry, part of Buell’s army, came to Grant’s
rescue. The title carefully delineates exactly what readers should expect: not an
overall treatise on the battle or the war, not a hagiographic remembrance of daring
deeds or an indictment of lost opportunities, but simply one man’s limited view
of events. This was decidedly unlike most of the memoirs, personal narratives,
and regimental histories that would shortly proliferate in the popular press. To
begin with, the author did not shy away from the consequences of warfare. Bierce’s
descriptions of battlefield grotesques are unsparing and occasionally shocking
even now. Perhaps the most well known and most frequently quoted occurs when
Bierce’s men find a badly wounded Union sergeant among the dead:
He lay face upward, taking in his breath in convulsive, rattling snorts,
and blowing it out in sputters of froth which crawled creamily down his
cheeks, piling itself alongside his neck and ears. A bullet had clipped a
groove in his skull, above the temple; from this the brain protruded in
bosses, dropping off in flakes and strings. I had not previously known
one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain.
One of my men, whom I knew for a womanish fellow, asked if he should
put his bayonet through him. Inexpressibly shocked by the cold-blooded
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proposal, I told him I thought not, it was unusual and too many were
looking.11
The passage is often cited as an example of Bierce’s realistic representation of
war; however, this is not all that sets it apart from other graphic accounts. Bierce
demonstrates his facility with literary technique, as in the alliterative personification
“crawled creamily,” and his portrayal of character. The “womanish fellow” surprises
both Bierce and the reader with his “cold-blooded proposal” of putting the injured
soldier out of his misery, yet the offer itself shows how the reality of war changes
men. Although Bierce describes himself as “inexpressibly shocked,” he refuses
to take action not because he disagrees with the suggestion, but only because of
its “unusual” and public nature. While other authors (including Walt Whitman
in his writings on the hospitals) might depict graphic injuries, this kind of hard
battlefield decision is left untold in nearly all Civil War writings.
For all of his literary flourish and complex portrayals, however, at the beginning
of “What I Saw of Shiloh” Bierce explicitly defines himself as non-literary, and,
conversely, he imagines a readership that may be literary but not military: the work
is “a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier”
(11). The story is meant to bridge the gap between the experienced veteran and the
inexperienced public. Civil War writing as it appeared in the 1870s tends to appear
in regimental histories and occasional first-person accounts meant to capture
memories of the war before they are lost to history. As one writer of a regimental
history lamented in 1873, “So many years have elapsed since the war closed, that
the remembrance of many facts and incidents that should have been preserved, has
faded away.”12 Similarly, Whitman’s work entitled Memoranda of the War (1875/76)
offers an example of this memorializing function. As Timothy Sweet notes of the
text, “etymologically a memorandum is something that ought to be remembered (in
the future); it is not so much a description as a prescriptive agenda for memory.”13
Unlike these works, “What I Saw of Shiloh” offers a personal history of combat
without dwelling on this historical function; it is, Bierce writes, “a simple story of a
battle” (11). As such, it resists easy placement in the growing tide of reminiscences
that would crest in the 1880s.
As these writings proliferated, Bierce would at times become more satirical, but
here, the author offers another way of telling war stories. As he writes later in the
text, his story is told literally and solely from his point of view: “In subordination of
the design of this narrative, as defined by its title, the incidents related necessarily
group themselves about my own personality as a center; and, as this center, during
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the few terrible hours of the engagement, maintained a variably constant relation
to the open field already mentioned, it is important that the reader should bear
in mind the topographical and tactical features of the local situation” (20). In
place of historical perspective, Bierce offers a geographic one. As David Owens has
demonstrated, topography is a critical component of Bierce’s Civil War writing,
and here he employs it not only to delineate the field of his vision, but to define
the project itself: to bring his readers closer to the battle as he experienced it that
day—not to remember it, but, in a sense, to relive it “with [his] own personality at
the center.”14
For Bierce, war writing is a matter of both maps and metaphors. Despite Bierce’s
opening disclaimers regarding his identity as a writer, the text combines journalistic
realism—”A few of [the men in camp] limped unsoldierly in deference to blistered
feet”—with literary convention, as in the personification of the regimental flag
in the description of the moments before the battle: “Presently the flag hanging
limp and lifeless at headquarters was seen to lift itself spiritedly from the staff. At
the same instant was heard a dull, distant sound like the heavy breathing of some
great animal below the horizon. The flag had lifted its head to listen” (11). Bierce
employs the flapping banner throughout the first section of his story to indicate
the change that swept over the camp. This style sets him apart both from other
veterans reporting their experiences, whether the common soldier or the general,
and from those writers whom he would later take to task for their literary excesses.
Bierce turns to figurative language again and again in an attempt to capture the
realities on the ground, even as he at times expresses his own misgivings about the
limits of literary language: “Occasionally, against the glare behind the trees, could
be seen black figures, singularly distinct but apparently no longer than a thumb.
They seemed to me ludicrously like the figures of demons in old allegorical prints
of hell” (14). Bierce describes his own vision of the battlefield and the “ludicrous”
connection that he makes to a more literary representation of what he sees, and
then quickly moves back to the reality that undermines any attempt at aesthetic
distance: “To destroy these and all of their belongings the enemy needed but
another hour of daylight” (14). As later stories make abundantly clear, classical
images of battle—proud soldiers on horseback, daring charges and hand-to-hand
combat with the foe—rarely remain picturesque for long in the field.
As a soldier as well as a writer, Bierce shows little patience with notions of war
or heroism that do not comport with battlefield realities. This is made abundantly
clear in “What I Saw of Shiloh”: “I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear
of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence,
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a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was
destroyed, as it very well deserved” (21). Elsewhere in the text he writes, “Lead had
scored its old-time victory over steel; the heroic had broken its great heart against
the commonplace. There are those who say that it is sometimes otherwise” (23). If
Bierce is unwilling to align himself with those who celebrate the heroic, it may be
because he never loses sight of the costs of such heroism, a cost that ultimately defies
description. While Bierce’s writing is frequently discussed in terms of its graphic
realism, even he appears at a loss for words as he surveys the carnage, and, following
a description of bodies ranged below his position, the dismal sight of the casualties
finally overwhelms the author’s attempts to represent them at all: “Faugh! I cannot
catalogue the charms of these gallant gentlemen who had got what they enlisted
for” (22). In future works, Bierce offers a stinging critique of unrealistic portrayals
of gallantry, but, as the passage above suggests, the author is not only suspicious of
misguided bravery, but at times even of an author’s ability to portray it at all.
As the years passed and the enthusiasm for Civil War memoirs crested and
subsided, Bierce continued to write about the conflict, most frequently in short
fiction and editorial columns. In 1898, however, the author returned to “What I
Saw of Shiloh” and revised it for inclusion in the San Francisco Examiner. While
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largely the same, Bierce added three sections that transform the story into the
kind of topical commentary on war writing one sees in much of his later work.
An unsigned editor’s note remarks briefly, “This account of the battle of Shiloh
was published several years ago in a local weekly. It has been revised and partly
rewritten by Mr. Bierce. ‘The Examiner’ presents it at this time because of its vivid
description of battle.”15 As if to highlight the “vivid” quality of the piece, there is
a large illustration encompassing the entire top third of the page and depicting
soldiers engaged in combat.
In a typical motif, an officer heroically rallies his men for a charge with saber drawn
and pointed towards the advancing enemy. In what seems a deliberate counterpoint
to this note and the emphasis on description rather than meaning, however, Bierce
also added a subtitle, labeling the work “A Tragic Story of Battle.” The description
of the story as “tragic” is a significant addition of editorial commentary; what
was previously just a narrative account of events as Bierce saw them is now cast as
tragedy. As Bierce narrates events, it is difficult to identify anything tragic in the
memoir; despite its graphic nature, the author repeatedly affirms that combatants
get no less than they signed up for, the pain and suffering inevitable results of battle
itself. “A Tragic Story of Battle,” then, is not a description of the narrative so much
as it is a judgment that battle itself is tragic, a cautionary note not much in keeping
with the jingoistic tenor of Hearst’s paper.
The distinction between reading the story as a “vivid” account of battle versus
a “tragic story” would not have been an idle one for Bierce “at this time,” as the
Examiner was breathlessly reporting developments in the Spanish-American War.
Bierce was alert to the newspapers’ drive toward war with Spain as early as 1893.
In a “Prattle” column from March of the year, Bierce wrote, “War—horrid war!-between the United States and Spain has already broken out like a red rash in the
newspapers, whose managing commodores are shivering their timbers and blasting
their tarry toplights with a truly pelagic volubility and no little vraisemblance. [...]
[A] frigate in full sail is not more gallant than an editor in full uniform or a cabbage
rose in full bloom.”16 While there is no record of how Hearst may have responded to
this column, there is no denying that he and his newspaper headed up the editorial
armada in whipping up enthusiasm for a conflict with Spain. Five years later, on the
day before Bierce’s revision of “Shiloh” appeared in the Examiner, the front page of
the paper contained these banner headlines: “THIS PAPER CONTAINS THE
FIRST AUTHENTIC PICTURES OF DEWEY’S BATTLE AT MANILA,”
and “AGUINALDO THRASHING THE COWARDLY FOE.”
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As with the Bierce memoir, these blaring headlines were accompanied by large
and dynamic illustrations, this time of one of Admiral Dewey’s ships, three flags
proudly flying, engaging the Spanish fleet. Attentive to developments of the war,
beyond the level of triumphs and setbacks heralded on the front page, for three
full months in 1898, Bierce changed the title of “Prattle,” his Sunday column in the
Examiner to “War Topics.” He then penned columns under a variety of titles such
as “A Freak War,” “Woman in this War,” and “Echoes of the War” for another three
months before resuming “Prattle.” In revising and re-titling “What I Saw of Shiloh,”
then, Bierce offers something more than simply one more graphic portrayal of war:
he once again appears determined to remind readers of the contradictions and
costs of battle and to critique saber-rattling from non-combatants, a practice his
own paper was engaging in enthusiastically.17
One of Bierce’s most frequent targets for criticism in this regard was the thencommon trope of the virtuous woman on the home-front who sends her man into
battle seeking battlefield glory, to “come back with his shield—or on it.”18 Bierce
thought this a particularly noxious strain of fiction, one that had proliferated on
both sides early in the Civil War. In The Imagined Civil War, Alice Fahs highlights
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war fiction and verse that “imagined women as the vehicle through which men’s
patriotism could be encouraged, expressed, and valorized.”19 A very common
example was the young heroine who spurned or shamed a suitor because of his
reluctance or refusal to volunteer for service. A slight variation on the motif was
the wife, fiancée, or sweetheart who proclaims her preference for her man’s death to
his cowardice. A poem in the Richmond Daily Dispatch in July of 1861, for example,
featured a female speaker who tells her husband:
Rather would I view thee lying
On the last red field of life,
‘Mid their country’s heroes dying,
Than to be a dastards’ wife!20
Bierce himself had employed this trope, if only to criticize it, in his earlier Civil
War fiction, and now, in his revision of “What I Saw of Shiloh,” he adds a striking
episode that is noticeably absent from his earlier version. The author recalls a
woman who happened to be crossing the Tennessee River in a steamboat:
She was a fine creature, this woman; somebody’s wife, though. Her
mission, as she understood it, was to inspire the failing heart with courage;
and when she selected mine I felt less flattered than astonished at her
penetration. How did she learn? She stood on the upper deck with the
red blaze of battle bathing her beautiful face, the twinkle of a thousand
muskets mirrored in her eyes; and, displaying a small ivory-handled pistol,
she told me, in a sentence punctuated by the thunder of great guns, that
if it came to the worst she would do her duty like a man! I am proud to
remember that I took off my hat to this little fool. (7)
In his description of this “fine creature,” it is as if Bierce has transported to the
Shiloh battlefield the beautiful and vain Marian Mendenhall, the woman who
goads her lover to bravery and an early grave, from his much earlier short story
“Killed at Resaca” (1887). In the earlier work, Ms. Mendenhall writes to inform her
paramour that she has received reports of his taking cover behind a tree, noting,
“I could bear to hear of my soldier lover’s death, but not of his cowardice.”21 The
unnamed woman on the boat, like Bierce’s Ms. Mendenhall, seems aware of a failing
in courage and seeks to correct it. Critic Napier Wilt, noting the impossibility of
verifying this event at Shiloh, which is mentioned only in this revised account,
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asserts that this episode and others like it “are a part of Bierce’s own memory of
the battle, or are literary devices used to heighten the effect of the story. I prefer
to believe the latter.”22 These alternatives are not mutually exclusive, of course, and
Bierce repeatedly used “literary devices” to render his own experiences more vividly.
At the same time, the addition of this episode to his narrative nearly twenty years
after he first wrote it suggests how Bierce could employ his Civil War writing as
critique. The Spanish-American War brought the subject of misplaced and mistaken
courage in response to female encouragement back to him forcefully: two weeks
before the re-publication of “What I Saw of Shiloh” in his “War Topics” column,
Bierce wrote, “It cheers to note the lively female of our species coming gallantly
to the front and throwing herself into the imminent deadly breach for God and
country! She means well, the good girl, and has never a doubt of the importance
and efficacy of her services to the cause.”23 Bierce’s tone here is not much different
from that in his description of “the little fool” on the Union gunship.
His sardonic appraisal of such patriotism in his “War Topics” column is jarringly
juxtaposed on the very same page of the Examiner alongside two stories regarding
patriotic school teachers. The second, “America’s Battle Cry,” would likely have
inspired Bierce’s ire:
Miss—, well, never mind her name. She is a little American, filled to
overflowing with patriotism. Perhaps some one dear to her went away in
the gallant First. Perhaps not. Her heart was with our boys in blue just the
same. […] She sounded again the slogan of days of old, of battle cries going
down to death, and then of a sudden she stopped and asked the class:
“Has America got a battle cry?”
For a moment silence reigned in that classroom. […] Then one
tall youth in the corner of the room arose in his seat. He knew. All eyes
were turned upon him.
“Well, Johnny?” said the teacher, inquiringly.
“Remember the Maine; to hell with Spain!” came the answer
with a roar.
The scene that followed baffles description. Every boy and girl
was on his or her feet in an instant and a chorus of young voices swelled
the sentiment.
And the teacher joined the chorus.24
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The suggestion that the teacher “perhaps” has a “dear one” in the fight clearly
links this short anecdote to the trope Fahs describes. Passages like this strongly
suggest that Bierce’s late addition in his “Shiloh” revision of an enthusiastically
patriotic woman passing by on a steamboat had much less to do with a recovered
memory or an attempt to more accurately describe his experience than it did with
his contempt for a zeal for war on the part of those who may never have experienced
it first-hand. Bierce knew that Johnny could indeed be sent into battle with the
teacher’s cries ringing in his ears.
The addition transforms the very nature of the text, making it something more
than the account he published many years before; it is topical as well literary. The
thinly veiled criticism is notably different from the kind of writing meant to
immerse the reader in the author’s experience that marks the original. At the same
time, Bierce made other changes to the narrative that render it a text of its day
rather than an historical account. In a final section added at the conclusion of the
1898 revision, Bierce engages in a form of nostalgia that marks Civil War writing
at the end of the nineteenth century: “O days when all the world was beautiful
and strange […] will your fine, far memories ever cease to lay contrasting pictures
athwart the harsher features of this later world, accentuating the ugliness of the
longer and tamer life? Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period
have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes?—that I recall with difficulty the
danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious
and picturesque?” (24, 25) Here the story is abruptly cast as a work of memory, a
reminiscence of a time long past. More surprisingly, Bierce writes that memories of
“danger and death and horrors” are difficult to recapture, yet these are exactly what
fill the preceding pages. The work, then, appears to be a reminder of the cruelties
of a time that the aging Bierce himself now admits that he finds harder to recall.
In the final passage, Bierce appears to deny the grim content of the text entirely,
noting, “Ah, Youth, there is no such wizard as thou! Give me but one touch of
thine artist hand upon the dull canvas of the Present; gild for but one moment
the drear and somber scenes of to-day, and I will willingly surrender another life
than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh” (25). When one considers
the description of dying men that have always been viewed as part of what makes
“What I Saw of Shiloh” distinct, it is difficult to account for Bierce’s longing for
the “artist hand” of “Youth” to set to work on his present life and guild it the way
memory was then gilding his Civil War days. In his own art, Bierce had worked
to strip away the veneer of Civil War memory, reminding his readers forcefully of
the folly and tragic cost that accompanied the conflict. This addition to “Shiloh,”
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with its longing for an escape from the “dull canvas of the Present,” is a striking
departure from much of his earlier work.
While it would be years before the writer disappeared in Mexico, it is hard to
read this jarring conclusion of the “Shiloh” revision without thinking of Bierce’s
end. When Bierce disappeared in Mexico sometime in late 1913 or early 1914, his
ostensible purpose in making the trip was to report on the cross-border incursions
and rebellion by Pancho Villa. Bierce had written a friend, “This fighting in Mexico
interests me. I want to go down there and see if those Mexicans can shoot straight.”
Later, in another letter, he wrote, “I’m on my way to Mexico, because I like the
game. I like the fighting; I want to see it.”25 While both the original and the revision
of “Shiloh” seem to explicitly condemn war as being any kind of “a game,” Bierce’s
nostalgic coda seems more of a piece with these later declarations from the aging
veteran.
Finally, then, this celebration of youth that ends the revised text points
out exactly what “What I Saw of Shiloh” is not, or certainly was not in its first
appearance in 1881. While the much older Bierce finally drapes his revised text not
in patriotism but in longing for a more “gilded” life, what defines his first work
of Civil War writing is how it again and again denies any pretense that war is
picturesque. As a writer, Bierce employs literary conventions to convey the story
of his experience at Shiloh, but, as a soldier, he repeatedly demonstrates to the
reader that literary representations of combat are finally just that, representations,
and the reality is often much different, and much worse, than the portraits other
writers were beginning to paint of the conflict. His revision moves beyond a kind
of literary commentary and attempts to martial his account of his experience as a
corrective to the hawkish turn taken by his paper during the Spanish-American
War; however, in the face of age and history, with the war and its combatants
increasingly receding into the past, the narrative, like much of Bierce’s war writing,
would come to serve readers primarily as a lens on the war itself rather than on the
period of the writing’s publication.
Such a transformation in part accounts for the common anthologizing of
Bierce’s work. Separated from the upheavals of the late nineteenth century, his war
literature becomes just one more graphic retelling of the Civil War. The author
himself encourages such a view in his first collection of his work, Tales of Soldiers
and Civilians (1892). By physically separating the contents of the collection into
two sections, the first—and much larger—centered around combat, and the other
a sparse gathering of his suspense fiction, Bierce emphasizes a dichotomy between
writing that explicitly addresses military conflict and writing that speaks to other
An International Journal of the Humanities
issues. This bifurcation is misleading, of course, and it is possible that in attempting
to reach an audience beyond his newspaper columns, the author sought to package
his work in a recognizable—and still popular—format. That later editors have
followed his lead is unsurprising, but it has limited the available readings of Bierce’s
work. Like much war writing, Bierce’s stories are about much more than war itself;
they are not simply retrospective accounts, but thoughtful critiques of popular
attitudes and a media-driven view of warfare with its political implications. Thus, a
close reading of Bierce’s writing in its original context is a reminder that war stories
do more than give a glimpse into the horrors of combat; they offer an opportunity
to reflect upon the varied social forces and attitudes that can lead a nation into
conflict in the first place.
Notes
1. Duncan, Russell and David J. Klooster, eds. Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete
Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce. Cambridge: U of Mass Press, 2002. 24
2. Duncan and Klooster, 23-24.
3. Even while acknowledging how Bierce’s military service informs his writing, critics are beginning
to recognize that Bierce’s work does more than rehearse his experiences. For example, in his recent
analysis of Bierce’s story “Chickamauga” (1889), James Baltrum argues that the story employs the
language of evolutionary theory to critique the growing prominence of social Darwinism. Baltrum,
James “Bierce aboard the Beagle: Darwinian Discourse and ‘Chickamauga’.” Explicator 67.3 (2009):
227-231. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 19 Nov. 2009.
4. The movement toward reconciliation gained considerable steam with the centennial of the
Declaration of Independence in 1876. For example, Sidney Lanier, a Confederate veteran and
prominent Southern poet, wrote and delivered poems for the occasion in Philadelphia (Blight 382).
While violence against African-Americans in the South continued, the federal government showed
an increasing reluctance to engage. As David Blight writes, “The sections needed one another,
almost as polar opposites that made the center hold and kept both an industrial economy humming
and a New South on the course of revival” (139). Bierce showed little interest in contributing to the
national narrative that was emerging from this drive towards reconciliation.
5. See, for example, David Owens’ The Devil’s Topographer (Knoxville, TN: U of Tennessee Press,
2006). Owens argues that Bierce’s Civil War fiction closely parallels Bierce’s own service, describing
how the settings for his stories parallel locales that the soldier saw first hand.
6. Ambrose Bierce, “Town Crier,” San Francisco News Letter, 1 Oct 1870, 9.
7. Quoted in Duncan and Klooster, 64.
8. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant: Volume I (New York: The Century Company,
1885), 8.
9. “The Unwritten Chapter,” The San Francisco Examiner, 1 June 1890, 12.
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10. Frank Wikleson, Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac. (New York:G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1887), v.
11. Ambrose Bierce, “What I Saw of Shiloh.” A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography. Ed. S.T.
Joshi and David E. Schultz. Knoxville: U of Tennessee Press, 1998, 19. Unless otherwise noted,
parenthetical citations are from this version of “What I Saw of Shiloh.”
12. Malcolm McGregor Dana. The Norwich memorial; the annals of Norwich, New London county,
Connecticut, in the great rebellion of 1861-1865, (Norwich, CT: J.J. Jewett, 1873), iii-iv, Making
of America, University of Michigan, 6 May 2007, <http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ac11756.0001.001>.
13. Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 47.
14. Bierce quoted by David M. Owens, The Devil’s Topographer: Ambrose Bierce and the
American War Story (Knoxville: U of Tennessee Press, 2006), 6.
15. Editor’s note preceding “What I Saw of Shiloh,” The San Francisco Examiner. 19 and 26 June
1898: magazine section 7, magazine section 11.
16. Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” The San Francisco Examiner, 26 March 1893, 6.
17. While William Randolph Hearst has received a great deal of criticism for jingoistic journalism
during the conflict, in publishing Bierce’s work he at least provided an outlet for a strong and
consistent counter-voice.
18. Plutarch’s sentiment, if not stated explicitly, was often invoked implicitly in a great deal of war
writing.
19. Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South (Chapel Hill: U
of North Carolina Press, 2001), 128.
Fahs emphasizes that there were other prominent representations of women in war
fiction of the period, including women who agonize over seeing their loved ones going
off to battle (128). In Bierce’s work, however, women often appear either as the undue
influence on the male soldier or as the victim of war’s violence, as in “The Affair at
Coulter’s Notch,” in which a Northern artilleryman must fire on his own home in an
attempt to target a Confederate artillery battery in the yard.
20. Quoted in Fahs, 128.
21. Ambrose Bierce, “Killed at Resaca,” The San Francisco Examiner. 5 June 1887, 11.
22. Napier Wilt, “Ambrose Bierce and the Civil War,” American Literature 1 (1929), 285.
23. Ambrose Bierce, “War Topics,” The San Francisco Examiner. 5 June 1898, 18.
24. “America’s Battle Cry,” The San Francisco Examiner, 5 June 1898, 18.
25. Quoted in Paul Fatout, Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Lexicographer (U of Oklahoma Press,
1951), 315.
An International Journal of the Humanities
Martin T. Buinicki is the Walter G. Friedrich Professor of American Literature at
Valparaiso University and author of Negotiating Copyright: Authorship and the Discourse of
Literary Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Routledge, 2006). His book Walt
Whitman’s Reconstruction is forthcoming in the Iowa Whitman Series.
David M. Owens is an Associate Professor of English and Assistant Provost for Faculty
Affairs at Valparaiso University. He is the author of The Devil’s Topographer: Ambrose
Bierce and the American War Story (University of Tennessee Press, 2006). He and Martin
Buinicki are conducting a major research project on Civil War fiction in the post-war
American periodical press.
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