Happy Birthday, "Bitter Bierce"

Happy Birthday, "Bitter Bierce"

Till recently, I always thought of Ambrose Bierce as “that weird horror writer who disappeared into the woods without a trace.”

Actually, it wasn’t the woods. It was Mexico. In 1913, Bierce wanted an eyewitness view of the Mexican revolution, so he took off with the rebel troops. He was never seen or heard from again.

He was more than just a horror writer, but stories like “The Damned Thing” (1898) show he was one of the best. In “The Damned Thing,” a hunter is savagely killed and mutilated by an invisible animal. Another goodie is “A Diagnosis of Death” (1909), in which a skeptic is warned of his oncoming death by his doctor’s ghost.

Bierce was also a satirist. His The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), originally called The Cynic’s Word Book, contained definitions that crossed in common usage. (E.g., he defines cynic as “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”) His fierce literary criticism (Oscar Wilde hated him) and scathing view of life led people to call him “Bitter Bierce.”

“War,” he once said, “is God's way of teaching Americans geography.”

I was impressed by all the Civil War stories he wrote. The most famous was “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890), which depicts a Confederate supporter who is about to be hanged at the bridge he tried to sabotage.

“Chickamauga” (1891), his most tragic war story, is from the point of view of a six-year-old boy, a Southern planter’s son. It starts out innocently enough, with the boy crudely making a wooden sword (that even his ex-soldier father doesn’t recognize!). He leaves the plantation and marches off to play “war games.”

In the woods, the boy gets lost, and falls asleep on the ground from sheer exhaustion. When he wakes up, he thinks he sees animals creeping through the woods. Actually, they’re mangled Union soldiers (the Battle of Chickamauga was one of the worst Union defeats in the Civil War), crawling away on hands and knees. Their pale, blood-streaked faces amuse the naïve boy, who’s reminded of circus clowns.

In one grisly part, the boy attempts to “play horsey” on one soldier’s back:

The man sank upon his breast, recovered, flung the small boy fiercely to the ground as an unbroken colt might have done, then turned upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw--from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry. The man rose to his knees, the child to his feet. The man shook his fist at the child; the child, terrified at last, ran to a tree near by. . . .

In the distance, the sky is red. Surrounded by the wounded, crawling mob, the boy marches ahead, playing that he is their new leader (even turning to make sure they’re all following!).

Ahead, the fire rages at a huge plantation. Unaware of what’s really happening, he keeps up the game, dancing in imitation of the flames, and looking for sticks to throw into the fire. That’s where his wooden sword comes in handy.

Then he realizes how familiar the outbuildings look.

“There . . .” Bierce writes, “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 work of a shell.”

It’s the boy’s own home that’s on fire; and the dead woman, his mother.

That is Bierce, at his most bitter.