Belligerent Muse by Cushman Stephen

Author:Cushman, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2014-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four: Ambrose Bierce, Chickamauga, and Ways to Write History

Valor, n. A soldierly compound of vanity, duty and the gambler’s hope.

“Why have you halted?” roared the commander of a division at Chickamauga, who had ordered a charge; “move forward, sir, at once.”

“General,” said the commander of the delinquent brigade, “I am persuaded that any further display of valor by my troops will bring them into collision with the enemy.”

—The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

Writing on August 17, 1892, to Blanche Partington, one of his many disciples, from St. Helena, California, the Napa Valley town where he sought relief from chronic asthma and where one can stay where he did, now the Ambrose Bierce House Bed and Breakfast, a structure built on Main Street in 1872, Bierce, at the age of fifty, responded to the young woman’s request for a list of books to read with, among others, this sentence: “Read Longinus, Herbert Spencer on Style, Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’ (don’t groan—the detractors of Pope are not always to have things their own way)[,] Lucian on the writing of history—though you need not write history.”1 Even this small sample of recommended works reveals much about Bierce’s literary sensibility, its layers of neoclassicism and admiration for British models, the latter fueled in part by his residence in England from 1872 to 1875 and the former the impressive result of his autodidactic exertions, which led him to brandish his familiarity with Latin, though not with Greek. Although consideration of any of the authors in his list could lead productively to discussion of Bierce the writer, the last name, that of Lucian, offers the swiftest access to Bierce’s complicated dual relation as both participant in and subsequent chronicler of the events of September 19 and 20, 1863, near Chickamauga Creek in northwestern Georgia. Bierce wrote repeatedly about the battle of Chickamauga, in both published work and private correspondence, and his writings about the Confederate victory there are especially important because they illuminate his understanding of the art of writing history in general and Civil War military history in particular.

Bierce wrote one fictional treatment of the battle, a short story about a deaf-mute boy who wanders away from home during the fighting, falls asleep in the woods, awakes to a nightmarish procession of wounded soldiers retreating to a creek from which some of them drink, and returns to his house to find it on fire and his mother killed. Published under the simple title “Chickamauga” in the San Francisco Examiner on January 20, 1889, the story will occupy the final part of this discussion. But those unfamiliar with the narrative contours of the battle will get little help from Bierce’s story, and no book or movie has yet lodged Chickamauga (second only to Gettysburg in casualties produced) in popular awareness, as Michael Shaara’s novel Killer Angels (1974), Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War (1990), and Ronald Maxwell’s feature film Gettysburg (1993) have done for the Pennsylvania battle, fought two and a half months earlier. Many brief summaries,

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