This Republic of Suffering (28 page)

Bierce's writings about the war are preoccupied with the gruesome and the macabre and display what seems almost an eagerness to transgress proprieties of thought and representation. In “What I Saw of Shiloh,” published in December 1881, Bierce offers his memories of the battle—explicitly partial and personal rather than heroic and sweeping. His work contrasted sharply with the celebratory
Century Magazine
series on “Battles and Leaders,” which had just begun in the early 1880s to engage a wide popular audience in Civil War reminiscence and hagiography. Bierce's essay contains one of the most graphic presentations of war death ever written, juxtaposing its sensory and moral horrors. He describes coming upon the site of the previous day's fighting and finding

Men? There were men enough; all dead, apparently, except one, who lay near where I had halted my platoon…—a Federal sergeant, variously hurt, who had been a fine giant in his time. He lay face upward, taking 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 proposal, I told him I thought not; it was unusual, and too many were looking.
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The particulars and the pain of death are unrelieved here; but convention prohibits mercy—“too many were looking”—and renders true compassion “cold blooded” the notion of a Good Death is made oxymoronic. “Death was a thing to be hated,” Bierce wrote elsewhere. “It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side—a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions.”
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Deaths—executions, suicides, battle casualties—constitute the central theme of Bierce's war writing, and indeed he saw death, not glory or political purpose, as the fundamental reality of war itself. As Edmund Wilson observed in
Patriotic Gore,
death was Bierce's “only real character.” A soldier was, in Bierce's view, essentially an “assassin,” a man “in the business of killing his fellow-men.” Yet Bierce's bitterness was hardly a manifestation of lack of feeling, as his at once chilling and deeply sympathetic description of the dying sergeant at Shiloh suggests.
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One of the most powerful of Bierce's war stories portrays the night-long encounter of a “brave and efficient” young second lieutenant with a dead body. Assigned to guard the nearby Union encampment while his comrades sleep, Brainerd Byring finds himself alone in the woods with a Confederate corpse. A sensitive man, he has always appreciated the “exhilaration of battle,” but he possesses a particular loathing for “the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes and stiff bodies, which when not unnaturally shrunken were unnaturally swollen.” As the night wears on, the body seems to begin to move. “What does it want?” the soldier demands. “It did not appear to be in need of anything but a soul,” the narrator wryly observes.
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Byring invokes the certitudes of fact and reason to combat growing anxiety about his dead companion. He rehearses in his mind all he knows about the history of attitudes toward the dead, about burial customs from ancient Europe and central Asia, and about the surprising cultural persistence of belief in the supernatural, which he does not share. “I suppose it will require a thousand ages—perhaps ten thousand—for humanity to outgrow this feeling. Where and when did it originate?” he muses in the effort to gain control of his intensifying feelings of dread. But his philosophizing cannot calm him; it is death, not he, that is in control. Even as he reassures himself that notions of the “malevolence of the dead body” are simply the vestige of antiquated myth, he sees that the body is “visibly moving!” The story ends with the discovery the next day by a Federal captain and surgeon of two dead bodies—one Confederate, already rotting, “frightfully gashed and stabbed” but with bloodless wounds; the second a young Federal officer with his own sword thrust through his chest. Confronted by a corpse, Byring is driven to try to annihilate both death and himself, embracing death as the only means to overcome his fear of it.
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Bierce, too, found the role of survivor troubling. The war had left him, he observed, “sentenced to life,” and the war dead haunted him and his prose, just as the Confederate corpse so disturbed Brainerd Byring. The line between battle's survivors and battle's dead is blurred for Bierce. “When I ask myself,” he once remarked, “what has happened to Ambrose Bierce the youth, who fought at Chickamauga, I am bound to answer that he is dead.” Rather than the purposeful and providential Christian death, Biercean death is often a surprise, sprung on the reader, as in the story of Byring, as it is on its victim—even, paradoxically, when it is suicide. The notion of death involving human preparation or agency, the central tenets—and hope—of the
ars moriendi,
is entirely alien in Bierce's world. It is instead death that possesses agency—like the apparently moving corpse—to exert its claim upon the living, and it is in this sense that it becomes, as Wilson remarked, Bierce's central character.
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Bierce's best-known story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” exemplifies death's surprise and man's futility in its depiction of a southern spy about to be hanged. Peyton Farquhar seems to have escaped his fate when the rope snaps and plunges him into the creek, permitting him to flee the Yankees and return home to his wife. But his escape proves a fantasy in which the reader too has been fooled. The story ends with Farquhar swinging from Owl Creek Bridge. The power of Bierce's irony derives from his insertion not just of the main character but of the reader into the gap he creates between appearance and actuality. Like Farquhar, his startled reader is left hanging.
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Dissenting from his era's romanticization of death, fully embracing Darwinian notions of “nature red in tooth and claw,” mocking the doctrines and authority of organized religion, Bierce had little faith in any afterlife. In his
Devil's Dictionary
he defined the Dead with rhymed irreverence:

Done with the work of breathing; done

With all the world; the mad race run

Through to the end; the golden goal

Attained and found to be a hole!
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The afterlife for which so many Americans avidly searched was not heaven but simply the void of the grave. Death was “hideous,” and it was complete in itself; it was not a passage to another life; it was not the embodiment or instrument of patriotic or religious purpose. But Bierce was moved as well as horrified by the dead, which was why they continued to haunt him. Both the Confederate and the Yankee slain deserved reverent attention; just as death defined life, the dead represented the real meaning of the war. “We know we live, for with each breath / We feel the fear and imminence of death.”
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Herman Melville did not share Bierce's extensive military experience, but he did understand the loss of innocence that rendered initial expectations absurd. Forty-two years old at the time of Fort Sumter, Melville spent most of the war on a Massachusetts farm, struggling to recover from what seemed to him the demise of his literary ambition in his critical and commercial failures of the 1850s. But the participation of close relatives in the army gave him a window into the conflict, and in the spring of 1864, on the eve of the Wilderness campaign, he undertook a tour of Virginia battlefields. He managed to secure an audience with Grant and to join a three-day excursion with a band of soldiers in search of Confederate partisan John Mosby. By the time of the southern surrender the following spring, Melville was launched on a new literary venture in an unfamiliar form. War would be his subject, and poetry his genre. His
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War,
published in 1866, presents the conflict in a collection of glimpses and fragments, not in the novelistic form of his most important earlier work. The choice reflected his judgment that “none can narrate that strife,” and even “entangled rhyme / But hints at the maze of war.” Melville recognized the momentousness of the nation's experience; the conflict had been “an upheaval affecting the basis of things,” and those things included literary form and language as well as human purposes and values.
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The poems are arranged in a chronology, not of their composition but of the war itself, beginning with John Brown and the “Conflict of Convictions” that resulted in secession and continuing through Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Antietam, Stones River, Gettysburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, the March to the Sea, the fall of Richmond, and the surrender at Appomattox. The volume opens with the “expectancy” of ignorant youth marching joyously off to battle. But Melville delineates the dashing of these hopes, the harsh education of these young who “perish, enlightened by the vollied glare.” As it does for Bierce, death comes with the irony of surprise. A glorious adventure undertaken with the enthusiasm and pleasure of “a berrying party” becomes a burying party of a quite different sort. War's young soldiers had not “dreamed what death was—thought it mere / Sliding into some vernal sphere.” In their anticipations they had “leaped the grief” of war, but battle and Melville restore it.
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At the heart of Melville's poetic inquiry rests “the riddle of death,” a question with which he had been personally much concerned before war propelled it to the center of national consciousness. Like so many other Americans of his era, Melville struggled to overcome his doubts about Christian doctrine in order to find a plausible foundation for reassuring faith in immortality. His friend Nathaniel Hawthorne had reported in 1856 that Melville “can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief,” but had out of frustration with his indecision “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated.” The issue remained far from settled for Melville, however, when the outbreak of war gave death new prominence in both private and public life. Literary critic Daniel Aaron has judged
Battle-Pieces
to be Melville's continuing inquiry into this question, “a sustained debate between belief and disbelief.”
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Annihilation took on a different meaning after 1861, and Melville rendered the texture of war's destructiveness unblinkingly: the soldiers in the Wilderness meet “skull after skull” and green and rotting “shoes full of bones,” the remains of the dead still unburied from the previous year's campaigns. “Few burial rites shall be,” as even the dignifying rituals of death are abandoned to the grim necessities of military slaughter. Glory, plumes, sashes, banners have become irrelevant; men are but operatives, cogs in a machinery of destruction, for war itself has been modernized and industrialized, as the ascendancy and “anvil-din” of the war's ironclad warships vividly symbolize.

No passion; all went on by crank,

Pivot and screw,

And calculations of caloric.
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Death itself becomes war's end, the product of its industrialized machinery; there is no more transcendent or glorious purpose; northerners and southerners lie mingled together, “fame or country least their care.” But they now understand what in their youthful zeal for battle they did not—“What like a bullet can undeceive!”—for the pieties and pomposities of war have dissolved. The dead have discovered as well the answer to the riddle that Melville cannot know, the riddle “of which the slain / Sole solvers are.” Beginning in such innocence, they are brought by war to an ultimate knowledge that even their survivors lack. The living remain captured in uncertainty.
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Skulls and bones left unburied on the field. “Battle-field of Gaines Mill, Virginia.” Library of Congress
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In Amherst, Massachusetts, where she rarely left her father's house, Emily Dickinson lived even more removed from the war than Melville. But she too displayed a sense of the ironic disjunction between reality and appearance, expectation and experience. “Could Prospect taste of Retrospect,” Emily Dickinson wrote at the end of the war, echoing the notion of dark enlightenment that structured Melville's
Battle-Pieces.

My Triumph lasted till the Drums

Had left the Dead alone

And then I dropped my Victory

And chastened stole along

To where the finished Faces

Conclusion turned on me

And then I hated Glory

And wished myself were They.