This Republic of Suffering [94]
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.57
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.”58
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.59
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.60
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