Ambrose Bierce was eventually an American journalist, editorialist, and writer of short stories, but he was first a young man who fought for the Union in the Civil War. His short story, also sometimes categorized as an essay, “What I Saw at Shiloh” provides his view on one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Bierce makes it very easy to “see” the brutalities and violence and the psychological and emotional tolls of war. But unlike so many other authors who write of such things, Bierce’s commentary is sarcastic, which helps us to understand that there is little nobility or gallantry in war that is not overcome by the waste of beauty, of energy, of life.
At the outset of the story, we meet Bierce’s regiment in a camp where they are being treated to a day of rest. But Bierce describes them as being weary, of limping badly due to blistered feet, of “indolent dogmatism” in their discussions of when the war would finally end. These are not fresh-faced, eager-for-battle newbies; they are battle worn and weary veterans being sent as fresh troops to reinforce a flagging Union line that had taken much fire and suffered many casualties. It is through these casualties that Bierce and his fellow soldiers must march on the way to the battlefield. As they approach and cross the Ohio River, Bierce gives us a glimpse into the ruined psyches of the defeated troops: “Along the sheltered strip of beach between the river bank and the water was a confused mass of humanity--several thousands of men. They were mostly unarmed; many were wounded; some dead.” But then Bierce comments on the sight:
These men were defeated, beaten, cowed. They were deaf to duty and dead to shame. A more demented crew never drifted to the rear of broken battalions. They would have stood in their tracks and been shot down to a man by a provost-marshal's guard, but they could not have been urged up that bank. An army's bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching.
This is not bravery or gallantry. This is exhaustion. These men were in such a state they would rather have been shot for disobeying a command than return to the field of battle.
Bierce also describes the night march that follows, the slow crawl through unfamiliar and dense terrain during which “[v]ery often [they] struck [their] feet against the dead; more frequently against those who still had spirit enough to resent it with a moan. These were lifted carefully to one side and abandoned.” Here is a glimpse of a noble gesture in moving the wounded carefully to one side so they would not be trampled by the advancing troops, but we also see the bitter irony, and the futility in doing so, because the brutal truth is that they are most likely still going to die, alone and abandoned where they fell.
He describes coming upon the medical tents, tents that looked comfortable, although
[t]he kind of comfort they supplied was indicated by pairs of men entering and reappearing, bearing litters; by low moans from within and by long rows of dead with covered faces outside. These tents were constantly receiving the wounded, yet were never full; they were continually ejecting the dead, yet were never empty. It was as if the helpless had been carried in and murdered, that they might not hamper those whose business it was to fall to-morrow.
Again, we see the contrast of the nobility and gallantry of war with its ultimate brutality. The wounded are being tended, the dead are being respected, yet it is a never-ending supply of both, and Bierce’s comment about the helpless wounded being murdered simply to make room for more lets us understand his position: that there really is nothing noble about war.
Bierce does not only force us to look at the “big picture.” He zooms in and lets us take a close look at the brutality and violence of war. As the infantry line halts to wait for further instruction, they find they are standing in a wooded area completely shredded by cannon fire, and all around them lie dead horses and mangled men. He describes
one, who lay near where I had halted my platoon to await the slower movement of the line--a Federal sergeant, variously hurt, who had been a fine giant in his time. 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.
Then, perhaps in an attempt to allow humor to mitigate the shock of such a sight, Bierce comments, “I had not previously known one could get on, even in this unsatisfactory fashion, with so little brain.” In this moment, too, however, there is a noble gesture: “One of my men whom I knew for a womanish fellow, asked if he should put his bayonet through him.” We are to understand this as an attempt to end the fellow’s suffering; we cannot know how long he has lain in the cold and wet in that condition, nor how long he may continue to do so. Ending his misery would be a kind, and noble, thing to do. Right? But Bierce comments on this, too: “Inexpressibly shocked by the cold-blooded proposal, I told him I thought not; it was unusual, and too many were looking.” He will not allow the soldier to follow through not because it would be wrong or because the soldier has hope of surviving but because it is “unusual” and they are in much too public a place. Again, we see a noble gesture overcome by the cold reality of war’s brutal heart.
There are some moments to which we can point and say, “There! There is nobility, there is gallantry in action!” Any of the moments that Bierce describes the men pushing through hardship, facing uncertainty with resolve, and mustering their courage in the face of absolute chaos are candidates. Bierce describes his fellow soldiers several times as “brave men” and “gallant soldiers.” But Bierce undermines those moments with an understanding that “if there is truth in the theory of the conversion of force, these men were storing up energy from every shock that burst its waves upon their bodies. Perhaps this theory may better than another explain the tremendous endurance of men in battle. But the eyes reported only matter for despair.”
There seems to be little ambiguity in his position on war. But there are moments that Bierce describes with great longing, affection, and excitement that make it difficult to determine one way or another. For example, when assembly is called, and the men prepare to break camp and move out, Bierce experiences this moment as one “which goes to the heart as wine and stirs the blood like the kisses of a beautiful woman” and likens it as to a siren calling to him with her “wildly intoxicating music.” He describes a later call to arms in much the same way, as being electric:
Wings were growing on blistered feet. Bruised muscles and jolted bones, shoulders pounded by the cruel knapsack, eyelids leaden from lack of sleep--all were pervaded by the subtle fluid, all were unconscious of their clay. The men thrust forward their heads, expanded their eyes and clenched their teeth. They breathed hard, as if throttled by tugging at the leash. If you had laid your hand in the beard or hair of one of these men it would have crackled and shot sparks.
The power of the call to action overcomes the exhaustion, the pain, even the dismay.
Even in the last line of the story, there is ambiguity. Bierce is reminiscing and remembering “dimly and brokenly, but with what a magic spell" his soldiering days. He calls on Youth to touch him once more and says that if Youth would but do that, he would “willingly surrender an other [sic] life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh.” So there is longing, but there is also recognition that war requires a throwing away, a waste of life. It seems clear that on some level Bierce enjoyed those days; it is equally clear that he hated the cost of living them.
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