I was a boy when I watched the Twilight Zone episode, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Rod Serling, who created and produced the Twilight Zone, introduced the episode, “An occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: in two forms, as it was dreamed... and as it was lived and died. This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination... the ingredients of the Twilight Zone.”
The story was so well done that my memory of the episode haunted me for a long time and still does.
Briefly, during the Civil War, Union soldiers ready a man for hanging. With noose around neck, he drops, but the rope breaks and he slips into the river below and somehow makes it home to his wife. As he is about to fall into her arms, the reverie ends. He has not escaped and dies abruptly.
It was a well-made short and had won at Cannes, but I thought it just an episode and did not know its provenance. I was well into adulthood when I learned more about the author, Ambrose Bierce.
His The Devil’s Dictionary is how he comes to the attention of most people, unless some high school teacher assigns one of his short stories. The Devil’s Dictionary reveals a humorous, but deeply cynical man. Indeed, it is the quality that most defined Bierce. As an example, his definition of Inhumanity as “n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity” aptly makes the point.
Such people may not be born, but experiences of life lead them to look at the motives of men from a deeply skeptical viewpoint. How did Bierce get there?
It was the American Civil War that most influenced the man. In Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American WriterChristopher Kiernan Coleman studies the military career that left its indelible mark on the subject.
Bierce grew up in Indiana and tried his hand at a few trades until the Civil War arrived. For a time, he was at a military academy, but left after a year. Kentucky Military Institute (KMI) was mostly southern in sympathy and that might have had some effect, as he was from a staunchly abolitionist family.
When the war came, Bierce had been whiling away the time, and was the second man to enlist in the company that would become part of the Ninth Indiana Regiment. That unit would gain the nickname, “The Bloody Ninth.” The sobriquet gives an indication of what the young man was in for.
Coleman’s account makes it seem that before the war Bierce was a bit of a devil-may-care, or liked to think he was. His enlistment, however, was as an idealistic anti-slavery man as much as, if not more than, to save the Union.
War would change him. He would not lose his antipathy to involuntary servitude, but idealism would not survive. The mischievous lad might not have become a martinet, but he came to appreciate the need for discipline in the dangerous business of war.
The author speculates that, pre-war, at military school Bierce could stomach only the year he spent there. This he contrasts with “a positive preference for spit-and-polish discipline while serving under Brigadier William Hazen” that Bierce acquired.
Hazen met Bierce and his unit after the campaign in Western Virginia. That effort had been successful and Hazen thought his command would be a disciplined force. As they did not meet his standards, he set about to put them in shape. This was not popular amongst the troops save for one. Bierce said of the general that he was “the best hated man that I ever knew, and his very memory is a terror to every unworthy soul in the service.”
Bravery in battle led to a promotion to sergeant. Distinguishing himself in that role saw Bierce raised to the rank of sergeant major. The young man was now the senior non-commissioned officer in his regiment. Considering that he was just shy of nineteen when he first enlisted, it could be considered a meteoric rise. Of course, the odd Confederate bullet may have opened up the possibility of advancement as well.
Bierce was not finished moving up. He would be commissioned a second lieutenant and eventually, a first. Hazen found him useful and he was the General’s topographic engineer. The making of maps, which he might have learned something of at KMI, was a valuable and necessary skill. Battles were lost due to lack of accurate geographic knowledge.
As he was clearly a man of skill and bravery in the profession of arms. Whence came the tendency to cynicism?
A possible clue to the change in spirit would be his wounding. He had been detailed by General Hazen to take the orders for advancing the picket line to the units involved. The troops would move forward watched by Confederate snipers who relished officers as targets.
Captain Eastman, leading from the front was shot, fatally as it would turn out. Bierce went to the assistance of the doomed man.
Coleman began Chapter 13, Casualties of War, with a Bierce story that parallels what happened to Ambrose to a point
“The Butternut(i.e. a confederate soldier)takes aim; he pauses a second. The shot is more difficult this time. The second officer is kneeling over the first now. No mind; he presses the trigger. A loud report, a flash, a puff of grey smoke, then-nothing. For a moment the Butternut thinks he misses. But no; suddenly the second man falls to the ground. It is a good day for hunting Yankees.”
Obviously, the second officer would be Bierce. Coleman does not say it happened exactly that way, but a serious head wound was inflicted.
The story of his journey to the army hospital in Nashville is harrowing. The recuperation on leave home does not seem to have been complete. His romance with a local girl apparently died during the furlough.
The author quotes what Ambrose’s brother Albert said of the man post-wound, “He was never the same after that. Some of the iron of that shell seemed to stick in his brain, he became bitter and suspicious, especially of his close friends.”
Coleman’s account makes clear the words happy camper could never apply to Bierce.
Was the injury the origin of the literary career of the man who would write so cynically? If so, his fans owe some gratitude to the shot that wounded him. Bierce’s worldview meant he was not going to write Hallmark card level cheerfulness.
He would continue in the army and after the war, would work with General Hazen in government service and pursue a writer’s career. His end is mysterious as he disappeared presumably while traveling to another civil war, this time in Mexico. Considering his life and writings, it was fitting he went as a man of mystery. He might have wanted it that way.
Full disclosure: Christopher Kiernan Coleman was my undergraduate classmate. He was and is what I was not, a scholar. Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strifeis well-ordered and Chris’ prose is a pleasure to read.
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