In Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Chickamauga,” a young boy emerges from his home, wooden sword in hand, and proceeds to kill imaginary enemies. He is unaware that a real battle – the namesake blood bath that gives the story its title – is taking place just a short distance away. He is deaf, and therefore can’t hear the approaching gunfire or the groans of dying soldiers. Intoxicated by his father’s stories of vanquishing “savages” in his younger days, the young boy blissfully re-enacts these heroic tales of conquest. The romanticism is so powerful that not even when he stumbles across the horrors of the nearby battle – wounded bodies, bleeding, dying, drowning in a creek – he is unafraid, and imagines he is their commander. “He waved his cap for their encouragement,” Bierce writes, “and smilingly pointed with his weapon in the direction of the guiding light — a pillar of fire to this strange exodus.” Only when he sees that the pillar of fire is, in fact, his home, and finds his mother’s mangled body lying in the grass, does the reality of war seep into his childish comprehension. Mute, the boy can only make “wild, uncertain gestures” and utter “a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries.” Read more…In Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Chickamauga,” a young boy emerges from his home, wooden sword in hand, and proceeds to kill imaginary enemies. He is unaware that a real battle – the namesake blood bath that gives the story its title – is taking place just a short distance away. He is deaf, and therefore can’t hear the approaching gunfire or the groans of dying soldiers. Intoxicated by his father’s stories of vanquishing “savages” in his younger days, the young boy blissfully re-enacts these heroic tales of conquest. The romanticism is so powerful that not even when he stumbles across the horrors of the nearby battle – wounded bodies, bleeding, dying, drowning in a creek – he is unafraid, and imagines he is their commander. “He waved his cap for their encouragement,” Bierce writes, “and smilingly pointed with his weapon in the direction of the guiding light — a pillar of fire to this strange exodus.” Only when he sees that the pillar of fire is, in fact, his home, and finds his mother’s mangled body lying in the grass, does the reality of war seep into his childish comprehension. Mute, the boy can only make “wild, uncertain gestures” and utter “a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries.” Read more… Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded. TAGS: BIERCE, AMBROSE, BOOKS AND LITERATURE, CIVIL WAR (US) (1861-65), GEORGIA In Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Chickamauga,” a young boy emerges from his home, wooden sword in hand, and proceeds to kill imaginary enemies. He is unaware that a real battle – the namesake blood bath that gives the story its title – is taking place just a short distance away. He is deaf, and therefore can’t hear the approaching gunfire or the groans of dying soldiers. Intoxicated by his father’s stories of vanquishing “savages” in his younger days, the young boy blissfully re-enacts these heroic tales of conquest. The romanticism is so powerful that not even when he stumbles across the horrors of the nearby battle – wounded bodies, bleeding, dying, drowning in a creek – he is unafraid, and imagines he is their commander. “He waved his cap for their encouragement,” Bierce writes, “and smilingly pointed with his weapon in the direction of the guiding light — a pillar of fire to this strange exodus.” Only when he sees that the pillar of fire is, in fact, his home, and finds his mother’s mangled body lying in the grass, does the reality of war seep into his childish comprehension. Mute, the boy can only make “wild, uncertain gestures” and utter “a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries.” Most literary critics read “Chickamauga” as an allegory. The boy represents the young American nation, oblivious to the dangers of its longstanding romance with war and too eager to fight. Just as the boy had been “made reckless by the ease with which he overcame invisible foes attempting to stay his advance,” Americans on both sides of the Civil War had naively believed that they would win quickly and with little bloodshed. Both the child and the nation had “committed the common enough military error of pushing the pursuit to a dangerous extreme.” Of course, Bierce, who served with his Indiana regiment at Chickamauga but published the story in 1889, might also have been thinking about the rise in militaristic fervor at the end of the 19th century that peaked during the war against Spain. The story appears to serve as stinging commentary on America’s ongoing war lust. But what if we read the story more literally, as a commentary on the effects of the Civil War on civilians? Can this story help us imagine how families living near the battlefield at Chickamauga awoke to the realities of war as it made its way through their fields and yards? According the National Park Service, the park at Chickamauga contains one of the most pristine historic battlefields in the world. When the park was created in 1895, Congress noted, “No battlefield park of this quality and magnitude could be found in any other location in the world.” Very little had changed in the area in the preceding 30 years; the roads, fields and forests remained mostly the same. Untouched and untrammeled, Chickamauga Battlefield Park drew military personnel, dignitaries and historians from across the globe to study the movement of troops during the fighting. Yet there were some important elements missing. While the park service built reproductions of several civilian homes that were destroyed in 1863, these structures only hint at the texture of life within the local community on the Tennessee-Georgia border as the Union Army pushed deeper into the heart of the Confederacy. Library of Congress The Brotherton House, Chickamauga, Ga. In 1863, there were 25 farmhouses on the site of the battle. One of those houses belonged to Eliza and John Glenn, who lived, according to documents in the park’s library, in a “one story double log” with their two children, 4-year-old Avery and 2-year-old Ella Nora. Years later, Avery recalled that the house had two rooms and a kitchen along with a shed on one side and a porch on the front – a modest farmhouse, as were the other homes around Chickamauga Creek. John Glenn built the house himself sometime around 1850 and was no doubt sorry to leave it when he enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861. He went away to war like many of the local men, safe in the belief that they were defending those structures and the people sheltered inside their walls. But it was not to be. War arrived at Glenn’s home on the morning of Sept. 19, 1863. Soon after the battle began, the house became the headquarters for the Union commander William Rosecrans, who advised Eliza that she should take her children and leave as the fighting drew near. With the help of a slave named John Camp, who had been given to her by her father when her husband left for war, Eliza loaded her children and a few belongings into a neighbor’s wagon. The Glenns then made for a makeshift refugee camp about a mile west of the battle, where they waited until the firing had ceased. As darkness fell on the first day of the battle, Eliza returned to her home — what was left of it. All that remained was the chimney standing amid smoldering remains. John Glenn would not have the opportunity to rebuild his home; he died the next year in a Mobile, Ala., hospital. Other homes suffered similar fates. The house of George Washington Brotherton and his wife, Mary, survived the battle only to become a camp hospital for wounded Union soldiers. The Brothertons took refuge in the “canyon” along with Eliza Glenn and her children, but their daughter Adaline ventured back to the farm to find a few of her father’s milk cows still alive. Planning to take the cows back to the refugees, Adaline instead gave the milk to the men lying wounded and dying in her front yard. Or so the story goes. Most likely, Union officers would have confiscated the livestock, and along with it Adaline’s chance to be merciful. RELATED Disunion Highlights Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive. See the Highlights » Whatever the case, the Brotherton family would never be the same. Upon returning to the farm, George and his son-in-law buried the bodies of Union soldiers who had been left in his yard as well as the dead animal carcasses that clogged up his pond, all the while wondering about the fate of his two eldest sons, Thomas and Jim, both of whom were serving in the Confederate Army. Tom “knew every pig trail through the woods” around the farm and served as a scout for General Longstreet during the battle. Later, in a letter to Jim, Tom declared, “It’s a sorry lad that won’t fight for his own home.” For Thomas Brotherton, this was no abstract declaration of patriotism. Sadly, he would never see his beloved home again. Captured in May 1864 near Dalton, Ga., Thomas spent five months in a P.O.W. camp at Rock Island, Ill. He took the oath of allegiance on Oct. 28 and was released, but made it only to Indianapolis. Suffering from one of myriad “camp fevers,” he died at Camp Morton, Ind., on Nov. 6. His name is engraved on a monument commemorating the Confederate dead buried in Crown Hill Cemetery, 430 miles and a lifetime away from the fields of Chickamauga. In the end, neither John Glenn nor Thomas Brotherton could protect the things and people they loved the most. War came, and as a young Indiana lieutenant witnessed those two days in northern Georgia, it spared nothing or no one in its path. The deaf-mute boy playing war may have been a figment of Bierce’s imagination, but the writer no doubt looked into the face of despair and emptiness that day if he chanced upon Eliza Glenn or one of the other Chickamauga refugees. They must have resembled the little boy at the end of Bierce’s story: Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck. Follow Disunion at twitter/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook. Sources: Brotherton & Glenn files, Chickamauga National Battlefield Park Library. Carole Emberton is an ssociate professor of history at the University at Buffalo and the author of “Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War.”In Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Chickamauga,” a young boy emerges from his home, wooden sword in hand, and proceeds to kill imaginary enemies. He is unaware that a real battle – the namesake blood bath that gives the story its title – is taking place just a short distance away. He is deaf, and therefore can’t hear the approaching gunfire or the groans of dying soldiers. Intoxicated by his father’s stories of vanquishing “savages” in his younger days, the young boy blissfully re-enacts these heroic tales of conquest. The romanticism is so powerful that not even when he stumbles across the horrors of the nearby battle – wounded bodies, bleeding, dying, drowning in a creek – he is unafraid, and imagines he is their commander. “He waved his cap for their encouragement,” Bierce writes, “and smilingly pointed with his weapon in the direction of the guiding light — a pillar of fire to this strange exodus.” Only when he sees that the pillar of fire is, in fact, his home, and finds his mother’s mangled body lying in the grass, does the reality of war seep into his childish comprehension. Mute, the boy can only make “wild, uncertain gestures” and utter “a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries.”
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 17:29:26 +0000
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