From Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs
Interesting Links
“The Battle of Stones River: Remembering the Fallen” (Emerging Civil War)
“William B. Hazen: The ‘Best-Hated Man’ of the American Civil War” (Warfare History Network)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “An Affair of Outposts,” Ambrose Bierce
• “A Horrid, Hellish Dream,” George E. Chamberlin
• “A Woman’s Recollections of Antietam,” Mary Bedinger Mitchell
• “Rip van Winkle,” Washington Irving
Buy the book
Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs
880 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $30.00
“The Battle of Stones River: Remembering the Fallen” (Emerging Civil War)
“William B. Hazen: The ‘Best-Hated Man’ of the American Civil War” (Warfare History Network)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “An Affair of Outposts,” Ambrose Bierce
• “A Horrid, Hellish Dream,” George E. Chamberlin
• “A Woman’s Recollections of Antietam,” Mary Bedinger Mitchell
• “Rip van Winkle,” Washington Irving
Buy the book
Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs880 pages
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $30.00
 |
| “He thrust forward his head and saw the reflection of his face, as in a mirror.” Illustration by American artist Norwood H. MacGilvary (1874–1950) for the “The Man” [later retitled “A Resumed Identity”] in the September 1908 issue of Cosmopolitan. |
The element of enchantment in that forest is supplied by my wandering and dreaming in it forty-one years ago when I was a-soldiering and there were new things under a new sun. It is miles away, but from a near-by summit I can overlook the entire region—ridge beyond ridge, parted by purple valleys full of sleep. Unlike me, it has not visibly altered in all these years, except that I miss, here and there, a thin blue ghost of smoke from an enemy's camp. Can you guess my feelings when I view this Dream-land—my Realm of Adventure, inhabited by memories that beckon me from every valley? I shall go; I shall retrace my old routes and lines of march; stand in my old camps; inspect my battlefields to see that all is right and undisturbed. I shall go to the Enchanted Forest.Four years later, during the summer of 1907, Bierce and a friend, the author Percival Pollard, interrupted a trip to Galveston, Texas, with a stop in Tennessee. They visited the site of the battle of Stones River, which occurred from December 31, 1862, to January 2, 1863. Only twenty years old at the time, Bierce had just been promoted to second lieutenant in the brigade commanded by Colonel William Babcock Hazen. In the days leading up to the battle, the Army of the Cumberland, commanded by General William S. Rosecrans, gathered outside of Murfreesboro, while the Army of Tennessee, led by Confederate General Braxton Bragg, prepared for the expected offensive.
Instead, while Bierce and his fellow soldiers were preparing breakfast on the morning of New Year’s Eve, Confederate forces unexpectedly struck and succeeded in nearly doubling the Union battle line back on itself. Hazen’s brigade was soon isolated on a slightly elevated four-acre wood called Round Forest—later known as Hell’s Half Acre—and the soldiers fought off wave after wave of Confederate forces. “It was the only part of the original line of battle that was held, and it proved to be the pivotal point and key of the Federal position,” Hazen later wrote. “My brigade sustained the first assault alone, but later we were aided by other troops.” The brigade held out for a tactical but costly victory when the rebel forces abandoned the offensive and then retreated. The three-day battle was one of the bloodiest clashes of the Civil War, with nearly 13,000 Union and 12,000 Confederate soldiers killed, wounded, or missing—about a third of each army. Of the 1,400 soldiers in Hazen’s brigade, more than 400 were killed or wounded.
At the height of the battle, Bierce’s commanding officer, First Lieutenant James D. Braden, was fighting alongside him when Braden was shot in the head and fell to the ground, choking on his own blood. “Now, Bierce was a queer, stern, and austere sort of person,” Braden told a journalist years later. “To many people, he was cold and unapproachable. But that day at Stones River, when he knelt beside me and gripped my hand in what we both thought was a last goodbye, I tell you he was crying like a little girl.” Then Bierce picked up the injured man and carried him off the field under heavy fire. Braden eventually recovered, returned to duty, and was still alive when Bierce and Pollard revisited the battlefield.
Within months after the battle, Hazen was promoted to brigadier general, Bierce was promoted to first lieutenant, and Hazen appointed Bierce as his topographical engineer. Bierce and his regiment spent the first half of 1863 in the region around Murfreesboro and nearby Readyville. That summer, several members of the brigade, under Hazen’s direction and at his expense, built a large limestone monument for the men killed at Stones River. It was to revisit this monument, and other nearby sites, that Bierce interrupted his trip to Galveston forty-four years later. (The monument still stands—the oldest Civil War memorial still in its original location.)
The following year, in 1908, Bierce wrote a story inspired by his visit to the monument and it appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine as “The Man.” When Bierce revised the story for the updated edition of Can Such Things Be?—the third volume of Bierce’s Collected Works, published in 1910—he changed the title to “A Resumed Identity” and, perhaps more pivotally, rewrote the final sentence.
Notes: Union General Philip Henry Sheridan and Confederate General George Edward Pickett fought in the battle of Sayler’s Creek, Virginia, April 6, 1865, a devastating defeat for the Confederates that helped force the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. In the Arabian Nights (29–30), a tailor tells the story of a barber who relentlessly pesters him with questions when all he wants is a haircut. “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!” is from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “Recessional: June 22, 1897,” written for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.
In the magazine version of the story, the final sentences read, “His arms gave way; he fell, face downward, into the pool. And within that hospitable wall, among the comrades of his youth, he sleeps no less soundly than they.”
In the magazine version of the story, the final sentences read, “His arms gave way; he fell, face downward, into the pool. And within that hospitable wall, among the comrades of his youth, he sleeps no less soundly than they.”
* * *
One summer night a man stood on a low hill overlooking a wide expanse of forest and field. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.