The Reality of the War
This story is quite directly framed as a commentary on the revisionism of the Civil War which had taken place in the quarter-century that has passed since its end. As a soldier roughly the same age as his protagonist, Bierce experienced the brutal reality of the war first-hand and the sanitized mythologizing of it into little more than excuse for parades, memorials and statues became increasingly disturbing. The result of that disturbance was a literary rendering of this revisionism in allegorical form which makes extensive use of imagery. The final 460-plus words of the first section of the story are nothing but precise, detailed descriptions of the topography of the Virginia setting in which the story takes places. This opening section uses this imagery to set the stage for what appears is going to be a raw portrait of battlefield engage at its most realistic. It is, allegorically, the real story of the war as it happened.
The Future of the War
By Part II, that precise realism has begun to crumble. The soldier found lying in a clump at laurel at the story’s opening wakes up to look across the valley toward a cliff where he thinks he sees a statue of a soldier on horseback. This imagery is not just an intrusion into the realism established in the first part, but speaks directly to a future which the soldier could not have foreseen at the time, but which did, in fact, come to be. The decades following the war had seen an ever-increasing number of statues commemorating war “heroes” cast in bronze and stone as a soldier on horseback:
“For an instant Druse had a strange, half-defined feeling that he had slept to the end of the war and was looking upon a noble work of art reared upon that eminence to commemorate the deeds of an heroic past of which he had been an inglorious part.”
The “inglorious part” is the author’s ironic reminder that those “heroes” being worshiped in statue-form had attained that status in large part by doing unspeakably inhumane things.
The Inglorious Part
Reality does not entirely escape the imagery of the moment when Carter Druse sets his sights upon the horseman and pulls the trigger. In fact, it is the circumstances of the kill which calls into the question most the whole concept of building statues of soldiers for the purpose of commemorating “honor.” Only single killing of a soldier by another occurs in this story, but those circumstances of the inglorious part played by Carter Druse make this story more profoundly anti-war than others which record a lush green battlefield turned red from the blood spilled by thousands. The imagery used here takes the reader into the mind of the soldier trained to do his duty even when that duty goes against every known and possible standard of decency and fairness in the real world away from the battlefield: Carter Druse, almost completely hidden in clump of laurel, takes aim, shoots and kills a person unaware of his existence, completely exposed and with no warning. Outside of the conventions of war, this is known as cold-blooded murder of the worst kind. Within the context of war, it is an action which is rewarded with medals, statues, commemorations and conferment of the legacy of hero.
The Complicit Reader
History does get revised unless those reading it accept the revision. Revisionism must also rely upon those who know the truth being willing to accept alternations. Some alterations are to be expected as a natural course of humanity: gruesome details need not always be supplied to convey the grotesqueries of war. To overlook the brutality as a general rule and support the revised heroic myth, however, is something else entirely. Readers are directly implicated into the revisionism of the Civil War which Bierce found so disturbing in one tiny little example of imagery that cannot be adequately explained as existing for any other reason. A Union officer doing scouting of his own does not see Carter Druse fire his rifle and witnesses only the unexplained consequence of a horse with a rider astride it falling through the air. When he files his scouting report to his commander, however, he leaves out this detail, informing him only that there is no road which leads directly into the valley from that direction. This third section of the story then concludes on an image which defies logical explication:
“The commander, knowing better, smiled.”
If the commander knows there actually is a road, he would not have sent the scout in the first place, so his smile cannot be in reference to that. Since there is no other contextual reason for the commander to smile knowingly, only one implication is left: it is an allegorical image of all those readers who, knowing the real truth about the Civil War, have chosen instead to accept the myth.
