Civil War Revisionism
Bierce published this story in 1889, nearly thirty years after shots fired at Fort Sumter ignited the Civil War. Having volunteered with the Union forces at age nineteen, Bierce had plenty of first-hand eyewitness experience with the reality of war and he never played it for mythic heroic status in his writings. His realism may have been tempered with irony and even allegorical fantasy at times, but he never portrayed the war anything less a brutal, bloody, dirty clash having little to do with artistic depictions of nobility. In the years between his time as a soldier and his publishing his story, monuments to Civil War “heroes” had popped up on both sides of the playing field, most commonly in the form of soldiers—usually officers—on horseback. The result, in Bierce’s opinion, was that the reality of the war was being revised and transformed into something it was not. And thus his story becomes allegory as a soldier on horseback temporarily transforms into a statue of a man on horseback before being shot to death and turning into a mythic figure of man on horseback flying through the air as seen by a non-participatory observer far away from the action.
Familial Division
Bierce could just as easily have made his point about the revisionism of the reality of the war into some mythically heroic showdown of titans without the victim of the sniper’s rifle being the sniper’s own father. Even if the man on horseback had been a complete and total stranger, the allegorical point would stand. That he specifically chose to make it a father and son tragedy also points to his discomfort at the direction the collective memory of the war was taking among Americans. By 1889, too family members personally impacted by a division of loyalties were gone as a result of aging. Old wounds had healed and angry memories had softened and the reality of so many brothers fighting brothers and sons fighting fathers in battle no longer seemed quite as viscerally real. Through the choice that Bierce made, the story also becomes thematically richer as a counter to revisionism with its reminder that families really had been torn apart in a way Americans had never seen before and had not seen since.
Duty
Duty is a prevailing theme that enters the story directly as a result of the experiences of the author. The soldier in Bierce plays out as his protagonist not necessarily because of any autobiographical connection to the central event of the story, but because his military service impressed upon him the vital and perhaps life-saving imperative to understand and carry out one’s duty. The story begins with Carter Druse failing in his duty to stay away during sentry duty; a failure punishable by death if he’d been discovered. So the story becomes on a certain level one of redemption for that failure. That redemption can only come by completely fulfilling his duty at the next opportunity and that opportunity arrives in the form of his instructions upon spotting an enemy combatant during sentry post: “The duty of the soldier was plain: the man must be shot dead from ambush—without warning.” This theme is given an ironic and tragic dimension with the introduction through flashback of the words of advice which were among the last his father ever spoke to him: “whatever may occur do what you conceive to be your duty.”
