War, it has been noted previously, is hell. What is rarely mentioned when you hear that phrase is the only people who generally agree with this sentiment are those who have actually been through war. Young men (and women, doubtlessly) have for millennia viewed war as a grand and noble cause that will bring glory, fame and all manner of spoils. Why has this been the traditional view toward war for so long?
Propaganda. Good press. PR. The necessity for a never-ending supply of people willing to sacrifice themselves in the dirt and mud and deep water and jungles and deserts and snow and heat and, well, you get the idea.
The idea of war in literary form is the oldest continually popular fairy tale. Stories of war have been, for the most part, fairy tales that describe the glories of powerful mythic warriors who either die a noble but curiously bloodless death or return home as heroes fully intact. The collective consequence of this compelling literary genre has been hundreds of millions of readers who have been conditioned into becoming very willing and easily manipulated killing machines. “Chickamauga” is, without question, an anti-war story that presents the brutality of Civil War battlefields in a manner that is extremely at odds with most well-known Civil War fiction. Like other stories of war, even those writers who lived the brutality themselves were moved to tone down the reality and ramp up the nobility. Not just in “Chickamauga” but in many of Bierce’s stories about the war he himself fought as a soldier, he breaks from the mold to portray the darkness that is absent so much of the literature to spring from that conflict. What makes “Chickamauga” so different is not simply that it is a portrait of war as seen through a child’s eyes, but that it is also a completely inversion of the principles of fairy tale literature.
In most fairy tales, the leaving of home sends the child into a dark world where he must confront the monstrousness of the adult world through metaphor before making it back to the safety and comfort of home. Bierce’s story inexorably leads his little protagonist back home to where—as the reader has been informed—the adults are conducting a frantic search for this missing child. The reader is thus led to expect either that the bizarre narrative is a dream sequence of some sort that will end with him safely at home the whole time or that at least when his strange fantasy world avoiding the reality of war and death finally ends it will be with a reversion to normalcy and his safe passage back home.
Like everything else about the story, however, this fairy tales defies conventional rules and expectations. Every image associated with war is seen through the provocative lens of the boy’s world of fantasy until he realizes that he has made his way home. And then, suddenly and irrevocably, everything comes into the focus of reality. And this sudden change is charged with some of the most profound symbolism of the story as he is not just snapped into real world, but he is “stupefied by the power of the revelation.” This is a moment of Biblical intensity for the child; it is the moment, in fact, when—at last—his fantasy world is shattered and reality is revealed to him in the most profoundly moving way possible: he now is capable of making the correct emotional response to what he sees. He has, in other words, finally attained the maturity of the reader. And what exactly was the stimulus for his no longer responding to the world in an inappropriate manner? Like the boy himself, the war has come home to him. In symbolic terms, this is the effect of glorifying war in the abstract and then finally having one’s eyes opened when a mortar destroys their home and kills their loved one. For some, such a nightmarish display of reality will be the only thing capable of snapping them out of their fantasy-world view of the glory of the warrior myth.
