A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind

by Stephen Budiansky

After the war Bierce wrote a series of astonishingly dark and ironic short stories trying to convey some of the unheroic truths about battle to a reluctant audience; “denied existence by the chief publishing houses,” they were privately printed with the financial assistance of a businessman acquaintance only in 1891. All are shocking for their cynicism and unsparing details of what bullets do to a man’s body; none is as deeply disturbing as “Chickamauga,” which grotesquely juxtaposes the incomprehension of a small boy setting off into the woods with his wooden sword to play soldier and the horrors of the actual wounded from the battlefield he discovers there: their blood-streaked faces which he laughingly takes for those of circus clowns, the men crawling on all fours he thinks are inviting him to play horsie on their backs. It is, of course, a horrid allegory of the foolish naïveté of all boys who go off to war.