Geography and Warfare in Ambrose Bierce's Civil War Texts

BENEDICT VON BREMEN

Battleﬁ eld Topography: Geography and Warfare in Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War Texts

Whether in camp or on the march, in barracks, in tents, or en bivouac, my duties as topographical engineer kept me working like a beaver – all day in the saddle and half the night at my drawing table. It was hazardous work […] Our frequent engagements with the Confederate outposts, patrols, and scouting parties [...] ﬁ xed in my memory a vivid and apparently imperishable picture of the locality – a picture serving instead of accurate ﬁ eld notes, which, indeed, it was not always convenient to take, with carbines cracking, sabers clashing, and horses plunging all about. These spirited en- counters were observations entered in red.1

A quarter-century ago I was myself a soldier […] To this day I cannot look over a landscape without noting the advantages of the ground for attack or defense; here is an admirable site for an earthwork, there a noble place for a ﬁ eld battery.2

No country is so wild and difﬁ cult but men will make it a theatre of war […].3 Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842-?), although “rediscovered”4 every so oft en, belongs to the most well-known authors of Gilded Age and fi n de siècle America. “Bitter Bierce,” sarcastic commentator of his time and countrymen, was among the most well-known journalists on the U.S. west coast from the 1880s onward and attained some national fame at the turn of the century.5 His stories “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga” are U.S. short fi ction staples.6 Along short prose

1 Ambrose Bierce, “George Thurston” (1883/93), The Ambrose Bierce Project, (Last access March 10, 2015), http://www.ambrosebierce.org/works.html (emphasis in original). As Donald T. Blume, Ambrose Bierce’s Soldiers and Civilians in Context: A Critical Study (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2004) states, there are differences between versions of stories published first in magazines and newspapers on the one hand and in book collections like Ambrose Bierce, Tales of Soldiers and Civi- lians (San Francisco: E. L. G. Steele, 1891) on the other. In this paper, I use the later versions. For ease of (online) access, all Bierce texts, unless otherwise stated, are taken from The Ambrose Bierce Project. 2 Ambrose Bierce, “Prattle,” San Francisco Examiner, June 12, 1887, quoted in Paul Fatout, The Devil’s Lexicographer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), 159. 3 “A Horseman in the Sky” (1888/91). 4 Cathy N. Davidson, “Introduction,” in Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), 1-10, here 1. Also Brooks Van Wyck, “The Letters of Ambrose Bierce,” in ibid., 65-69, here 67: “‘I have pretty nearly ceased to be ‘discovered,’ but my notoriety as an obscu- rian may be said to be worldwide and apparently everlasting.’” 5 e.g. Roy Morris Jr., Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 261. This is the latest biography of Bierce’s whole life in monograph form. 6 e.g. Craig A. Warren, “From the Editor,” The Ambrose Bierce Project Journal 1:1 (2005), http:// www.ambrosebierce.org/journal.html.

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Fig. 1 Map from: William B. Hazen, A Narrative of Military Service (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1885).

and (opinion editorial) journalism, Bierce wrote poetry and his (in)famous Th e Dev- il’s Dictionary epigrams.7 Judging from scholarly works written on Bierce and his

7 The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce vols. I-XII (New York: Neale, 1909-1912) do only list the texts Bierce himself felt worthy enough to be included, Morris, 243. His short fiction has been com- prehensively collected in The Short Fiction of Ambrose Bierce: A Comprehensive Edition vols. I-III, eds. Lawrence I. Berkove, S. T. Joshi and David. E. Schultz (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006). Joshi and Schultz have also published A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography (Knoxvil- le: The University of Tennessee Press, 1998), a collection of autobiographic texts, and A Much Mi- sunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2003).

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