奇卡莫加isCherokeefor “bad water,” the name a branch of the tribe gave to the creek alongside which they lived in the northwest corner of Georgia when they were decimated by an outbreak of smallpox. Subsequent historians dubbed Chickamauga Creek the “River of Death” (Morris 56); the Civil War’s Battle of Chickamauga on September 19–20, 1863, was “the largest battle in the western theater of operations and the bloodiest two-day encounter of the entire war” (Morris 61), with Union and Confederate casualties estimated at 16,000 and 20,000, respectively (McPherson 674–675).
安布罗斯·比尔斯（Ambrose Bierce）（1842年出生）是一个印第安纳农场男孩，他于1861年入伍，参加了这场战斗，在他的故事《奇卡莫加》（Chickamauga）（1889年）中，他不仅准确地描述了地形的战术军事方面，而且还描述还以可怕的细节捕捉了战争的恐怖。Bierce用他作为提前侦察兵和地形工程师获得的专业知识来实现这一目标（参见“ Chickamauga的一点” [1898]，Collected WorksI, 275) and with the dual-narrative perspective he uses in having an adult tell the story of a six-year-old farm boy’s first and shattering experience of war. This “child” strays “one sunny autumn afternoon” from his “home in a small field” and enters “a forest unobserved.” He is “the son of a poor planter,” who “in his younger manhood . . . had been a soldier,” in whom “the warrior-fire survived” and from whose “military books and pictures” the boy has made himself “a wooden sword,” which he now recklessly brandishes as he advances with ease in the forest against “invisible foes.” Here Bierce (cf. “A Little of Chickamauga,”Collected WorksI, 271, 274) has the boy duplicate the Union general William S. Rosencrans’s tactical blunder when he incautiously advanced south from Chattanooga, by noting that the boy was committing “the common enough military error of pushing the pursuit to a dangerous extreme,” arriving at “a wide but shallow brook,” whose “rapid waters” he nevertheless crosses and vanquishes “the rear-guard of his invisible foe.” However, he is then frightened by “a rabbit,” from which he flees, “calling with inarticulate cries for his mother,” and eventually sobs himself to sleep between two rocks near the stream. Meanwhile, “the wood birds sing merrily above his head,” and “somewhere far away was a strange, muffled thunder.”
当他在暮光之城醒来时，他看到“在他面前是一个奇怪的动人物体，他认为这是一只大动物 - 一只狗，一只猪 - 他无法命名。也许是熊。”但是，随着它的临近，他勇敢地说：“因为他看到至少它没有兔子的长期险恶的耳朵。”然后他注意到“右边和左边还有更多；他周围的整个开放空间都与他们一起生活 - 所有人都向布鲁克移动。”叙述者将这些生物识别为受伤的士兵从战场上拖走自己，寻求一个喝酒或死亡的地方：“他们是男人。他们爬到手和膝盖上。。。。 They came by the dozens and by hundreds. . . . Occasionally one who had paused did not again go on, but lay motionless. He was dead. Some, pausing, made strange gestures with their hands, erected their arms and lowered them again, clasped their heads, spread their palms upward. . . .” The boy jumps on one of the crawling soldiers, thinking he can ride him as he had often ridden his father’s slaves “for his amusement.” The soldier collapses but turns “a face that lacked a lower jaw,” and “from the upper teeth to the throat was a red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone,” which gave him “the appearance of a great bird of prey.” Meanwhile, the soldiers “moved forward down the slope like a swarm of great black beetles.” The narrator reinforces the animal imagery by comparing the trail of their discarded equipment to “the ‘spoor’ of men flying from their hunters.”
Ambrose Bierce/The Paris Review
Fire “on the farther side of the creek” was “now suffusing the whole landscape,” and the boy, ahead of the crawling soldiers, crosses the creek and heads for the fire “across a field,” where he recognizes “the blazing building as his own home” and finds the body of his mother, “the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood,” and “The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.” “Looking down upon the wreck,” the boy utters “a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey.” The “child,” only now revealed to be “a deaf mute,” is brutally brought face to face with the horrific reality of war in ironic contrast to his war games in the forest.
In its review (February 20, 1892), theLondon Atheneumobjected to Bierce’s focus on “the minutest details of bodily and mental pain,” most gruesomely in “Chickamauga,” in which the reviewer mistakenly notes that the child “was struck deaf and dumb” by the sight of his dead mother. The雅典娜found this “extremely unsuitable for young readers, to whom it is surely more wholesome to present the nobler side of war” (Critical Essays15–16）。的确，无论是在维多利亚时代的英格兰还是在美国，内战已被描绘了数十年“通过平民浪漫的光环”（Grattan 137），比尔斯的内战故事都震惊了读者。在其评论（1898年3月）中In the Midst of Life(New York, 1898), however, the Nation praised “Chickamauga” as “an allegory” and noted that “this volume could not have been revived at a more opportune moment,” just before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War (April–August 1898), and that it therefore deserved “the widest circulation as a peace tract of the first order, in the present craze for bloodshed” (Critical Essays16). After the republication of the English edition (1915) during World War I, the伦敦意见cited Bierce “as one of the greatest masters in depicting the horrors of war” and called him “the veritable Goya of literature” (Critical Essays47). Although he has remained in the shadow ofStephen Crane(1871–1900), whose novelThe Red Badge of Courage(1895) has become a classic, Bierce, too, is a worthy forerunner of such 20th-century American war writers asErnest Hemingwayor Tim O’Brien.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/chickamauga-short-story
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bierce, Ambrose. “Chickamauga” (1889). In Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. San Francisco, Calif.: Steele, 1892. ———. “Chickamauga.” The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce. Vol. 2. New York/Washington: Neale, 1909. ———. “Chickamauga.” In The Civil War Stories of Ambrose Bierce, edited by Ernest J. Hopkins. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (Bison Books), 1988. ———. In the Midst of Life—Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. London: Chatto & Windus, 1892. ———. “A Little of Chickamauga” (1898). In The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce. Vol. 1. New York/Washington: Neale, 1909. Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Short Fiction. Edited by Richard Fusco. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003. Davidson, Cathy N., ed. Critical Essays on Ambrose Bierce. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Gale, Robert L. An Ambrose Bierce Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Goya, Francisco. The Disasters of War. Edited by Philip Hofer. New York: Dover, 1967. (Translation of Los Desastres de la Guerra, Madrid, 1863.) Grattan, C. Hartley. Bitter Bierce: A Mystery of American Letters. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. 1988. Reprint, New York: Ballantine Books, 1989. Morris, Roy, Jr. Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998
Categories:美国文学，，，，Literary Criticism，，，，Literature，，，，Short Story
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