'I Took Off My Hat to This Little Fool'

“Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes? -- that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque?” 

The Battle of Shiloh started in southwestern Tennessee on this date, April 6, in 1862. Casualty estimates total almost 24,000 in two days of fighting – the bloodiest engagement on American soil up to that time. Union forces, though victorious, lost more men than the Confederates.  

 

Among the combatants was Ambrose Bierce, a first lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. He was nineteen years old. In 1881, Bierce published his nonfiction account of the battle, “What I Saw at Shiloh,” from which the passage at the top is drawn. It’s the source of the title of an excellent volume, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (eds. Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster, 2002).

 

Bierce’s account is typical of his prose, fiction and otherwise – terse, utterly unsentimental and often witty. His eye, as usual, is focused on the odd detail, not the wide-angle scene:

 

 “There was, I remember, no elephant on the boat that passed us across that evening, nor, I think, any hippopotamus. These would have been out of place. We had, however, a woman. Whether the baby was somewhere on board I did not learn. She was a fine creature, this woman; somebody’s wife. Her mission, as she understood it, was to inspire the failing heart with courage; and when she selected mine I felt less flattered by her preference than astonished by her penetration. How did she learn? She stood on the upper deck with the red blaze of battle bathing her beautiful face, the twinkle of a thousand rifles mirrored in her eyes; and displaying a small ivory-handled pistol, she told me in a sentence punctuated by the thunder of great guns that if it came to the worst she would do her duty like a man! I am proud to remember that I took off my hat to this little fool.”

 

Bierce romanticizes nothing and sounds remarkably modern, almost contemporary:

“At Shiloh, during the first day’s fighting, wide tracts of woodland were burned over in this way and scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture. I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was destroyed, as it very well deserved. My regiment having at last been relieved at the guns and moved over to the heights above this ravine for no obvious purpose, I obtained leave to go down into the valley of death and gratify a reprehensible curiosity.”

Bierce served for four years during the war and saw action at Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Kenesaw Mountain (where he was severely wounded), Franklin and Nashville. I shared my appreciation for Bierce with R.L. Barth, a poet and Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, who replied:

“‘What I Saw at Shiloh’ is indeed a great piece of nonfiction. I think he’s one of America’s greatest writers on the subject of war, but he doesn’t seem to have much of a reputation as one. For the most part, if I see him mentioned it’s for his life, his attitude toward life, his spooky stories, or of course The Devil’s Dictionary. And yet, the best of his Civil War stories are extraordinary explorations of aspects of war.” 

For a strategic account of the battle, see what Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wrote about Shiloh in Chap. XXIV of his Personal Memoirs (1885-86):

  

“Ifs defeated the Confederates at Shiloh. There is little doubt that we would have been disgracefully beaten if the shells and bullets fired by us had passed harmlessly over the enemy and if all of theirs had taken effect. . . . There was, in fact, no hour during the day when I doubted the eventual defeat of the enemy, although I was disappointed that reinforcements so near at hand did not arrive at an earlier hour.”