Chickamauga

“Advancing from the bank of the creek he suddenly found himself confronted with a new and more formidable enemy: in the path that he was following, sat, bolt upright, with ears erect and paws suspended before it, a rabbit!”

There is some plain irony in the fact of this boy, who has been fighting a pretend battle, being suddenly frightened by a rabbit. Yet his fear also emphasizes his childishness and helplessness, beneath his brave soldier act.  

“The wood birds sang merrily above his head; the squirrels, whisking their bravery of tail, ran barking from tree to tree, unconscious of the pity of it, and somewhere far away was a strange, muffled thunder, as if the partridges were drumming in celebration of nature’s victory over the son of her immemorial enslavers.”

The “strange muffled thunder” is actually the sounds of war, as we will find out later in the story. Even so, the boy sleeps through it, soothed by the immediate sounds of the forest. The natural world often appears in this story as an element that is beyond man’s control, however even if he might try to “enslave” it. In this case, the placid singing of the birds and running of the squirrels is at odds with the battle going on not far away, and briefly puts that battle in perspective. 

“Before it had approached enough to restore his doubts he saw that it was followed by another and another.”

The boy does not realize at first that the wounded soldiers are men, and his incomprehension serves to make the soldiers strange and horrifying to the reader as well. In not giving the soldiers an immediate label, the boy in some ways sees them more clearly, as the ambiguous frightening creatures that they are.  

“They came by dozens and by hundreds; as far on either hand as one could see in the deepening gloom they extended and the black wood behind them appeared to be inexhaustible.”

While the soldiers are wounded and in many cases dying, the boy does not yet realize this, and this description of them makes them seem swarming and “inexhaustible,” more like bugs than people. It gets at a certain reality about war and the bottomless drive to conquer, even if it is incorrect about the soldiers themselves.

“He was dead.”

This sentence is terse and blunt, compared to the elaborate rhetorical language of much of this story. It serves to emphasize the shock and the bluntness of what it is describing. 

“To him it was a merry spectacle.”

The soldiers amuse the child, with their blood-streaked faces and how they, their crawling in place of walking, and he considers them to be like clowns. Yet we also understand his reaction to be more complex than that. He is relieved that they are men, disoriented by having been lost in a dark forest, and confused by their lack of reaction to him. Even if these deeper reactions are not spelled out to the reader, the atmosphere of the story conveys them.

“Instinctively the child turned toward the growing splendor and moved down the slope with his horrible companions; in a few moments had passed the foremost of the throng—not much of a feat, considering his advantages.”

This is one instance in the story where the tone is slightly light and ironic, despite the awfulness of the scene that is being described. The irony in this context has a complicated effect, making the reader feel a disturbing combination of intimacy and distance. 

“He had slept through it all, grasping his little wooden sword with perhaps a tighter clutch in unconscious sympathy with his martial environment, but as heedless of the grandeur of the struggle as the dead who had died to make the glory.”

It is one instance of irony in this story that the boy, who has been taught to valorize soldiers and battle, ends up sleeping through a fight. At the same time, his experience in some ways brings him closer to the reality of the soldiers whom he has revered and imitated. He learns that there is more to war than actual fighting, including being hungry, stranded, and lost—experiences that do not necessarily involve very much ““grandeur.”

“The fire beyond the belt of the woods on the farther side of the creek, reflected to earth from the canopy of its own smoke, was now suffusing the whole landscape.”

The boy first sees the fire from a distance, as a subtle, “suffusing” force rather than a destructive one. At the same time, there is something sinister about this description. It suggests a light that comes from no fixed location, but that seems to emanate from everywhere at once, like an apocalypse.

“Three or four who lay without motion appeared to have no heads.”

This brief description of decapitated soldiers shows the boy’s confused and fleeting impressions of the devastation surrounding him. He notices first that the soldiers are motionless, and only later that they are headless. The strange offhandedness of “appeared to have no heads”—as if a much subtler and less significant loss were being described—shows how unreal the scene is to him, too horrifying for him to absorb all at once.   

“Desolation everywhere! In all the wide glare not a living thing was visible. He cared nothing for that; the spectacle pleased, and he danced with glee in imitation of the wavering flames.”

The boy is initially drawn towards the fire because of the warmth and light that it gives off. However, this scene also shows that he is drawn towards its outsized destructiveness, and its distance from all things living. The story as a whole suggests that the boy’s attraction to the fire is not unique, but is common to many boys and men who valorize war.

“There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman—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.”

This description of the boy’s dead mother is much more detailed than those of the previous dead bodies that the boy has seen. Where those descriptions simply suggest corpses, this description suggests someone who was recently alive; words such as “clutched” and “deranged” evoke her struggle to hold on to her life. Although she is a wife and mother—or, perhaps, because of this—the words used to describe her dead body are far more active and vital than those used to describe the dead soldiers. The description shows how much more real her death is to the boy than those deaths that he has already witnessed.  

“His little world swung half around; the points of the compass were reversed.”

This sentence evokes the boy’s disorientation upon learning that his own house has been burned down. However, it is notable to remember that he has been lost and disoriented since the beginning of the story. The effect of this final disorientation is therefore less shocking than it is dizzying, and shows how the horrors of war accumulate faster than can be absorbed.