In the Library
In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians
Ambrose Bierce, 1909
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 27
- Length
- Length 76k words
£1.99
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A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below.
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About the book
The rope is already around his neck. Bierce sets a man on the ties of Owl Creek Bridge, hands bound behind him, and then lets a few seconds swell until an entire life of longing pours through them. He had been in that war himself, at Shiloh and Kennesaw Mountain, where a bullet went into his skull, and it tells in the cold courtesy he brings to atrocity. A sentry on a cliff sights his rifle on a Confederate horseman and recognises his own father. A deaf child wanders out past his father's house into the wood, and comes back through a field of men crawling on their hands, delighted, playing at generals, because he cannot hear a sound they make. No one else writes cruelty this politely: the sentences are trim, ironic, almost gentlemanly, and they give way beneath you like a trapdoor. What these stories know, and will not let you unknow, is that a man's worst moment tends to arrive wearing the uniform of his duty.