Contents

• Ambrose Bierce on History, Memory, and Literature: "A Sole Survivor"
• Introduction: Fighting and Writing the Civil War
• Ch. 1. Patricide in the House Divided, 1861. A Thin Blue Ghost. Battlefields and Ghosts. One Kind of Officer. The Mocking-Bird. A Horseman in the Sky. Defending Realism I. A Tough Tussle. On a Mountain. Jupiter Doke, Brigadier- General. Two Fantastic Fables: Equipped for Service and The Mysterious Word. The Professional Officer
• Ch. 2. What War Really is, 1862. What I Saw of Shiloh. Defending General Buell. Two Military Executions. On Military Executions. An Affair of Outposts. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The Coup de Grace
• Ch. 3. A True War Story is Never Moral, 1863. Stone’s River. A Baffled Ambuscade. On Military Punishments. Three and One Are One. The Affair at Coulter’s Notch. Defending Realism II. George Thurston. The Story of a Conscience. Parker Adderson, Philosopher. One Officer, One Man. On Chickamauga. Chickamauga. A Little of Chickamauga. More on Chickamauga. Letter to Colonel Archibald Gracie. General Wood’s Command. General Grant and the Poisoned Chalice
• Ch. 4. War is all Hell, 1864. Bierce’s Map of the Battlefield of Resaca. Killed at Resaca. Bierce’s Map of the Battlefield of Pickett’s Mill. The Crime at Pickett’s Mill. On General O. O. Howard. On Prayer in Battle. My Dear Clara. One of the Missing. A Son of the Gods: A Study in the Present Tense. Defending Realism III. Four Days in Dixie. What Occurred at Franklin. On General Schofield. The Body Count at Franklin. The Major’s Tale. The Battle of Nashville: An Attack of General Debility. On Black Soldiering
• Ch. 5. Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period, 1865 and Later. ‘Way Down in Alabam’. The Other Lodgers. A Resumed Identity. The Nature of War. Modern Warfare. A’Soldiering for Freedom. The Hesitating Veteran. Invocation. The Death of Grant. Contentment. The Death of General Grant. At a "National Encampment" On Jefferson Davis’s Death. The Confederate Flags. To E. S. Salomon. A Travel Letter to George. A Year’s "Casualties" A Bivouac of the Dead. A Letter from D.C. Fragments from Last Letters