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7 Collateral Damage: Civilians and the Human Cost of War . . . generally war is destruction and nothing else. —William Tecumseh Sherman sBiercereflectsinstoriessuchas“KilledatResaca”and“ParkerAdderson, Philosopher,” soldiers were the most obvious victims of Civil War society ’s hero-system. Civilians, meanwhile, supported the war effort by fulfilling the gate-keeping and recruiting functions necessary to maintain the integrity of the hero-system and its membership. Gerald F. Linderman explains that, in urging enlistment, “[t]he influence of home was profound. Soldiers’ families enforced and reinforced the centrality of courage.” Parents repeatedly “admonished their sons first to be brave and then to be careful.” When a soldier died, family and loved ones “at home hoped desperately for last words that would confirm that their soldier had preserved his decency” (83, 86, 87). Nevertheless, as they labored to sustain the Civil War hero-system, civilians became as much its victims as its perpetrators. In her study of death during the Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust argues, War victimized civilians as well as soldiers, and uncounted numbers of noncombatants perished as a direct result of the conflict. The war’s circumstances created a variety of ways for ordinary Americans to die: from violence that extended beyond soldiers and battles, from diseases that spread beyond military camps, from hardships and shortages that enveloped a broad swatch of the American—and especially the southern—population. It was, in Collateral Damage 84 Abraham Lincoln’s words, a “people’s contest,” and the people suffered its cruelties. (137) No systematic accounting has ever been made of civilian casualties, which for the most part have remained unacknowledged; however, James M. McPherson estimates that the war resulted in fifty thousand civilian deaths in the South (Battle Cry of Freedom 619n53). Bierce was not blind to such suffering and loss, and it is perhaps significant that his two best-known and most-acclaimed short stories, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Chickamauga,” focus on the cost in southern civilian lives that the Civil War entailed. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” depicts the death by hanging of Peyton Farquhar, a wealthy southern planter who has been caught trying to sabotage a railroad bridge in northern Alabama. In introducing the story, however, Bierce first provides a detailed description of the scene of the execution before formally introducing the reader to its victim. The first sentence of the original 1890 version of the tale specifically sets the event in the summer of 1862, but in later versions, Bierce edited out the dating. David M. Owens speculates that Bierce moved the location of the bridge, which actually is located near Shiloh Church in Tennessee, so that it could legitimately be presented as a railroad bridge. Bierce was himself in northern Alabama in the summer of 1862 to repair the railroad line, and critical sections of this railroad were destroyed by the Confederates in late September 1864 to prevent the Union army from using it (Owens 49–51). Bierce first describes the scene through the perspective of an unidentified third-person observer-narrator, using precise details and military language. “A man” stands on a temporary platform on the bridge, “looking down into the swift water twenty feet below.” His hands are “behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircle[s] his neck.” The preparations for the hanging are carried out by “two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant. . . . At a short remove upon the same temporary platform [is] an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He [is] a Captain.” In addition a sentinel is positioned “at each end of the bridge . . . with his rifle in the position known as ‘support,’ that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest—a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It [does] not appear to be the duty of these two men,” Bierce adds, to know what is “occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.” Beyond the sentinels stand “the spectators—a single company of infantry in line, at ‘parade rest,’ the butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant [stands] at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon...

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