While watching the wounded soldiers retreat from the battlefield—many of whom are crawling on their knees—the child decides it is time to play horse with one of them. When capturing this interaction, the narrator uses both a simile and a metaphor, as seen in the following passage:
The man sank upon his breast, recovered, flung the small boy fiercely to the ground as an unbroken colt might have done, then turned upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw — from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry.
Here, the narrator compares the soldier to two different types of animals. First, they use a simile to describe how the crawling soldier “flung the small boy fiercely to the ground as an unbroken colt might have done.” While the child wants the soldier to pretend to be a horse under his control, the soldier instead behaves as an untrained colt, signaling that he is far too wounded to go along with the whims of a child.
The metaphor here—in which the narrator describes the soldier as “a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry”—also communicates how injured and suffering the man is. He resembles a bird of prey because his chin has been shot off and the blood from that injury has dripped down his throat and chest.
The discrepancy between what the narrator imagines this soldier to be (a lively young horse and an efficient predatory bird) and what he actually is (a deeply wounded man barely hanging on to life) is notable. Much of Bierce’s story is about how people—like the child and his father—are unable to see the brutal realities of war, preferring the fantasy instead.
