The mood of “Chickamauga” is haunting and devastating. While the story starts off lighthearted—with the child playing make-believe war games with himself and facing off with a rabbit—it quickly shifts into an eerie and unsettling place when the boy finds himself lost in the woods. The mood shifts into a more horrifying and disturbing place as the wounded soldiers emerge, almost zombie-like, from the woods in which the child finds himself, as seen in the following passage:
Through the belt of trees beyond the brook shone a strange red light, the trunks and branches of the trees making a black lacework against it. It struck the creeping figures and gave them monstrous shadows, which caricatured their movements on the lit grass. It fell upon their faces, touching their whiteness with a ruddy tinge, accentuating the stains with which so many of them were freaked and maculated.
By focusing on the interplay of the “strange red light,” the “black lacework” of the trees, and the “monstrous shadows” of the “creeping figures,” Bierce effectively shifts the story into an eerie register. It is not only the figures’ shadows, but their faces, too, that Bierce captures with unsettling language, calling them “freaked” and “maculated,” and noting the contrast of their “whiteness” and red stains (likely from their blood).
“Chickamauga” shifts into an even darker register in the final moments of the story, as the narrator reveals that the child’s family has been burned alive inside their home. Here, the child is finally forced out of his fantasy land and confronts the losses of war for the first time. With this conclusion, Bierce indicates that war targets people indiscriminately and that no one is safe from its devastating effects.
