When capturing the child’s experience while watching the wounded soldiers crawl through the woods, the narrator uses a simile, as seen in the following passage:
And so the clumsy multitude dragged itself slowly and painfully along in hideous pantomime — moved forward down the slope like a swarm of great black beetles, with never a sound of going — in silence profound, absolute.
In comparing the group of soldiers to “a swarm of great black beetles,” the narrator helps readers understand how the child is making sense of this scene. He has never witnessed wounded people collectively in motion like this (as he has never fallen asleep right by a battlefield before), and he therefore compares the men to something he does know—swarms of beetles. Here, the child (via the narrator) uses his imagination to make sense of what he’s witnessing and, in a way, the scene becomes even more horrific because of it.
While the narrator separates from the child’s perspective at times to offer context, it is clear that the narrator is channeling the child’s experience here, given that these beetle-like men move in “profound” and “absolute” silence. This is because, as readers learn later, the child is deaf.
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.
