Bierce’s writing style in “Chickamauga” features poetic language and rich imagery. The story starts off with the narrator using expressive language when introducing the child, such as the fact that his “spirit, in bodies of its ancestors, had for thousands of years been trained to memorable feats of discovery and conquest.” This lofty language helps readers understand the child’s romantic idea of war.
The language remains just as poetic and imagistic later in the story, but it switches into a much darker key as the narrator describes the wounded soldiers crawling their way through the woods. In one moment, the narrator compares one of the soldiers to “a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry.” Again, Bierce’s language has a romantic grandiosity to it, but this time it is describing the bloodied, jaw-less appearance of a dying soldier. Bierce’s switch from a romantic style of writing to a darkly romantic style allows him to keeps readers engaged while also helping them understand an important point he is making about war—namely, that glorifying war dangerously obscures its brutal and devastating reality.
Another important element of the style is the way that the narrator adds brief asides rather than staying close to the child’s perspective throughout. Take the following passage, for example, which comes as the child first notices the soldiers retreating through the woods:
Some, pausing, made strange gestures with their hands, erected their arms and lowered them again, clasped their heads; spread their palms upward, as men are sometimes seen to do in public prayer.
Not all of this did the child note; it is what would have been noted by an elder observer; he saw little but that these were men, yet crept like babes.
Here, the narrator shares details about the “strange gestures” and movements of the soldiers as if they were engaged in “public prayer” before noting that the child was unable to see these gestures for what they were. This moment allow readers to confront the reality (and agony) of the scene before them rather than staying in the child’s imagination with him. The narrator expects the readers—or “elder observers”—to understand just how wounded and desperate these soldiers are as they likely call out for help in their final moments.
