The tone of “Chickamauga” is darkly ironic, cynical, and resigned. Though the child is having a grand adventure for most of the story, the narrator is clearly aware of all that the child cannot comprehend about the brutal realities of war. While the child sees the hundreds of wounded soldiers moving through the woods as part of his make-believe games, the narrator understands how deeply injured and traumatized they are, as evident in the following passage:
But on and ever on they crept, these maimed and bleeding men, as heedless as he of the dramatic contrast between his laughter and their own ghastly gravity. To him it was a merry spectacle.
The narrator’s tone here comes across as cynical, as they juxtapose the “ghastly gravity” of the “maimed and bleeding men” with the child’s laughter, even noting “the dramatic contrast” directly. The minimalist way in which the narrator states the child’s take on this scene as a “merry spectacle” communicates their resigned and melancholic tone.
Though it’s impossible to know if the narrator is a stand-in for Bierce himself, the narrator seems to know something about the horrors of war, the way that Bierce, as a Civil War veteran, also did. It’s possible that the resigned and cynical tone of the story emerged from Bierce himself, who left his experience as a soldier embittered and traumatized. In this story—as in many of his stories—he is seeking to encourage readers to understand the truly appalling and gruesome realities of war.
