In “Chickamauga,” set during the American Civil War, a six-year old child in northwestern Georgia wanders into the forest carrying a wooden toy sword to play at being a soldier. As the child wanders deeper into the forest, the narrator provides information about the boy’s father: he is a poor planter, and in his younger manhood he had been a soldier. Even now, the father still loves soldiering and often looks at books about war. As the child enjoys his adventure he commits the “common enough military error of pushing the pursuit to a dangerous extreme”—he’s lost, but doesn’t know it yet.
After the boy successfully crosses a stream, he briefly celebrates this “victory” before encountering a rabbit. The child is so afraid of this rabbit that he turns and flees, calls out inarticulate cries for his mother, weeps, stumbles, and then wanders around for an hour before relizing he is lost and sobbing himself to sleep, clutching his toy sword. As he sleeps, birds sing and squirrels run around, and somewhere far off there is a strange, muffled thunder, “as if the partridges were drumming in celebration of nature’s victory over her immemorial enslavers.” Hours pass before the child gets up, and by then the chill of evening has arrived. The boy is frightened by a ghostly mist rising off of the stream, then he notices a strange moving object which at first he cannot identify. He fears it might be another wild animal like a dog, pig, or bear. He then realizes this is not one creature, but many creatures, one followed by another.
The child finally realizes these are men, creeping on their hands and knees instead of walking. They come by the dozens and the hundreds, surrounded by the “deepening gloom” of the woods around them. Occasionally, a man stops crawling and does not go on again, because he is dead. In reality, the men are soldiers. However, the narrator tells us that the child does not note all of the details; they are “what would have been noted by an elder observer.” The child seems to be comforted by the fact that they are men as opposed to wild animals, and does not seem to worry about or even notice the extent of their wounds. The men remind the child of a circus clown he saw the previous summer, and he laughs as he watches them, viewing them as “a merry spectacle.” He remembers riding his father’s slaves like horses for his own amusement, and attempts to do the same thing with the soldiers. The man that he climbs on flings the boy off, though, and shakes his fist at the child. The boy, “terrified at last,” runs to a nearby tree, and the soldiers drag themselves on.
The boy continues to move down the slope towards the stream along with these crawling, staggering men, He places himself in the lead and directs the march, still playing soldier. The forest is littered with objects that are remnants of battle, such as knapsacks and broken rifles, and the ground has been trodden into mud by the tracks of men and horses going in both directions. But again, the narrator tells us that the child does not notice all of this. It is still implied at this point that the child’s age is the sole reason why he does not notice everything that is going on around him.
A fire is burning on the belt of woods on the other side of the stream, and is “now suffusing the whole landscape.” The stream and stones surrounding it are red with blood. The narrator reveals more gruesome details about the soldiers, such as that some of them are so wounded that they drown when they try to drink water. The child waves his cap in encouragement of the soldiers and points his toy sword in the direction of the fire as a “guiding light.”
When the child reaches the fire, there is a blazing ruin of a building, and not a living thing is visible, but he is focused on the fire, which excites him, and dances in imitation of the flames. He runs around trying to collect fuel for the fire, but everything he finds is too heavy for him to throw into it, so he throws in his toy sword, which the narrator says is “a surrender to the superior forces of nature.” The narrator also tells us the child’s military career is over.
The child notices some outbuildings in the distance that look strangely familiar, but he cannot place them at first. Suddenly he realizes he is looking at his own plantation home and the surrounding forest, and that all of it is on fire. He runs around the ruin, and discovers the dead body of a white women who appears to have been shot in the head. It is his mother. The child makes wild and uncertain gestures and, for the second time in the story, he utters a series of inarticulate animal-like cries, but this time the narrator reveals that the child is deaf and mute. The child stands still, looking down at the body of his dead mother.
