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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Chickamauga, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fantasy of War vs. Reality of War
Humanity vs. Nature
Reality vs. Imagination
Summary
Analysis
One afternoon a six-year old child wanders alone into the forest near his “rude” home, carrying a wooden toy sword. The child is playing soldier, delighting in the freedom of the forest and the opportunity for exploration, just as—the narrator of the story explains—the child’s ancestors “had for thousands of years been trained to memorable feats of discovery and conquest” and had “conquered its way through two continents” such that the boy was born “to war and dominion as a heritage.”
The child’s creation of a toy sword immediately establishes his perspective that war is a game to play at. At first, it might seem simple to chalk up the child’s attitude about war to his age, since it’s common for small children to play with toy versions of weapons. However, the narrator quickly provides information about the child’s ancestors that makes it impossible for the reader to dismiss his attitude as simply being a product of his youth. The boy’s ancestors have been participating in actual wars, conquering land and engaging in colonialism and slavery for generations. This suggests that the boy thinks the way he does—that war is a glorious game—because he has inherited that idea from his ancestors, who viewed actual war in the same way. The narrator’s tone and language throughout this early part of the story is also important. The language is so over-the-top grandiose that it can be read as sarcastic mockery; the narrator thinks these simple ideas of war are silly.
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Themes
The child’s father is a poor planter, who in his youth was a soldier who had “fought naked savages” and still loved “military books and pictures” that he looked at with the boy. The child created the toy sword in imitation of his father, even though the narrator comments that the father would perhaps not be able to identify the toy sword as a sword if he saw it. The child carries his toy sword bravely, as befitted “the son of an heroic race.” He imitates the postures and movements of soldiers as he wanders deeper into the forest.
Not only is the boy’s view of war something he inherited from his ancestors—he learned it directly from his father. The boy’s father’s view of war is worth considering: it focuses on an idea of bringing order and civilization to the uncivilized and natural—i.e. “savages.” The father clearly finds this idea of war noble, but once again the narrator’s tone suggests that the idea itself is, at best, naïve. That the narrator establishes that the child inherited his viewpoint about war from his family at the very beginning of the story implies that the narrator wants the reader to understand this connection before narrating the events of the story. The outcome of the story are not to be blamed on this young naïve boy, but rather on the ideas of war in the culture and society that produced him.
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Themes
The child soon becomes “reckless by the ease with which he overcame invisible foes” and commits “the common enough military error of pushing the advance to a dangerous extreme.” He wanders too far into the woods, without knowing it, and comes to a wide but shallow brook with rapid waters. After he successfully crosses the stream, he briefly celebrates this victory, and the narrator says that, like many other conquerors, he cannot “curb the lust for war / Nor learn that tempted fate will leave the loftiest star.”
Soon after the child crosses the stream, though, he encounters the “new and more formidable enemy” of a rabbit. The child, terrified, turns and runs, calls with “inarticulate cries” for his mother, and weeps and stumbles through the forest, suddenly realizing that he is lost. After more than an hour he becomes so exhausted that he sobs himself to sleep while clutching his toy sword, which is “no longer a weapon but a companion.”
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As the boy sleeps, animals move and sing around him, 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.” The narrator reveals that back at the “little plantation,” white and black men search for the boy in the fields and hedges in alarm, and the mother’s heart breaks for her missing child.
Hours pass before the boy wakes up and rises to his feet. He feels the chill of evening, but no longer cries, even when he is frightened by a ghostly mist rising off the stream. Suddenly, he sees a strange moving object. At first he can’t identify what it is, and thinks that it might be another wild animal such as a pig, dog, or even a bear. As the object gets closer, the boy realizes it is a group of objects rather than one. He gains some courage when he notices that at least these objects do not have the “long, menacing ears of the rabbit.” Then he realizes they are men, and that there are many of them..
The men creep on their hands and knees by the dozens and the hundreds through the deep gloom of the woods. Some of the men try to rise to their feet, but fall back down to their knees. Occasionally one of the men who pauses moving doesn’t start again—that man has died. Some men seem to make movements as if praying. The narrator comments that the boy actually didn’t notice all of these details, which are things that would have been noticed by an “elder observer.”
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Literary Devices
The boy just sees that they are men, though they are wearing unfamiliar clothes and crawl on their hands and knees like babies. The boy wanders among them curiously, peering into their faces. The men remind the child of a clown he saw the past summer, because their faces are white and streaked with red. He laughs while he watches them. Meanwhile, as these “maimed and bleeding men” keep crawling onward, the child delights in this ”merry spectacle.”
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Literary Devices
The narrator notes that the child used to sometimes ride on the backs of his father’s slaves as if they were horses, and now he tries to do the same to one of the men. However, the man flings him off and shakes his fist at the boy. The man has no lower jaw, and the boy, finally frightened, runs and hides behind a tree.
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The men continue crawling toward the stream, like a “swarm of great black beetles.” Rather than darkening with the coming of night, the forest brightens as a “strange red light” glows in the distance. After a moment the boy comes out and places himself ahead of the men in order to direct the march with his wooden sword. The narrator states: “Surely such a leader never before had such a following.”
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The narrator notes that the ground is littered with broken rifles, bedrolls, and knapsacks—the sorts of things associated with retreating soldiers, of troops who are “flying from their hunters.” But again, the child does not make these associations.
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The narrator reveals that a few hours before, a battle had occurred between thousands of soldiers, and the boy had slept through it all, grasping his sword “with perhaps a tighter clutch in unconscious sympathy with his martial environment.” In fact, the battle was so close to the boy that the soldiers almost trampled him as he slept, but still he did not wake up. The narrator comments that the sleeping boy was as “heedless of the grandeur of the struggle as the dead who had died to make the glory.”
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The fire at the edge of the woods now glows everywhere, its light reflected back down by its own hovering smoke. The water of the stream toward which the soldiers are headed gleams red with reflected firelight, and some stones in the stream are red with blood. The soldiers who reach the stream plunge in their heads to drink. Some are too weak to lift their heads again and drown. These men look headless, and the child regards them with wonder. The boy, still leading the soldiers, smiles and encourages them onward by pointing his sword toward the “guiding light” of the fire on the other side of the stream.
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Themes
The boy emerges from the forest and is awed and excited by the tremendous fire. Leaving the soldiers behind, he climbs a fence, runs across a field, and finds the blazing ruin of a dwelling. The boy is delighted by the desolation. He can’t see a single living thing around him, but “he cared nothing for that; the spectacle pleased, and he danced with glee in imitation of the wavering flames.” He runs around trying to collect fuel to feed the fire, but everything he finds is too heavy for him to handle. So, “in despair,” he flings in his toy sword, “a surrender to the superior forces of nature.” The narrator comments that the boy’s “military career is at an end.”
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Themes
The boy then sees some outbuildings in the distance that look strangely familiar, as if he has seen them before in a dream. He looks at them for a moment, trying to figure out what they are, when suddenly he realizes he is looking at his own home, burning. He is momentarily stunned, then he runs, stumbling, around the buildings He sees the dead body of a white woman. She is face up, her hands thrown out, her clothing “deranged,” and her forehead is torn away, her brain spills out of a hole in her head, and her hair is tangled with clotted blood. She has been shot in the head.
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The child waves his hands in “wild, uncertain gestures.” He “utters a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil.” The narrator reveals that the child is deaf and mute. The child stands motionless with quivering lips and stares down at “the wreck.”
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