The boy’s toy sword symbolizes the way that a romantic conception of war inevitably leads those who hold to the brutal devastation of real war. Initially, the child—influenced by his father’s idealized ideas about war—views war as a game, wandering into the forest to play soldier with his toy sword. The boy’s exuberant play warmongering soon leads to a limited kind of disaster, as the overeager boy soon becomes lost in the forest. The boy then cries himself to sleep, clutching his sword, which the narrator describes as, “no longer a weapon but a companion.” This description suggests an evolution in the child’s attitude about war: not only is it a fun game to him, but it is also something that he associates with comfort—a comfort that may arise from his family’s connection to war through his father’s soldiering. The child at this point in the story does not view war and family as being at odds with each other, but rather as intertwined.
After the child wakes up and encounters the wounded soldiers retreating from the Civil War battle he just slept through, he continues to carry the toy sword around as he “leads” the group. The child is still playing war, even as he is surrounded by dying and severely wounded soldier’s carrying real weapons. That the child doesn’t notice the actual pain and death of war as he continues to play at war emphasizes the way that romantic ideas of war as fun or glorious can blind those who hold those views to the obvious realities of war. Similarly, as the soldiers that the boy thinks he is leading die around him, he hardly notices: his ideas of war make him a “leader” who is at once ridiculous and cruel, uncaring for those he thinks he is leading.
Late in the story, the boy (along with the wounded men) come upon a raging fire. The fire entrances and delights the boy, and he searches for a way to help fuel its burning. Put another way: the boy is delighted by the fire’s destruction, and he wants to be a part of that destruction. When everything he wants to throw into it turns out to be too heavy for him to lift, the boy, “in despair”, throws in his sword. With this action, the narrator states that the boy’s military career was over. Yet the boy’s action can best be read as a surrender to the destruction caused by war. As the story portrays it, even though the boy is reluctant to throw in his sword, he can’t stop himself: the boy can do nothing except participate in it. Throwing in the sword, then, can be taken as the boy giving up his belief in romantic ideas of war as a part of actually partaking in true destruction—and, symbolically, it can be read as capturing how romantic ideas of war lead inevitably from initially noble ideas about war to participation in wanton destruction. Further, at the story’s end, the boy discovers that the battle and fire has also destroyed his home and killed his family. In this way, through the developing symbology of the toy sword throughout “Chickamauga,” Bierce suggests that cavalier, romanticized ideas of war will lead not just to destruction, but self-destruction.
The Toy Sword Quotes in Chickamauga
In his younger manhood the father had been a soldier, had fought against naked savages and followed the flag of his country into the capital of a civilized race to the far South. In the peaceful life a planter the warrior-fire survived; once kindled, it is never extinguished. The man loved military books and pictures and the boy had understood enough to make himself a wooden sword, though even the eye of his father would hardly have known it for what it was. This weapon he now bore bravely, as became the son of an heroic race.
An observer of better experience in the use of his eyes would have noticed that these footprints pointed in both directions; the ground had been twice passed over—in advance and in retreat. A few hours before, these desperate, stricken men, with their more fortunate and now distant comrades, had penetrated the forest in thousands. Their successive battalions, breaking into swarms and reforming in lines, had passed the child on every side—had almost trodden on him as he slept. The rustle and murmur of their march had not awakened him. Almost within a stone’s throw of where he lay they had fought a battle; but all unheard by him were the roar of the musketry, the shock of the cannon, “the thunder of the captains and the shouting.” He had slept through it all, grasping his little wooden sword with perhaps a tighter clutch in unconscious sympathy with his martial environment, but as heedless of the grandeur of the struggle as the dead who had died to make the glory.
[The child] approached the blazing ruin of a dwelling. Desolation everywhere! In all the wide glare not a living thing was visible. He cared nothing for that; the spectacle pleased, and he danced with glee in imitation of the wavering flames. He ran about, collecting fuel, but every object that he found was too heavy for him to cast in from the distance to which the heat limited his approach. In despair he flung in his sword—a surrender to the superior forces of nature. His military career was at an end.
The Toy Sword Symbol Timeline in Chickamauga
