Geschichten aus dem Bürgerkrieg

The American Civil War (1861-1865) had a decisive impact on Ambrose Bierce. He was a participant in and thus a witness to one of the first modern wars of the industrial age. Laconically, but not indifferently, he reports his terrible experiences. The stories show succinctly the psychological destruction that total violence wreaks on the individual. Supplemented by Bierces' perhaps most significant narrative, "What I Saw at Shiloh. "It took Ambrose Bierce twenty years to find words. He was the first to break the silence, that crippling guilty conscience of an entire nation. It was not until years after him that war heroes on both sides put pen to paper in their memoirs; indeed, by the time the War Department published an official version of the Battle of Shiloh in 1901, four decades had passed. Is there any truth in war? Bierce found nothing but naked horror." Time.