July 16, 2025 • 20 mins
A deaf-mute child plays soldier in the woods during the Civil War, encountering wounded men crawling back from battle without understanding the horror surrounding him, only to discover his home burned and his mother dead from an artillery shell.
• A six-year-old boy, son of a former soldier, wanders into the forest with his toy wooden sword
• The child falls asleep in the woods, unaware that a battle rages around him
• Upon waking, he encounters wounded soldiers crawling through the forest but perceives them as strange playmates
• The boy follows the injured men toward a red glow in the distance, becoming their "leader"
• He discovers the red light is his own home in flames and finds his mother's body with a horrific head wound
• The final revelation that the child is deaf-mute explains his inability to hear the battle or understand what he witnessed
Please give me a five-star rating and a good review if you enjoyed this short story.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, are you tired?
You will be, because this isRon Reads and today we're
reading a story calledChickamauga by Andros Ambrose
(00:25):
Bierce.
One sunny autumn afternoon, achild strayed away from its rude
home in a small field andentered a forest unobserved.
It was happy in a new sense offreedom from control, happy in
(00:49):
the opportunity of explorationand adventure, for this child's
spirit and bodies of itsancestors had, for thousands of
years, been trained to memorablefeats of discovery and conquest
, victories and battles whosecritical moments were for
centuries, whose victors' campswere cities of hewn stone.
(01:14):
From the cradle of its race, ithad conquered its way through
two continents and, passing agreat sea, had penetrated a
third there, to be born to warand dominion as a heritage.
The child was a boy aged aboutsix years, the son of a poor
(01:36):
planter.
In his younger manhood, thefather had been a soldier, had
fought against the naked savagesand followed the flag of his
country into the capital of acivilized race to the far south.
In the peaceful life of aplanter, the warrior fire
survived.
Once kindled, it was neverextinguished.
(02:00):
The man loved military booksand pictures, and the boy had
understood enough to makehimself a wooden sword, though
even the eye of his father,would hardly have known it for
what it was.
The weapon he now bore bravelyas, became the son of an heroic
(02:23):
race, became the son of anheroic race and, pausing now and
again in the sunny space of theforest, assumed with some
exaggeration the postures ofaggression and defense that he
had been taught by theengraver's art, made reckless by
the ease with which he overcameinvisible foes.
(02:44):
Attempting to stay his advance,he committed to the common
enough military error of pushingthe pursuit to a dangerous
extreme, until he found himselfupon the margin of a wide but
shallow brook whose rapid watersbarred his direct advance
(03:05):
against the flying foe that hadcrossed with illogical ease.
But the intrepid victor was notto be baffled.
The spirit of the race whichhad passed the great sea burned.
Unconquerable in that smallbreast and would not be denied.
Conquerable in that smallbreast and would not be denied
(03:30):
Finding a place where someboulders in the bed of the
stream lay.
But a step or leap apart, hemade his way across and fell
again upon the rear guard of hisimaginary foe, putting all to
the sword.
Now that the battle had been won, prudence required that he
(03:51):
withdraw to his base ofoperations.
Alas, like many a mightierconqueror, and like one the
mightiest, he could not curb thelust for war, nor learn that
tempted fate will leave theloftiest star.
Fate will leave the loftieststar.
Advancing from the bank of thecreek, he suddenly found himself
(04:12):
confronted with a new and moreformidable enemy In the path
that he was following, sat Boltupright, with ears erect and
paws suspended before it, arabbit With a startled cry, cry.
The child turned and fled, heknew not in what direction,
calling with inarticulate criesfor his mother, his little heart
(04:42):
beating hard with terror,breathless, blind, with tears,
lost in the forest.
Then, for more than an hour, hewandered with erring feet
through the tangled undergrowthtill, at last, overcome by
fatigue, he lay down in a narrowspace between two rocks, within
a few yards of the stream, and,still grasping his toy sword,
(05:07):
no longer a weapon but acompanion, sobbed himself to
sleep.
The wood birds sang merrilyabove his head, the squirrels
whisking their bravery of tail,bravery of tail, ran barking
(05:30):
from tree to tree, unconsciousof the piety of it, and
somewhere far away was a strangemuffled thunder, as if the
partridges were drumming incelebration of nature's victory
over the son of her immemorialenslavers.
And back at the littleplantation where white men and
black were hastily searching thefields and hedges in alarm.
(05:50):
A mother's heart was breakingfor her missing child.
Hours passed and then the littlesleeper rose to his feet.
The chill of evening was in hislimbs, the fear of the gloom in
his heart.
But he had rested and he nolonger wept, with some blind
(06:14):
instinct which impelled toaction.
He struggled through theundergrowth about him and came
to a more open ground On hisright, the brook.
To the left, a gentle acclivity, studded with infrequent trees.
Over all the gathering gloom oftwilight, a thin, ghostly mist
(06:35):
rose along the water.
It frightened and repelled him.
Instead of recrossing in thedirection whence he came, he
turned his back upon it and wentforward toward the dark and
closing wood.
Suddenly he saw before him astrange moving object which he
took to be some large animal, adog, a pig.
(06:59):
He could not name it.
Perhaps it was a bear.
He had seen pictures of bearsbut knew nothing to their
discredit and had vaguely wishedto meet one.
But something in form ormovement of this object,
something in the awkwardness ofits approach, told him that it
was not a bear, and curiositywas stayed by fear.
(07:22):
He stood still and, as it cameslowly on, gained courage every
moment, for he saw that at lastit had not the long, menacing
ears of a rabbit.
Possibly his impressionablemind was half conscious of
something familiar in itsshambling, awkward gait.
Before it had approached nearenough to resolve his doubts, he
(07:45):
saw that it was followed byanother and another.
To the right and to the leftwere many more.
The whole open space about himwere alive, with them all moving
toward the brook.
They were men.
They crept upon their hands andknees.
They used their hands onlydragging their legs as they used
their knees.
(08:05):
They used their knees, onlytheir arms, hanging idle at
their sides.
They strove to rise to theirfeet but fell prone in the
attempt.
They did nothing, naturally,and nothing alike, save only to
advance foot by foot in the samedirection, singly, in pairs and
in little groups.
They came through the gloom,some halting out and again,
(08:28):
while others crept slowly pastthem, then resuming their
movement.
They came by dozens and byhundreds, as far on either hand
as one could see.
In the deepening gloom theyextended and the black wood
behind them appeared to beinexhaustible.
The very ground seemed inmotion toward the creek.
(08:49):
Occasionally, one who hadpaused, did not again go on but
lay motionless.
He was dead.
Some, pausing, made strangegestures with their hands,
erected their arms and loweredthem again, clasped their heads,
spread their palms upwards, asmen are sometimes seen to do in
(09:12):
public prayer.
Not all of this did the childnote.
It is what we would have notedby an elder observer.
He saw little but that thesewere men, yet crept like babies
being men.
(09:32):
They were not terrible.
Though unfamiliarly clad, hemoved among them freely, going
from one to another and peeringinto their faces with childish
curiosity.
All their faces were singularlywhite and many were streaked
(09:53):
and gouted with red.
Something in this, somethingtoo perhaps in their grotesque
attitudes and movements,reminded him of the painted
clown whom he had seen lastsummer in the circus, and he
laughed as he watched them.
But on and ever on they crept,these maimed and bleeding men,
(10:13):
as heedless as he of thedramatic contrast between his
laughter and their own ghastlygravity.
To him it was a merry spectacle.
He had seen his father'snegroes creep upon their hands
and knees, for his amusement hadridden them so, making believe
(10:34):
they were his horses.
He now approached one of thesecrawling figures from behind and
, with an agile movement,mounted it astride.
The man sank upon his breast,recovered, flung the small boy
fiercely to the ground, as anunbroken colt might have done,
then turned upon him a face thatlacked a lower jaw.
From the upper teeth to thethroat it was a great red gap
(10:58):
fringed with hanging shreds offlesh and splinters of bone.
The unnatural prominence ofnose, the absence of chin, the
fierce eyes gave this man theappearance of a great bird of
prey, crimsoned in throat andbreast by the blood of its
quarry.
The man rose to his knees, thechild to his feet.
(11:20):
The man shook his fist at thechild.
The man shook his fist at thechild.
(11:41):
The child, terrified, at lastran to a tree nearby, like a
swarm of great black beetles,with never a sound of going and
silence, profound and absolute.
Instead of darkening, thehaunted landscape began to
brighten.
Through the belt of treesbeyond the brook shone a strange
(12:02):
red light, the trunks andbranches of the trees making a
black lacework against it.
It struck the creeping figuresand gave them monstrous shadows
(12:22):
which caricatured theirmovements on the lit grass.
It fell upon their faces,touching their whiteness with a
ruddy tinge, accentuating thestains with which so many of
them were freaked and maculated.
It sparkled on buttons and bitsof metal in their clothing.
(12:44):
Indistinctively, the childturned toward the growing
splendor and moved down theslope with his horrible
companions.
In a few moments had passed theforemost of the throng.
Not much of a feat, consideringhis advantages.
He placed himself in the lead,his wooden sword still in hand,
(13:05):
and solemnly directed the march,conforming his pace to theirs
and occasionally turning as ifto see that his forces did not
strangle.
Surely such a leader neverbefore had such a following
scattered upon the ground.
Now slowly narrowing theencroachment of this awful march
(13:27):
to water, were certain articlesto which, in the leader's mind,
were coupled no significantassociations, doubled and the
ends bound together with astring, a heavy knapsack, here
and there a broken rifle, suchthings in short, as are found in
(13:50):
the rear of retreating troops,the spore of men flying from
their hunters.
Everywhere near the creek,which here had a margin of low
land, the earth was trodden intomud by the feet of men and
horses.
An observer of betterexperience in use of his eyes
(14:11):
would have noticed that thesefootprints pointed in both
directions.
The ground had been twicepassed over in advance and
retreat A few hours before thesedesperate, stricken men with
their more fortunate and nowdistant comrades had penetrated
the forest in thousands.
(14:32):
Their successive battalions,breaking into swarms and
reforming in lines, had passed.
The child on every side hadalmost trodden on him as he
slept.
The rustle and murmur of theirmarch had not awakened him.
Almost within a stone's throwof where he lay, they had fought
a battle, but all unheard byhim were the roar of the
(14:54):
musketry, the shock of thecannon, the thunder of 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 asheedless of the grandeur of the
struggle as the dead who haddied to make the glory.
(15:18):
The fire beyond the belt ofwoods on the farther side of the
creek reflected to earth fromthe canopy of its own smoke and
now, suffusing the wholelandscape, it transformed the
sinuous line of mists to thevapor of gold.
The water gleamed with dashesof red, and red too were many of
(15:43):
the stones protruding above thesurface.
But that was blood.
The less desperately woundedhad stained them in crossing On
them too.
The child now crossed witheager steps.
He was going to the fire.
As he stood upon the fartherbank.
(16:03):
He turned about to look at thecompanions of his march, the
advances.
The advance was arriving at thecreek.
The stronger had already drawnthemselves to the brink and
plunged their faces into theflood without motion, appeared
to have no heads, as the child'seyes expanded with wonder.
(16:26):
Even his hospitableunderstanding could not accept a
phenomenon implying suchvitality as that, after slaking
their thirst, these men had nothad the strength to go back from
the water, nor keep their headsabove it.
They were drowned In rear ofthese, the open spaces of the
(16:49):
direction, of the guiding light,a pillar of fire to this
(17:09):
strange exodus.
Confident in the fidelity of hisforces, he now entered the belt
of woods, passing through iteasily on the red illumination,
climbed a fence, ran across thefield, nation climbed a fence,
(17:29):
ran across the field, turningnow and again to co-quit with
his responsive shadow, and soapproaching the blazing ruin of
a dwelling desolation.
Everywhere, and all the wideglare, not a living thing was
visible.
He cared nothing for that.
The spectacle pleased and hedanced with glee in imitation of
the wavering flame.
He ran about collecting fuel,but every object that he found
(17:54):
was too heavy for him to cast infrom the distance to which the
heat limited his approach.
In despair, he flung his sword,a surrender to the superior
forces of nature.
His military career was at anend.
Shifting his position, his eyesfell upon some outbuildings
which had an oddly familiarappearance, as if he had dreamed
(18:17):
of them.
He stood considering them withwonder when suddenly the entire
plantation with its enclosingforest forest seemed to turn as
if upon a pivot.
His little sword swung halfaround.
The points of the compass werereversed.
He recognized the blazingbuilding as his own home.
(18:38):
For a moment he stood stupefiedby the power of the revelation.
Then ran with stumbling feet,making a half-circuit of the
ruin there conspicuous in thelight of the conflagration.
He laid the dead body of a woman, the white face turned upward,
(18:59):
the hands thrown out andclutched, full of grass.
The clothing deranged, the longdark hair entangled and full of
grass.
The clothing deranged, the longdark hair, entangles and full
of clotted blood.
The greater part of theforehead was torn away and from
the jagged hole the brainprotruded, overflowing the
temple.
A frothy mass of gray crownedwith clusters of crimson bubbles
(19:23):
.
Gray crowned with clusters ofcrimson bubbles, the work of a
shell.
The child moved his littlehands, making wild, uncertain
gestures.
He uttered a series ofinarticulate and indescribable
cries, something between thechattering of an ape and the
gobbling of a turkey, astartling, soulllless, unholy
(19:46):
sound, the language of a devil.
The child was a deaf mute.
He stood motionless withquivering lips looking down upon
the wreck.
This has been Chickamauga byAmbrose Bierce.
(20:09):
Please give me a five-starrating and a good review if you
enjoyed this short story.
This has been Ron Reeds.
Hello, are you tired?
You will be, because this isRon Reads and today we're
reading a story calledChickamauga by Andros Ambrose
(00:25):
Bierce.
One sunny autumn afternoon, achild strayed away from its rude
home in a small field andentered a forest unobserved.
It was happy in a new sense offreedom from control, happy in
(00:49):
the opportunity of explorationand adventure, for this child's
spirit and bodies of itsancestors had, for thousands of
years, been trained to memorablefeats of discovery and conquest
, victories and battles whosecritical moments were for
centuries, whose victors' campswere cities of hewn stone.
(01:14):
From the cradle of its race, ithad conquered its way through
two continents and, passing agreat sea, had penetrated a
third there, to be born to warand dominion as a heritage.
The child was a boy aged aboutsix years, the son of a poor
(01:36):
planter.
In his younger manhood, thefather had been a soldier, had
fought against the naked savagesand followed the flag of his
country into the capital of acivilized race to the far south.
In the peaceful life of aplanter, the warrior fire
survived.
Once kindled, it was neverextinguished.
(02:00):
The man loved military booksand pictures, and the boy had
understood enough to makehimself a wooden sword, though
even the eye of his father,would hardly have known it for
what it was.
The weapon he now bore bravelyas, became the son of an heroic
(02:23):
race, became the son of anheroic race and, pausing now and
again in the sunny space of theforest, assumed with some
exaggeration the postures ofaggression and defense that he
had been taught by theengraver's art, made reckless by
the ease with which he overcameinvisible foes.
(02:44):
Attempting to stay his advance,he committed to the common
enough military error of pushingthe pursuit to a dangerous
extreme, until he found himselfupon the margin of a wide but
shallow brook whose rapid watersbarred his direct advance
(03:05):
against the flying foe that hadcrossed with illogical ease.
But the intrepid victor was notto be baffled.
The spirit of the race whichhad passed the great sea burned.
Unconquerable in that smallbreast and would not be denied.
Conquerable in that smallbreast and would not be denied
(03:30):
Finding a place where someboulders in the bed of the
stream lay.
But a step or leap apart, hemade his way across and fell
again upon the rear guard of hisimaginary foe, putting all to
the sword.
Now that the battle had been won, prudence required that he
(03:51):
withdraw to his base ofoperations.
Alas, like many a mightierconqueror, and like one the
mightiest, he could not curb thelust for war, nor learn that
tempted fate will leave theloftiest star.
Fate will leave the loftieststar.
Advancing from the bank of thecreek, he suddenly found himself
(04:12):
confronted with a new and moreformidable enemy In the path
that he was following, sat Boltupright, with ears erect and
paws suspended before it, arabbit With a startled cry, cry.
The child turned and fled, heknew not in what direction,
calling with inarticulate criesfor his mother, his little heart
(04:42):
beating hard with terror,breathless, blind, with tears,
lost in the forest.
Then, for more than an hour, hewandered with erring feet
through the tangled undergrowthtill, at last, overcome by
fatigue, he lay down in a narrowspace between two rocks, within
a few yards of the stream, and,still grasping his toy sword,
(05:07):
no longer a weapon but acompanion, sobbed himself to
sleep.
The wood birds sang merrilyabove his head, the squirrels
whisking their bravery of tail,bravery of tail, ran barking
(05:30):
from tree to tree, unconsciousof the piety of it, and
somewhere far away was a strangemuffled thunder, as if the
partridges were drumming incelebration of nature's victory
over the son of her immemorialenslavers.
And back at the littleplantation where white men and
black were hastily searching thefields and hedges in alarm.
(05:50):
A mother's heart was breakingfor her missing child.
Hours passed and then the littlesleeper rose to his feet.
The chill of evening was in hislimbs, the fear of the gloom in
his heart.
But he had rested and he nolonger wept, with some blind
(06:14):
instinct which impelled toaction.
He struggled through theundergrowth about him and came
to a more open ground On hisright, the brook.
To the left, a gentle acclivity, studded with infrequent trees.
Over all the gathering gloom oftwilight, a thin, ghostly mist
(06:35):
rose along the water.
It frightened and repelled him.
Instead of recrossing in thedirection whence he came, he
turned his back upon it and wentforward toward the dark and
closing wood.
Suddenly he saw before him astrange moving object which he
took to be some large animal, adog, a pig.
(06:59):
He could not name it.
Perhaps it was a bear.
He had seen pictures of bearsbut knew nothing to their
discredit and had vaguely wishedto meet one.
But something in form ormovement of this object,
something in the awkwardness ofits approach, told him that it
was not a bear, and curiositywas stayed by fear.
(07:22):
He stood still and, as it cameslowly on, gained courage every
moment, for he saw that at lastit had not the long, menacing
ears of a rabbit.
Possibly his impressionablemind was half conscious of
something familiar in itsshambling, awkward gait.
Before it had approached nearenough to resolve his doubts, he
(07:45):
saw that it was followed byanother and another.
To the right and to the leftwere many more.
The whole open space about himwere alive, with them all moving
toward the brook.
They were men.
They crept upon their hands andknees.
They used their hands onlydragging their legs as they used
their knees.
(08:05):
They used their knees, onlytheir arms, hanging idle at
their sides.
They strove to rise to theirfeet but fell prone in the
attempt.
They did nothing, naturally,and nothing alike, save only to
advance foot by foot in the samedirection, singly, in pairs and
in little groups.
They came through the gloom,some halting out and again,
(08:28):
while others crept slowly pastthem, then resuming their
movement.
They came by dozens and byhundreds, as far on either hand
as one could see.
In the deepening gloom theyextended and the black wood
behind them appeared to beinexhaustible.
The very ground seemed inmotion toward the creek.
(08:49):
Occasionally, one who hadpaused, did not again go on but
lay motionless.
He was dead.
Some, pausing, made strangegestures with their hands,
erected their arms and loweredthem again, clasped their heads,
spread their palms upwards, asmen are sometimes seen to do in
(09:12):
public prayer.
Not all of this did the childnote.
It is what we would have notedby an elder observer.
He saw little but that thesewere men, yet crept like babies
being men.
(09:32):
They were not terrible.
Though unfamiliarly clad, hemoved among them freely, going
from one to another and peeringinto their faces with childish
curiosity.
All their faces were singularlywhite and many were streaked
(09:53):
and gouted with red.
Something in this, somethingtoo perhaps in their grotesque
attitudes and movements,reminded him of the painted
clown whom he had seen lastsummer in the circus, and he
laughed as he watched them.
But on and ever on they crept,these maimed and bleeding men,
(10:13):
as heedless as he of thedramatic contrast between his
laughter and their own ghastlygravity.
To him it was a merry spectacle.
He had seen his father'snegroes creep upon their hands
and knees, for his amusement hadridden them so, making believe
(10:34):
they were his horses.
He now approached one of thesecrawling figures from behind and
, with an agile movement,mounted it astride.
The man sank upon his breast,recovered, flung the small boy
fiercely to the ground, as anunbroken colt might have done,
then turned upon him a face thatlacked a lower jaw.
From the upper teeth to thethroat it was a great red gap
(10:58):
fringed with hanging shreds offlesh and splinters of bone.
The unnatural prominence ofnose, the absence of chin, the
fierce eyes gave this man theappearance of a great bird of
prey, crimsoned in throat andbreast by the blood of its
quarry.
The man rose to his knees, thechild to his feet.
(11:20):
The man shook his fist at thechild.
The man shook his fist at thechild.
(11:41):
The child, terrified, at lastran to a tree nearby, like a
swarm of great black beetles,with never a sound of going and
silence, profound and absolute.
Instead of darkening, thehaunted landscape began to
brighten.
Through the belt of treesbeyond the brook shone a strange
(12:02):
red light, the trunks andbranches of the trees making a
black lacework against it.
It struck the creeping figuresand gave them monstrous shadows
(12:22):
which caricatured theirmovements on the lit grass.
It fell upon their faces,touching their whiteness with a
ruddy tinge, accentuating thestains with which so many of
them were freaked and maculated.
It sparkled on buttons and bitsof metal in their clothing.
(12:44):
Indistinctively, the childturned toward the growing
splendor and moved down theslope with his horrible
companions.
In a few moments had passed theforemost of the throng.
Not much of a feat, consideringhis advantages.
He placed himself in the lead,his wooden sword still in hand,
(13:05):
and solemnly directed the march,conforming his pace to theirs
and occasionally turning as ifto see that his forces did not
strangle.
Surely such a leader neverbefore had such a following
scattered upon the ground.
Now slowly narrowing theencroachment of this awful march
(13:27):
to water, were certain articlesto which, in the leader's mind,
were coupled no significantassociations, doubled and the
ends bound together with astring, a heavy knapsack, here
and there a broken rifle, suchthings in short, as are found in
(13:50):
the rear of retreating troops,the spore of men flying from
their hunters.
Everywhere near the creek,which here had a margin of low
land, the earth was trodden intomud by the feet of men and
horses.
An observer of betterexperience in use of his eyes
(14:11):
would have noticed that thesefootprints pointed in both
directions.
The ground had been twicepassed over in advance and
retreat A few hours before thesedesperate, stricken men with
their more fortunate and nowdistant comrades had penetrated
the forest in thousands.
(14:32):
Their successive battalions,breaking into swarms and
reforming in lines, had passed.
The child on every side hadalmost trodden on him as he
slept.
The rustle and murmur of theirmarch had not awakened him.
Almost within a stone's throwof where he lay, they had fought
a battle, but all unheard byhim were the roar of the
(14:54):
musketry, the shock of thecannon, the thunder of 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 asheedless of the grandeur of the
struggle as the dead who haddied to make the glory.
(15:18):
The fire beyond the belt ofwoods on the farther side of the
creek reflected to earth fromthe canopy of its own smoke and
now, suffusing the wholelandscape, it transformed the
sinuous line of mists to thevapor of gold.
The water gleamed with dashesof red, and red too were many of
(15:43):
the stones protruding above thesurface.
But that was blood.
The less desperately woundedhad stained them in crossing On
them too.
The child now crossed witheager steps.
He was going to the fire.
As he stood upon the fartherbank.
(16:03):
He turned about to look at thecompanions of his march, the
advances.
The advance was arriving at thecreek.
The stronger had already drawnthemselves to the brink and
plunged their faces into theflood without motion, appeared
to have no heads, as the child'seyes expanded with wonder.
(16:26):
Even his hospitableunderstanding could not accept a
phenomenon implying suchvitality as that, after slaking
their thirst, these men had nothad the strength to go back from
the water, nor keep their headsabove it.
They were drowned In rear ofthese, the open spaces of the
(16:49):
direction, of the guiding light,a pillar of fire to this
(17:09):
strange exodus.
Confident in the fidelity of hisforces, he now entered the belt
of woods, passing through iteasily on the red illumination,
climbed a fence, ran across thefield, nation climbed a fence,
(17:29):
ran across the field, turningnow and again to co-quit with
his responsive shadow, and soapproaching the blazing ruin of
a dwelling desolation.
Everywhere, and all the wideglare, not a living thing was
visible.
He cared nothing for that.
The spectacle pleased and hedanced with glee in imitation of
the wavering flame.
He ran about collecting fuel,but every object that he found
(17:54):
was too heavy for him to cast infrom the distance to which the
heat limited his approach.
In despair, he flung his sword,a surrender to the superior
forces of nature.
His military career was at anend.
Shifting his position, his eyesfell upon some outbuildings
which had an oddly familiarappearance, as if he had dreamed
(18:17):
of them.
He stood considering them withwonder when suddenly the entire
plantation with its enclosingforest forest seemed to turn as
if upon a pivot.
His little sword swung halfaround.
The points of the compass werereversed.
He recognized the blazingbuilding as his own home.
(18:38):
For a moment he stood stupefiedby the power of the revelation.
Then ran with stumbling feet,making a half-circuit of the
ruin there conspicuous in thelight of the conflagration.
He laid the dead body of a woman, the white face turned upward,
(18:59):
the hands thrown out andclutched, full of grass.
The clothing deranged, the longdark hair entangled and full of
grass.
The clothing deranged, the longdark hair, entangles and full
of clotted blood.
The greater part of theforehead was torn away and from
the jagged hole the brainprotruded, overflowing the
temple.
A frothy mass of gray crownedwith clusters of crimson bubbles
(19:23):
.
Gray crowned with clusters ofcrimson bubbles, the work of a
shell.
The child moved his littlehands, making wild, uncertain
gestures.
He uttered a series ofinarticulate and indescribable
cries, something between thechattering of an ape and the
gobbling of a turkey, astartling, soulllless, unholy
(19:46):
sound, the language of a devil.
The child was a deaf mute.
He stood motionless withquivering lips looking down upon
the wreck.
This has been Chickamauga byAmbrose Bierce.
(20:09):
Please give me a five-starrating and a good review if you
enjoyed this short story.
This has been Ron Reeds.
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