The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce — Volume 2: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians

“Prisoner, what is your name?”

“As I am to lose it at daylight to-morrow morning it is hardly worth while concealing it.  Parker Adderson.”

“Your rank?”

“A somewhat humble one; commissioned officers are too precious to be risked in the perilous business of a spy.  I am a sergeant.”

“Of what regiment?”

“You must excuse me; my answer might, for anything I know, give you an idea of whose forces are in your front.  Such knowledge as that is what I came into your lines to obtain, not to impart.”

“You are not without wit.”

“If you have the patience to wait you will find me dull enough to-morrow.”

“How do you know that you are to die to-morrow morning?”

“Among spies captured by night that is the custom.  It is one of the nice observances of the profession.”

The general so far laid aside the dignity appropriate to a Confederate officer of high rank and wide renown as to smile.  But no one in his power and out of his favor would have drawn any happy augury from that outward and visible sign of approval.  It was neither genial nor infectious; it did not communicate itself to the other persons exposed to it—­the caught spy who had provoked it and the armed guard who had brought him into the tent and now stood a little apart, watching his prisoner in the yellow candle-light.  It was no part of that warrior’s duty to smile; he had been detailed for another purpose.  The conversation was resumed; it was in character a trial for a capital offense.

“You admit, then, that you are a spy—­that you came into my camp, disguised as you are in the uniform of a Confederate soldier, to obtain information secretly regarding the numbers and disposition of my troops.”

“Regarding, particularly, their numbers.  Their disposition I already knew.  It is morose.”

The general brightened again; the guard, with a severer sense of his responsibility, accentuated the austerity of his expression an stood a trifle more erect than before.  Twirling his gray slouch hat round and round upon his forefinger, the spy took a leisurely survey of his surroundings.  They were simple enough.  The tent was a common “wall tent,” about eight feet by ten in dimensions, lighted by a single tallow candle stuck into the haft of a bayonet, which was itself stuck into a pine table at which the general sat, now busily writing and apparently forgetful of his unwilling guest.  An old rag carpet covered the earthen floor; an older leather trunk, a second chair and a roll of blankets were about all else that the tent contained; in General Clavering’s command Confederate simplicity and penury of “pomp and circumstance” had attained their highest development.  On a large nail driven into the tent pole at the entrance was suspended a sword-belt supporting a long sabre, a pistol in its holster and, absurdly enough, a bowie-knife.  Of that most unmilitary weapon it was the general’s habit to explain that it was a souvenir of the peaceful days when he was a civilian.

It was a stormy night.  The rain cascaded upon the canvas in torrents, with the dull, drum-like sound familiar to dwellers in tents.  As the whooping blasts charged upon it the frail structure shook and swayed and strained at its confining stakes and ropes.

The general finished writing, folded the half-sheet of paper and spoke to the soldier guarding Adderson:  “Here, Tassman, take that to the adjutant-general; then return.”

“And the prisoner, General?” said the soldier, saluting, with an inquiring glance in the direction of that unfortunate.

“Do as I said,” replied the officer, curtly.

The soldier took the note and ducked himself out of the tent.  General Clavering turned his handsome face toward the Federal spy, looked him in the eyes, not unkindly, and said:  “It is a bad night, my man.”

“For me, yes.”

“Do you guess what I have written?”

“Something worth reading, I dare say.  And—­perhaps it is my vanity—­I venture to suppose that I am mentioned in it.”

“Yes; it is a memorandum for an order to be read to the troops at reveille concerning your execution.  Also some notes for the guidance of the provost-marshal in arranging the details of that event.”

“I hope, General, the spectacle will be intelligently arranged, for I shall attend it myself.”

“Have you any arrangements of your own that you wish to make?  Do you wish to see a chaplain, for example?”

“I could hardly secure a longer rest for myself by depriving him of some of his.”

“Good God, man! do you mean to go to your death with nothing but jokes upon your lips?  Do you know that this is a serious matter?”

“How can I know that?  I have never been dead in all my life.  I have heard that death is a serious matter, but never from any of those who have experienced it.”

The general was silent for a moment; the man interested, perhaps amused him—­a type not previously encountered.

“Death,” he said, “is at least a loss—­a loss of such happiness as we have, and of opportunities for more.”

“A loss of which we shall never be conscious can be borne with composure and therefore expected without apprehension.  You must have observed, General, that of all the dead men with whom it is your soldierly pleasure to strew your path none shows signs of regret.”

“If the being dead is not a regrettable condition, yet the becoming so—­ the act of dying—­appears to be distinctly disagreeable to one who has not lost the power to feel.”

“Pain is disagreeable, no doubt.  I never suffer it without more or less discomfort.  But he who lives longest is most exposed to it.  What you call dying is simply the last pain—­there is really no such thing as dying.  Suppose, for illustration, that I attempt to escape.  You lift the revolver that you are courteously concealing in your lap, and—­”

The general blushed like a girl, then laughed softly, disclosing his brilliant teeth, made a slight inclination of his handsome head and said nothing.  The spy continued:  “You fire, and I have in my stomach what I did not swallow.  I fall, but am not dead.  After a half-hour of agony I am dead.  But at any given instant of that half-hour I was either alive or dead.  There is no transition period.

“When I am hanged to-morrow morning it will be quite the same; while conscious I shall be living; when dead, unconscious.  Nature appears to have ordered the matter quite in my interest—­the way that I should have ordered it myself.  It is so simple,” he added with a smile, “that it seems hardly worth while to be hanged at all.”

At the finish of his remarks there was a long silence.  The general sat impassive, looking into the man’s face, but apparently not attentive to what had been said.  It was as if his eyes had mounted guard over the prisoner while his mind concerned itself with other matters.  Presently he drew a long, deep breath, shuddered, as one awakened from a dreadful dream, and exclaimed almost inaudibly:  “Death is horrible!”—­this man of death.

“It was horrible to our savage ancestors,” said the spy, gravely, “because they had not enough intelligence to dissociate the idea of consciousness from the idea of the physical forms in which it is manifested—­as an even lower order of intelligence, that of the monkey, for example, may be unable to imagine a house without inhabitants, and seeing a ruined hut fancies a suffering occupant.  To us it is horrible because we have inherited the tendency to think it so, accounting for the notion by wild and fanciful theories of another world—­as names of places give rise to legends explaining them and reasonless conduct to philosophies in justification.  You can hang me, General, but there your power of evil ends; you cannot condemn me to heaven.”

The general appeared not to have heard; the spy’s talk had merely turned his thoughts into an unfamiliar channel, but there they pursued their will independently to conclusions of their own.  The storm had ceased, and something of the solemn spirit of the night had imparted itself to his reflections, giving them the sombre tinge of a supernatural dread.  Perhaps there was an element of prescience in it.  “I should not like to die,” he said—­“not to-night.”

He was interrupted—­if, indeed, he had intended to speak further—­by the entrance of an officer of his staff, Captain Hasterlick, the provost-marshal.  This recalled him to himself; the absent look passed away from his face.

“Captain,” he said, acknowledging the officer’s salute, “this man is a Yankee spy captured inside our lines with incriminating papers on him.  He has confessed.  How is the weather?”

“The storm is over, sir, and the moon shining.”

“Good; take a file of men, conduct him at once to the parade ground, and shoot him.”

A sharp cry broke from the spy’s lips.  He threw himself forward, thrust out his neck, expanded his eyes, clenched his hands.

“Good God!” he cried hoarsely, almost inarticulately; “you do not mean that!  You forget—­I am not to die until morning.”

“I have said nothing of morning,” replied the general, coldly; “that was an assumption of your own.  You die now.”

“But, General, I beg—­I implore you to remember; I am to hang!  It will take some time to erect the gallows—­two hours—­an hour.  Spies are hanged; I have rights under military law.  For Heaven’s sake, General, consider how short—­”

“Captain, observe my directions.”

The officer drew his sword and fixing his eyes upon the prisoner pointed silently to the opening of the tent.  The prisoner hesitated; the officer grasped him by the collar and pushed him gently forward.  As he approached the tent pole the frantic man sprang to it and with cat-like agility seized the handle of the bowie-knife, plucked the weapon from the scabbard and thrusting the captain aside leaped upon the general with the fury of a madman, hurling him to the ground and falling headlong upon him as he lay.  The table was overturned, the candle extinguished and they fought blindly in the darkness.  The provost-marshal sprang to the assistance of his Superior officer and was himself prostrated upon the struggling forms.  Curses and inarticulate cries of rage and pain came from the welter of limbs and bodies; the tent came down upon them and beneath its hampering and enveloping folds the struggle went on.  Private Tassman, returning from his errand and dimly conjecturing the situation, threw down his rifle and laying hold of the flouncing canvas at random vainly tried to drag it off the men under it; and the sentinel who paced up and down in front, not daring to leave his beat though the skies should fall, discharged his rifle.  The report alarmed the camp; drums beat the long roll and bugles sounded the assembly, bringing swarms of half-clad men into the moonlight, dressing as they ran, and falling into line at the sharp commands of their officers.  This was well; being in line the men were under control; they stood at arms while the general’s staff and the men of his escort brought order out of confusion by lifting off the fallen tent and pulling apart the breathless and bleeding actors in that strange contention.

Breathless, indeed, was one:  the captain was dead; the handle of the bowie-knife, protruding from his throat, was pressed back beneath his chin until the end had caught in the angle of the jaw and the hand that delivered the blow had been unable to remove the weapon.  In the dead man’s hand was his sword, clenched with a grip that defied the strength of the living.  Its blade was streaked with red to the hilt.

Lifted to his feet, the general sank back to the earth with a moan and fainted.  Besides his bruises he had two sword-thrusts—­one through the thigh, the other through the shoulder.

The spy had suffered the least damage.  Apart from a broken right arm, his wounds were such only as might have been incurred in an ordinary combat with nature’s weapons.  But he was dazed and seemed hardly to know what had occurred.  He shrank away from those attending him, cowered upon the ground and uttered unintelligible remonstrances.  His face, swollen by blows and stained with gouts of blood, nevertheless showed white beneath his disheveled hair—­as white as that of a corpse.

“The man is not insane,” said the surgeon, preparing bandages and replying to a question; “he is suffering from fright.  Who and what is he?”

Private Tassman began to explain.  It was the opportunity of his life; he omitted nothing that could in any way accentuate the importance of his own relation to the night’s events.  When he had finished his story and was ready to begin it again nobody gave him any attention.

The general had now recovered consciousness.  He raised himself upon his elbow, looked about him, and, seeing the spy crouching by a camp-fire, guarded, said simply: 

“Take that man to the parade ground and shoot him.”

“The general’s mind wanders,” said an officer standing near.

“His mind does not wander,” the adjutant-general said.  “I have a memorandum from him about this business; he had given that same order to Hasterlick”—­with a motion of the hand toward the dead provost-marshal—­ “and, by God! it shall be executed.”

Ten minutes later Sergeant Parker Adderson, of the Federal army, philosopher and wit, kneeling in the moonlight and begging incoherently for his life, was shot to death by twenty men.  As the volley rang out upon the keen air of the midnight, General Clavering, lying white and still in the red glow of the camp-fire, opened his big blue eyes, looked pleasantly upon those about him and said:  “How silent it all is!”

The surgeon looked at the adjutant-general, gravely and significantly.  The patient’s eyes slowly closed, and thus he lay for a few moments; then, his face suffused with a smile of ineffable sweetness, he said, faintly:  “I suppose this must be death,” and so passed away.