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Summary
Themes
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.
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.
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.”
The child imagines war as easy and simple: he overcomes his imaginary foes easily, with neither setback nor blood. Yet the narrator makes clear that imagining war to be this way—even when the battle itself is imaginary—will lead to disaster, as the boy gets lost without even realizing, yet, that he is lost. The boy fighting this imaginary battle in the forest also creates an image of him fighting against the forest itself—the first hint of the story’s suggestion that when humanity fights itself, it is also fighting against nature. The quoted poem in the story that contains the lines “curb the lust for war, Nor learn that tempted fate will leave the loftiest star,” is from Lord Byron’s poem “June 18 Defeat of Napoleon,” about the fall of Napoleon at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo. In this battle, Napoleon was defeated and lost all his power. This comparison of the child to Napoleon foreshadows the end of the story where the child’s and other characters’ mistaken views about war lead to death and destruction rather than eternal honor and glory.
Themes
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.”
The boy imagines himself a conquering war hero, but is terrified of a harmless rabbit. The scene is humorous, but also thematically rich. It illustrates the child’s disconnect between his imagination and reality, mocks his idea of war as easy and heroic when he is terrified in the face of even the slightest opposition (even that of a rabbit), and also once again hints at the conflict between humanity and nature, and the inherent fear that humanity feels toward nature. Once he realizes he is lost, the boy views his toy sword as a comforting companion—the child is more comfortable with human violence than he is with the natural world of the forest around him.
Themes
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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.
As the boy sleeps nature continues on around him, suggesting that humanity’s efforts to “conquer continents” and tame nature doesn’t change the fact that humanity is a part of nature. At the same time, the strange, muffled thunder is actually the sounds of the Civil War battle of Chickamauga taking place while the child sleeps, but the narrator describes the sound as being like partridges celebrating nature’s victory against her enslavers. This draws attention to the effects that the human battle is having on nature in this story: the child’s imaginary war takes place in the forest, but the actual battle takes place in the forest as well, so humans are using nature as a backdrop for their own violence and carelessly damaging nature as well. Mankind, then, is a part of nature; but its wars destroy and enslave nature, and the implication here is that in the face of such actions nature will inevitably respond. Also worth noting is that right after the suggestion that humans are enslaving nature comes a mention of slavery back at the boy’s plantation home: his father owns slaves, and those slaves are currently searching for the missing child. Since this story is based on a real Civil War battle, and the Civil War was being fought over slavery, a connection is drawn here between the war, dominion, and enslavement that humans commit against each other and the war, dominion, and enslavement committed against nature.
Themes
Literary Devices
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..
This section of the story complicates the boundaries between humanity and nature. At first, the child assumes the men are some sort of animal, and he is uneasy, but when he realizes they do not have long, menacing ears like the rabbit, he gains some courage. In reality, though the boy doesn’t yet realize it, these men are soldiers, and certainly more dangerous than anything in nature.
Themes
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.”
The image of the crawling, dying men is strange, almost phantasmagorical. By this point in the story, the reader starts to have a sense that the men are soldiers, but because the story is filtered through the child’s perception, it is not totally clear what’s happening beyond the horror of the scene—which in turn emphasizes just that, the horror. Further, when the narrator comments that the child doesn’t catch the details but that an “elder observer” would, it in effect calls on the reader to really pay attention to these details, to really attend to the horror of these crawling men, praying, unable to stand, dying as they fall. Yet the narrator’s comment can also be read as being ironic. The narrator has already made clear that the boy’s view of war as simple and glorious is inherited from his father and his ancestors—those are all adults who haven’t noticed these details.
Themes
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.”
The unfamiliar clothes that the soldiers wear are military uniforms. The juxtaposition between the awful reality of the scene and the boy’s reaction to it intensifies, as the boy sees horribly injured soldiers smeared with blood and is reminded of clowns from a circus. The boy’s reaction to the wounded soldiers—especially his laugh—is at once shocking and ridiculous. And, yet, once again the way that the story and narrator have linked the child’s idea of war to that of broader society’s view of war turns the child’s strange and awful response to these dying men into not just a condemnation of the child, but also an implicit condemnation of that society. After all, supporters of whichever side won this battle will cheer its victory, and will never engage with the brutal reality of these soldiers crawling and dying in the forest.
Themes
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.
This second mention of the child’s family’s slaves highlights the child’s participation in an oppressive system that is part of the network of atrocities his ancestors have been committing for generations. The child sees domination as natural, as fun, and treats his father’s slaves with disrespect for his own amusement. The boy has been brought up to see those who lack power as playthings, including this soldier. Yet the boy’s use of the soldier as an object mirrors to a degree the way that society has also used this soldier: as a tool in a war, just as a horse is a tool in war. The boy’s dehumanizing actions, which are so clearly strange and out of place, once again highlight adult society’s similar dehumanizing actions, which are accepted as a matter of course.
Themes
Literary Devices
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.”
The boundaries between humanity and nature are once again blurred when the narrator compares the group of men with a different type of animal (this time, beetles). When the soldiers commit the unnatural act of a massive battle against their own species, they wound each other and become more animalistic in their movements and appearance. While the boy’s father imagines war as a battle of civilization against the “savage,” the story shows war as something that undoes civilization, that reduces men to the level of the beetle. The “strange red light” is a fire—the battle has started a conflagration; now that conflagration is growing. War destroys nature through fire, but nature reacts with more destruction through that same fire.
Themes
Literary Devices
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.
This is another moment where the narrator forces the reader to confront the reality of war even though the child cannot. The inclusion of details that the child does not note makes the child’s misperception of violence in the story a major, conspicuous feature. The description of the retreating soldiers as escaping their “hunters” again blurs the line between human and nature, and in that comparison casts a harsh light on both the destruction of men by other men, and nature by men.
Themes
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.”
The narrator continues to provide specific details about the reality of the battle that the child is not privy to. The boy, though surrounded by war, is unaware of its reality. That the boy could sleep through the battle continues to raise the question of just what is going on with this child—no one is that sound a sleeper. But the narrator continues to hold those details back, and in doing so the reader comes to think of the child as being ridiculous and monstrous and uncaring. But, once again, the narrator then takes that sense of the child and uses it to condemn the adult world, in this case by comparing the child’s “heedlessness” with that of the soldiers who went into this battle influenced by the idea of the “grandeur” of war and are now, merely, dead. The child’s misperceptions about war might be exacerbated by his age, but they are mirrored by his entire society.
Themes
Literary Devices
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.
Once again, the narrator heightens the tension between what the child perceives and what the reader perceives. The child believes he is leading a group of soldiers onward in a battle, but in reality the battle is already over and the soldiers are dying. The child believes the fire is a guiding light towards which he can lead his soldiers, but in reality the fire is a remnant of the battle that is now raging out of control. The battle has destroyed and soiled nature, as marked by the blood-stained rocks, raging fire, and the forest floor littered with the discarded gear of fleeing soldiers.
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.”
The boy’s father and ancestors saw themselves as conquering nature and other people in order to bring civilization and proper order. They subdued and enslaved the land and “savages,” because that was their right as the bringers of civilization. Yet in this scene the boy is completely and totally in awe of the pure destructive force of the fire. He wants to be a part of that destructive power. Throwing his sword into the fire is a kind of sacrifice of his ideals of war—that it is glorious, just, and fun—to the reality that he just likes power, destroying things, and being part of an overwhelming force. When the boy throws his sword into the fire, the narrator comments that the boy is surrendering to “the superior forces of nature,” which draws attention to two things. First, the fact that even though the fire started because of the battle, the spread of fire is a natural process that is not manmade. Second, though, the child can be read as surrendering to human nature—to the inherent desire for mastery, power, and destruction that is a part of all men, and underlies all war. When the child throws his sword in the fire, he ends his military career—his elaborate, delusional game of war has come to an end in the face of the brutal reality of a desire to destroy. And the story implies that all military careers are similarly just veneers that will similarly come to an end in lust for destruction.
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.
The boy’s inability to recognize his own home highlights the difference between his perception of events and their reality, the level of destruction that has occurred, and perhaps the child’s own loss of himself to the desire to destroy. When the child does realize what has happened, he is forced to face reality. When he finds his own mother dead, he reacts in a completely different way than he reacted when he saw dead and dying soldiers in the forest. What he thought was a glorious game was in fact brutal destruction. He thought he was an instrument of destruction, but it was always going to rebound against him. Meanwhile, the details of the dead mother are gruesome: a suggestion of rape in the “deranged” clothes, tangled hair and clotted blood, oozing brain. Just as the child is forced to face the reality of war, the story ensures that the reader, too, must face it. The story is not just a comeuppance for the child; it is meant to shock and disgust the reader, to make the reader too feel the reality of war—and to realize that the child is not the only one who had no actual conception of war’s brutality.
Themes
Literary Devices
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.”
After comparing the child to an animal and further confusing the borders between humanity and nature, the narrator finally reveals that the child is deaf and mute. This revelation explains quite a bit of the child’s behavior through the story: this is why he slept through the war, why he couldn’t understand that the men were injured soldiers, and so on. But throughout the story, the narrator has connected the child’s behavior to that of his family, ancestors, and society. The revelation that the child can’t hear or talk removes some of his responsibility for his actions, but it places even more responsibility on the family and society that molded him. The child, being unable to interact with reality as most other people can, can be forgiven for not understanding the reality of war. But the society that taught him these misperceptions of war as glorious, of destruction as fun, can’t be let off the hook. The child’s final act in the story is to simply stare down at “the wreck”, finally forced to confront the reality that he has failed to see throughout the story. In this way, the story suggests that those who fail to grapple with the brutal realities of war—and of the ethos that glorifies conquering and enslaving both nature and other men—will inevitably lead to their own death and destruction.
Themes
Literary Devices
