George Thurston

by Ambrose Bierce

　　

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THREE INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A MAN George Thurston was a first lieutenant and aide-de-camp on the staff ofColonel Brough, commanding a Federal brigade. Colonel Brough was onlytemporarily in command, as senior colonel, the brigadier-general havingbeen severely wounded and granted a leave of absence to recover.Lieutenant Thurston was, I believe, of Colonel Brough's regiment, towhich, with his chief, he would naturally have been relegated had helived till our brigade commander's recovery. The aide whose placeThurston took had been killed in battle; Thurston's advent among us wasthe only change in the _personnel_ of our staff consequent upon thechange in commanders. We did not like him; he was unsocial. This,however, was more observed by others than by me. Whether in camp or onthe march, in barracks, in tents, or _en bivouac_, my duties astopographical engineer kept me working like a beaver--all day in thesaddle and half the night at my drawing-table, platting my surveys. Itwas hazardous work; the nearer to the enemy's lines I could penetrate,the more valuable were my field notes and the resulting maps. It was abusiness in which the lives of men counted as nothing against the chanceof defining a road or sketching a bridge. Whole squadrons of cavalryescort had sometimes to be sent thundering against a powerful infantryoutpost in order that the brief time between the charge and theinevitable retreat might be utilized in sounding a ford or determiningthe point of intersection of two roads. In some of the dark corners of England and Wales they have an immemorialcustom of "beating the bounds" of the parish. On a certain day of theyear the whole population turns out and travels in procession from onelandmark to another on the boundary line. At the most important pointslads are soundly beaten with rods to make them remember the place inafter life. They become authorities. Our frequent engagements with theConfederate outposts, patrols, and scouting parties had, incidentally,the same educating value; they fixed in my memory a vivid and apparentlyimperishable picture of the locality--a picture serving instead ofaccurate field notes, which, indeed, it was not always convenient totake, with carbines cracking, sabers clashing, and horses plunging allabout. These spirited encounters were observations entered in red. One morning as I set out at the head of my escort on an expedition ofmore than the usual hazard Lieutenant Thurston rode up alongside andasked if I had any objection to his accompanying me, the colonelcommanding having given him permission. "None whatever," I replied rather gruffly; "but in what capacity willyou go? You are not a topographical engineer, and Captain Burlingcommands my escort." "I will go as a spectator," he said. Removing his sword-belt and takingthe pistols from his holsters he handed them to his servant, who tookthem back to headquarters. I realized the brutality of my remark, butnot clearly seeing my way to an apology, said nothing. That afternoon we encountered a whole regiment of the enemy's cavalry inline and a field-piece that dominated a straight mile of the turnpike bywhich we had approached. My escort fought deployed in the woods on bothsides, but Thurston remained in the center of the road, which atintervals of a few seconds was swept by gusts of grape and canister thattore the air wide open as they passed. He had dropped the rein on theneck of his horse and sat bolt upright in the saddle, with folded arms.Soon he was down, his horse torn to pieces. From the side of the road,my pencil and field book idle, my duty forgotten, I watched him slowlydisengaging himself from the wreck and rising. At that instant, thecannon having ceased firing, a burly Confederate trooper on a spiritedhorse dashed like a thunderbolt down the road with drawn saber. Thurstonsaw him coming, drew himself up to his full height, and again folded hisarms. He was too brave to retreat before the word, and my uncivil wordshad disarmed him. He was a spectator. Another moment and he would havebeen split like a mackerel, but a blessed bullet tumbled his assailantinto the dusty road so near that the impetus sent the body rolling toThurston's feet. That evening, while platting my hasty survey, I foundtime to frame an apology, which I think took the rude, primitive form ofa confession that I had spoken like a malicious idiot. A few weeks later a part of our army made an assault upon the enemy'sleft. The attack, which was made upon an unknown position and acrossunfamiliar ground, was led by our brigade. The ground was so broken andthe underbrush so thick that all mounted officers and men were compelledto fight on foot--the brigade commander and his staff included. In the_mle_ Thurston was parted from the rest of us, and we found him,horribly wounded, only when we had taken the enemy's last defense. Hewas some months in hospital at Nashville, Tennessee, but finallyrejoined us. He said little about his misadventure, except that he hadbeen bewildered and had strayed into the enemy's lines and been shotdown; but from one of his captors, whom we in turn had captured, welearned the particulars. "He came walking right upon us as we lay inline," said this man. "A whole company of us instantly sprang up andleveled our rifles at his breast, some of them almost touching him.'Throw down that sword and surrender, you damned Yank!' shouted some onein authority. The fellow ran his eyes along the line of rifle barrels,folded his arms across his breast, his right hand still clutching hissword, and deliberately replied, 'I will not.' If we had all fired hewould have been torn to shreds. Some of us didn't. I didn't, for one;nothing could have induced me." When one is tranquilly looking death in the eye and refusing him anyconcession one naturally has a good opinion of one's self. I don't knowif it was this feeling that in Thurston found expression in a stiffishattitude and folded arms; at the mess table one day, in his absence,another explanation was suggested by our quartermaster, an irreclaimablestammerer when the wine was in: "It's h--is w--ay of m-m-mastering ac-c-consti-t-tu-tional t-tendency to r--un aw--ay." "What!" I flamed out, indignantly rising; "you intimate that Thurston isa coward--and in his absence?" "If he w--ere a cow--wow-ard h--e w--wouldn't t-try to m-m-master it;and if he w--ere p-present I w--wouldn't d-d-dare to d-d-discuss it,"was the mollifying reply. This intrepid man, George Thurston, died an ignoble death. The brigadewas in camp, with headquarters in a grove of immense trees. To an upperbranch of one of these a venturesome climber had attached the two endsof a long rope and made a swing with a length of not less than onehundred feet. Plunging downward from a height of fifty feet, along thearc of a circle with such a radius, soaring to an equal altitude,pausing for one breathless instant, then sweeping dizzily backward--noone who has not tried it can conceive the terrors of such sport to thenovice. Thurston came out of his tent one day and asked for instructionin the mystery of propelling the swing--the art of rising and sitting,which every boy has mastered. In a few moments he had acquired the trickand was swinging higher than the most experienced of us had dared. Weshuddered to look at his fearful flights. "St-t-top him," said the quartermaster, snailing lazily along from themess-tent, where he had been lunching; "h--e d-doesn't know that if h--eg-g-goes c-clear over h--e'll w--ind up the sw--ing." With such energy was that strong man cannonading himself through the airthat at each extremity of his increasing arc his body, standing in theswing, was almost horizontal. Should he once pass above the level of therope's attachment he would be lost; the rope would slacken and he wouldfall vertically to a point as far below as he had gone above, and thenthe sudden tension of the rope would wrest it from his hands. All sawthe peril--all cried out to him to desist, and gesticulated at him as,indistinct and with a noise like the rush of a cannon shot in flight, heswept past us through the lower reaches of his hideous oscillation. Awoman standing at a little distance away fainted and fell unobserved.Men from the camp of a regiment near by ran in crowds to see, allshouting. Suddenly, as Thurston was on his upward curve, the shouts allceased. Thurston and the swing had parted--that is all that can be known; bothhands at once had released the rope. The impetus of the light swingexhausted, it was falling back; the man's momentum was carrying him,almost erect, upward and forward, no longer in his arc, but with anoutward curve. It could have been but an instant, yet it seemed an age.I cried out, or thought I cried out: "My God! will he never stop goingup?" He passed close to the branch of a tree. I remember a feeling ofdelight as I thought he would clutch it and save himself. I speculatedon the possibility of it sustaining his weight. He passed above it, andfrom my point of view was sharply outlined against the blue. At thisdistance of many years I can distinctly recall that image of a man inthe sky, its head erect, its feet close together, its hands--I do notsee its hands. All at once, with astonishing suddenness and rapidity, itturns clear over and pitches downward. There is another cry from thecrowd, which has rushed instinctively forward. The man has become merelya whirling object, mostly legs. Then there is an indescribable sound--the sound of an impact that shakes the earth, and these men, familiarwith death in its most awful aspects, turn sick. Many walk unsteadilyaway from the spot; others support themselves against the trunks oftrees or sit at the roots. Death has taken an unfair advantage; he hasstruck with an unfamiliar weapon; he has executed a new and disquietingstratagem. We did not know that he had so ghastly resources,possibilities of terror so dismal. Thurston's body lay on its back. One leg, bent beneath, was broken abovethe knee and the bone driven into the earth. The abdomen had burst; thebowels protruded. The neck was broken. The arms were folded tightly across the breast.

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