GEORGE THURSTON
THREE INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A MAN
by Ambrose Bierce
George Thurston was a first lieutenant and
aide-de-camp on the staff of Colonel Brough,
commanding a Federal brigade. Colonel Brough was
only temporarily in command, as senior colonel,
the brigadier-general having been severely
wounded and granted a leave of absence to recover.
Lieutenant Thurston was, I believe, of Colonel
Brough's regiment, to which, with his chief, he
would naturally have been relegated had he lived
till our brigade commander's recovery. The aide
whose place Thurston took had been killed in
battle; Thurston's advent among us was the only
change in the personnel of our staff consequent
upon the change in commanders. We did not like
him; he was unsocial. This, however, was more
observed by others than by me. Whether in camp or
on the march, in barracks, in tents, or en bivouac,
my duties as topographical engineer kept me
working like a beaver--all day in the saddle
and half the night at my drawing-table, platting
my surveys. It was 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 a business in which the lives of
men counted as nothing against the chance of
defining a road or sketching a bridge. Whole
squadrons of cavalry escort had sometimes to be
sent thundering against a powerful infantry
outpost in order that the brief time between
the charge and the inevitable retreat might be
utilized in sounding a ford or determining the
point of intersection of two roads.
In some of the dark corners of England and Wales
they have an immemorial custom of "beating the
bounds" of the parish. On a certain day of the
year the whole population turns out and travels
in procession from one landmark to another on the
boundary line. At the most important points lads
are soundly beaten with rods to make them remember
the place in after life. They become authorities.
Our frequent engagements with the Confederate
outposts, patrols, and scouting parties had,
incidentally, the same educating value; they fixed
in my memory a vivid and apparently imperishable
picture of the locality--a picture serving instead
of accurate field notes, which, indeed, it was not
always convenient to take, with carbines cracking,
sabers clashing, and horses plunging all about.
These spirited encounters were observations entered
in red.
One morning as I set out at the head of my escort
on an expedition of more than the usual hazard
Lieutenant Thurston rode up alongside and asked
if I had any objection to his accompanying me, the
colonel commanding having given him permission.
"None whatever," I replied rather gruffly; "but
in what capacity will you go? You are not a topographical
engineer, and Captain Burling commands my escort."
"I will go as a spectator," he said. Removing his
sword-belt and taking the pistols from his holsters
he handed them to his servant, who took them back
to headquarters. I realized the brutality of my
remark, but not clearly seeing my way to an apology,
said nothing.
That afternoon we encountered a whole regiment of
the enemy's cavalry in line and a field-piece that
dominated a straight mile of the turnpike by which
we had approached. My escort fought deployed in the
woods on both sides, but Thurston remained in the
center of the road, which at intervals of a few
seconds was swept by gusts of grape and canister
that tore the air wide open as they passed. He had
dropped the rein on the neck 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 slowly disengaging
himself from the wreck and rising. At that instant,
the cannon having ceased firing, a burly Confederate
trooper on a spirited horse dashed like a thunderbolt
down the road with drawn saber. Thurston saw him
coming, drew himself up to his full height, and
again folded his arms. He was too brave to retreat
before the word, and my uncivil words had disarmed
him. He was a spectator. Another moment and he would
have been split like a mackerel, but a blessed bullet
tumbled his assailant into the dusty road so near
that the impetus sent the body rolling to Thurston's
feet. That evening, while platting my hasty survey,
I found time to frame an apology, which I think took
the rude, primitive form of a confession that I had
spoken like a malicious idiot.
A few weeks later a part of our army made an assault
upon the enemy's left. The attack, which was made
upon an unknown position and across unfamiliar
ground, was led by our brigade. The ground was so
broken and the underbrush so thick that all mounted
officers and men were compelled to fight on foot--the
brigade commander and his staff included. In the
melee Thurston was parted from the rest of us, and
we found him, horribly wounded, only when we had
taken the enemy's last defense. He was some months
in hospital at Nashville, Tennessee, but finally
rejoined us. He said little about his misadventure,
except that he had been bewildered and had strayed
into the enemy's lines and been shot down; but from
one of his captors, whom we in turn had captured,
we learned the particulars. "He came walking right
upon us as we lay in line," said this man. "A whole
company of us instantly sprang up and leveled our
rifles at his breast, some of them almost touching
him. 'Throw down that sword and surrender, you
damned Yank!' shouted some one in authority. The
fellow ran his eyes along the line of rifle barrels,
folded his arms across his breast, his right hand
still clutching his sword, and deliberately replied,
'I will not.' If we had all fired he would 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 any concession one naturally
has a good opinion of one's self. I don't know
if it was this feeling that in Thurston found
expression in a stiffish attitude and folded arms;
at the mess table one day, in his absence, another
explanation was suggested by our quartermaster,
an irreclaimable stammerer when the wine was in:
"It's h--is w--ay of m-m-mastering a
c-c-consti-t-tu-tional t-tendency to r--un aw--ay."
"What!" I flamed out, indignantly rising; "you
intimate that Thurston is a 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 brigade was in camp, with headquarters
in a grove of immense trees. To an upper branch
of one of these a venturesome climber had attached
the two ends of a long rope and made a swing with
a length of not less than one hundred feet. Plunging
downward from a height of fifty feet, along the
arc of a circle with such a radius, soaring to an
equal altitude, pausing for one breathless instant,
then sweeping dizzily backward--no one who has not
tried it can conceive the terrors of such sport to
the novice. Thurston came out of his tent one day
and asked for instruction in 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 trick and was swinging higher than
the most experienced of us had dared. We shuddered
to look at his fearful flights.
"St-t-top him," said the quartermaster, snailing
lazily along from the mess-tent, where he had been
lunching; "h--e d-doesn't know that if h--e g-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 air that at each extremity of
his increasing arc his body, standing in the swing,
was almost horizontal. Should he once pass above
the level of the rope's attachment he would be
lost; the rope would slacken and he would fall
vertically to a point as far below as he had gone
above, and then the sudden tension of the rope
would wrest it from his hands. All saw the 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, he swept past us through
the lower reaches of his hideous oscillation. A
woman standing at a little distance away fainted
and fell unobserved. Men from the camp of a
regiment near by ran in crowds to see, all shouting.
Suddenly, as Thurston was on his upward curve, the
shouts all ceased.
Thurston and the swing had parted--that is all
that can be known; both hands at once had released
the rope. The impetus of the light swing exhausted,
it was falling back; the man's momentum was carrying
him, almost erect, upward and forward, no longer
in his arc, but with an outward 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 going up?" He passed close to the branch
of a tree. I remember a feeling of delight as I
thought he would clutch it and save himself. I
speculated on the possibility of it sustaining his
weight. He passed above it, and from my point of
view was sharply outlined against the blue. At this
distance of many years I can distinctly recall that
image of a man in the sky, its head erect, its feet
close together, its hands--I do not see its hands.
All at once, with astonishing suddenness and
rapidity, it turns clear over and pitches downward.
There is another cry from the crowd, which has
rushed instinctively forward. The man has become
merely a whirling object, mostly legs. Then there
is an indescribable sound--the sound of an impact
that shakes the earth, and these men, familiar
with death in its most awful aspects, turn sick.
Many walk unsteadily away from the spot; others
support themselves against the trunks of trees or
sit at the roots. Death has taken an unfair
advantage; he has struck with an unfamiliar weapon;
he has executed a new and disquieting stratagem.
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 above the knee and the bone
driven into the earth. The abdomen had burst; the
bowels protruded. The neck was broken.
The arms were folded tightly across the breast.
~~~~~~~ THE END ~~~~~~~
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