Ambrose Bierce didn't just write about the Civil War - he lived through it, on the battlefields and along the picket lines. In so doing he gave birth to a chronicle of men at war previously unseen in the American literary canon. That some of these stories verge on the supernatural, others on factual chronicle, and others balance on the thin line between humour and morbidity in no way detracts from their resonance to the history of the War Between the States.