How Did The Civil War Changes

Men have always gone to war. War is a plague that has been on this Earth for hundreds of years and will never stop. At the time of the Civil War, battle had changed dramatically. War changes but is always the same. People are always hurt and killed on both sides and nobody can escape death. The Civil War brought new technologies to the battlefield. Men bore muskets that shot newly invented canadoil bullets that were much more accurate and resulted the scale of deaths to increase by the thousands.

Ambrose Bierce fought in this tragic war that pit brother against brother in a fight to the death. He knew how bad war was and experienced it firsthand. It makes sense why he has so much realism in his stories. Also battle messes with your

mind and that is why there are so many instances of illusion in his stories. In An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge there are many examples of all these things.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge tells the tale of Peyton Farquhar, a southern plantation and slave owner. The story has many illustrations of illusion vs. reality. It is separated into three parts. The first part describes what is going on in reality and introduces Farquhar as he is about to be hanged off of a bridge. Throughout this part he describes the soldiers and the guns to the point of detail that you know the writer had a lot of experience around the army. Also Farquhar goes into more realistic details by describing the planks, beams and rope on the bridge. These are all examples of realistic writing.
The third part of the story changes dramatically from the second which went back in time and described some small events. Farquhar was just falling to his death about to be hung when time slows down and his escape plan suddenly becomes apparent. Even though it seems that Farquhar was just saved, there is a lot of symbols that show the opposite. The driftwood he sees before falling shows the freedom that the piece of wood has as it flows to safety down the river. Another example of realism in the story was the very detailed description of warfare. Farquhar is shot at with rifles and even shot at by a cannon which Farquhar then anticipated the cannon to load grape shot and surely kill him.
Although Farquhar had the perfect plan of escape, it was all in his head and the reality of the story was that he was killed by the hanging. The sudden dramatic climax shows the cruelty of the execution and the reality of war.