On a Mountain

Ambrose Bierce is an American writer and journalist, an author of humoristic and “horror” stories. Being a participant of the Civil War, Ambrose Bierce differed with reporter’s sharpness, intransigence and straightness even in fiction and poetry. That’s why he was called as a “Bitter Bierce”. 


The Story “On a Mountain” describes the feelings of the first author’s impression seeing mountains – their dim, blue billows, ridge after ridge interminable, beyond purple valleys full of sleep, "in which it seemed always afternoon." But in this beauty there are war actions 

The author serves in the “old soldiers” troops who gave themselves no end of military airs. 

It was in the autumn of that "most immemorial year," the 1861st. Their troop has been pushed in across the Ohio border but after various vicissitudes of fortune and mismanagement they found themselves at Cheat Mountain Pass, holding a road that ran from Nowhere to the southeast. And this Pass became their trap.