Bierce's ‘A Resumed Identity’ was first published as ‘The Man’ in The Cosmopolitan (New York), September 1908, and collected in Can Such Things Be? (New York: Cassell, 1893). This is one of Bierce's tales that engages with the psychological damage of the war.
See also: Jim McWilliams, ‘Ambrose Bierce's Civil War: One Man's Morbid Vision,’ Civil War Times magazine, http://www. historynet.com/ambrose-bierces-civil-war-one-mans-morbid-vision. htm; Don Swaim, Civil War Bierce, http://donswaim.com/bierce-civilwar.html; Giorgio Mariani, ‘Ambrose Bierce's Civil War Stories and the Critique of the Martial Spirit,’ Studies in American Fiction 19.ii (Autumn 1991), pp. 221–28.
I – THE REVIEW AS A FORM OF WELCOME
One summer night a man stood on a low hill overlooking a wide expanse of forest and field. By the full moon hanging low in the west he knew what he might not have known otherwise: that it was near the hour of dawn. A light mist lay along the earth, partly veiling the lower features of the landscape, but above it the taller trees showed in well-defined masses against a clear sky. Two or three farmhouses were visible through the haze, but in none of them, naturally, was a light. Nowhere, indeed, was any sign or suggestion of life except the barking of a distant dog, which, repeated with mechanical iteration, served rather to accentuate than dispel the loneliness of the scene.
The man looked curiously about him on all sides, as one who among familiar surroundings is unable to determine his exact place and part in the scheme of things. It is so, perhaps, that we shall act when, risen from the dead, we await the call to judgment.
A hundred yards away was a straight road, showing white in the moonlight. Endeavoring to orient himself, as a surveyor or navigator might say, the man moved his eyes slowly along its visible length and at a distance of a quarter-mile to the south of his station saw, dim and gray in the haze, a group of horsemen riding to the north. Behind them were men afoot, marching in column, with dimly gleaming rifles aslant above their shoulders. They moved slowly and in silence. Another group of horsemen, another regiment of infantry, another and another – all in unceasing motion toward the man's point of view, past it, and beyond. A battery of artillery followed, the cannoneers riding with folded arms on limber and caisson.