Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

Ambrose Bierce and the unknown Mexican were led out and placed against the wall of a building, in this case a stable. Faced with the terrible sight, the Mexican fell to his knees and began to pray, refusing to rise and face his executioners. Bierce, following the example of his companion, also knelt but did not pray. Instead, he refused the cloth over his eyes and asked the soldiers not to mutilate his face. And so he died.

“I was much interested in the whole affair,” the nameless Mexican officer told Mr. Weeks, “and I asked my surgeon friend many questions. He did not know Bierce at all and did not know he was describing the death of some one in whom I was deeply concerned. But I had known Bierce well and asked the surgeon for detail after detail of the murdered American’s appearance, age, bearing, and manner. From what he told me, I have not the slightest doubt that this was Ambrose Bierce and that he died in this manner at the hands of the butcher, Urbina.”

Following the reports of Mr. Weeks, the San Francisco Bulletin sent one of its special writers, Mr. U. H. Wilkins, down into Mexico, to further examine and confirm or discredit the report of the Mexican officer. Mr. Wilkins reported in March, 1920, confirming the Weeks report and adding what seems to be direct testimony. Mr. Wilkins says that he found a Mexican soldier who had been in Urbina’s command at Icamole and who was a member of the firing squad. This man showed Mr. Wilkins a picture of Bierce which, he said, he had taken from the pocket of the dead man just after the execution had taken place.

Still the doubt perseveres. No one has been able to find the grave of Bierce. The picture which the soldier said he took from the pocket of the dead man was not produced and has never, so far as I can discover, been shown.

Personally, I find in this material more elements for skepticism than for belief. Would Ambrose Bierce have been carrying a picture of himself about the wastes of Mexico? Perhaps, if it was on a passport or other credentials. In that case General Urbina must have known whom he was shooting. And would a guerilla leader, with much more of the brigand about him than the soldier, have shot a man like Bierce, who certainly was worth a fortune living and nothing dead? I must beg to doubt.

Nor do the other details ring true. If the captured Americano was Ambrose Bierce, one of two things must have happened. Either he would have resorted, to save his life, to invective and persuasiveness, for which he was remarkable, or he must have shrugged and been resigned. This Bierce was too old, too cynical, too tired of living and pretending for valedictory heroics. And he was too much of a soldier to wince. For this and another reason the story of his execution will not go down.

Unhappily, the tale of a distinguished victim of the firing squad asking that his face be not disfigured is a piece of standard Mexican romance. According to the tradition of that country, the Emperor Maximilian, when he faced his executioners at Queretaro, begged that he be shot through the body, so that his mother might look upon his face again. Hence, I suspect the soldierly Mexican raconteur of having been guilty of a romantic anachronism, perhaps an unconscious substitution. If the man whom Urbina shot had been Ambrose Bierce, he would neither have knelt, nor made the pitiful gesture of asking the inviolateness of his face.

Adolphe de Castro, who won a lawsuit in 1926 compelling the publishers of a collected edition of Bierce’s writings to recognize him as the co-author of “The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter,” has within the year published a version of Bierce’s end[11] that has some of the same elements in it. Bierce, says de Castro, was shot by Villa’s soldiers at the guerilla leader’s command. Here is the story condensed:

[11] “Ambrose Bierce as He Really Was,” The American Parade, October, 1926.

Bierce was with Villa at the taking of Chihuahua in 1913. After this fight there was nothing for the novelist-soldier to do and he took to drinking tequila, a liquor which causes those who drink it any length of time to turn blue. (Sic!) Bierce had with him a peon who understood a little English and acted as valet and cup companion. When he was in his mugs Bierce talked too much, complained of inactivity and criticised Villa. One drunken night he suggested to the peon that they desert to Carranza. Someone overheard this prattle and carried it to Villa, who had the peon tortured till he confessed the truth. He was released and instructed to carry out the plan with the Gringo. That night, as they started to leave Chihuahua, the writer and his peon were overtaken by a squad, shot down “and left for the vultures.”