The themes permitted by such an attitude were certain to displease the readers of that period. In _Tales of Soldiers and Civilians_, his first book of stories, he looks squarely and grimly at one much bedecked subject of the time--war; not the fine gay gallantry of war, the music and the marching and the romantic episodes; but the ghastly horror of it; through his vivid, dramatic passages beats a hatred of war, not merely "unrighteous" war, but all war, the more disquieting because never allowed to become articulate. With bitter but beautiful truth he brings each tale to its tragic close, always with one last turn of the screw, one unexpected horror more. And in this book--note the solemn implication of the title he later gave it, _In the Midst of Life_--as well as in the next, _Can Such Things Be_, is still another subject which Bierce alone in his generation seemed unafraid to consider curiously: "Death, in warfare and in the horrid guise of the supernatural, was painted over and over. Man's terror in the face of death gave the artist his cue for his wonderful physical and psychologic microscopics. You could not pin this work down as realism, or as romance; it was the greatest human drama--the conflict between life and death--fused through genius. Not Zola, in the endless pages of his _Debacle_, not the great Tolstoi in his great _War and Peace_ had ever painted war, horrid war, more faithfully than any of the stories of this book; not Maupassant had invented out of war's terrible truths more dramatically imagined plots.... There painted an artist who had seen the thing itself, and being a genius, had made it an art still greater. Death of the young, the beautiful, the brave, was the closing note of every line of the ten stories of war in this book. The brilliant, spectacular death that came to such senseless bravery as Tennyson hymned for the music-hall intelligence in his _Charge of the Light Brigade_; the vision-starting, slow, soul-drugging death by hanging; the multiplied, comprehensible death that makes rivers near battlefields run red; the death that comes by sheer terror; death actual and imagined--every sort of death was on these pages, so painted as to make Pierre Loti's _Book of Pity and Death_ seem but feeble fumbling." Now death by the mid-Victorian was considered almost as undesirable an element in society as sex itself. Both must be passed over in silence or presented decently draped. In the eighties any writer who dealt unabashed with death was regarded as an unpleasant person. "Revolting!" cried the critics when they read Bierce's _Chickamauga_ and _The Affair at Coulter's Notch_. Bierce's style, too, by its very fineness, alienated his public. Superior, keen, perfect in detail, finite, compressed--such was his manner in the free and easy, prolix, rambling, multitudinous nineteenth century.