Discuss the recurring theme of betrayal throughout the story and provide examples.

Bierce could just as easily have made his point about the revisionism of the reality of the war into some mythically heroic showdown of titans without the victim of the sniper’s rifle being the sniper’s own father. Even if the man on horseback had been a complete and total stranger, the allegorical point would stand. That he specifically chose to make it a father and son tragedy also points to his discomfort at the direction the collective memory of the war was taking among Americans. By 1889, too family members personally impacted by a division of loyalties were gone as a result of aging. Old wounds had healed and angry memories had softened and the reality of so many brothers fighting brothers and sons fighting fathers in battle no longer seemed quite as viscerally real. Through the choice that Bierce made, the story also becomes thematically richer as a counter to revisionism with its reminder that families really had been torn apart in a way Americans had never seen before and had not seen since.