Immediately following his promotion, Bierce served temporarily as provost marshal, helping to police the camp and enforce discipline,. One of his duties was to assist at military executions, a typically unwanted duty that Bierce, with his taste for the grotesque, found rather diverting. At one such event, two Union soldiers were to be hanged for "a particularly atrocious murder outside of the issues of war"; they had apparently killed Southern civilians instead of Southern soldiers, a finely drawn distinction often lost on enlisted men, then and now.
- Roy Morris, Jr., Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company, p.53
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