"A Tough Tussle" is a short story by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose Bierce.
It was published on the first page of the Sunday supplement to The San Francisco Examiner on September 30, 1888 and was reprinted in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891).
As in so many of his stories, Bierce highlights "a power of the mind to shape perception,” anticipating the discovery of shell shock among World War I veterans).
[2] As Byring's generalized anxiety gradually becomes fixated on the corpse, the young officer envisions the dead body as animate and attacks it.
[3] According to Sharon Talley, "Bierce anticipates current psychological thinking in his appreciation of the incapacitating consequences of war trauma on the human psyche... that can lead individuals to choose suicide as a solution when anxiety becomes overwhelming".