"One of the Missing" is a short story by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose Bierce.
After hearing the explosion, his brother Adrian is ordered to move forward and explore the area that Jerome has scouted.
[2] The story was rewritten by Bierce for his Collected Works in order to highlight the subjective perception of time: what had seemed to the protagonist like hours of torture was actually a mere twenty-two minutes.
[3] This notion is also dramatised in Bierce's most successful story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge".
Jerome finds himself in the position of a Confederate soldier that he thought to kill seconds before the explosion, just like the two fishers in Maupassant's story suddenly find themselves as helpless and doomed as the fish they caught: "seized by chance and subject to the bidding of a more powerful entity".