Short Stories About War: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic short stories about war, from The Sniper and War by Pirandello to Owl Creek Bridge and Boule de Suif, summarised and compared for readers and writers.
War stories in the short form rarely show a battle. They show a bridge, a rooftop, a coach, a railway compartment, one place where the war arrives as a single decision.
The collection opens with two men and a rifle, moves through the American Civil War as Bierce saw it, and ends in occupied France with Maupassant and Zola. Each title links to a page where the story is summarised and its ending explained.
The stories
The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty. On a Dublin rooftop during the civil war a Republican sniper is wounded, fakes his own death, and shoots the man on the opposite roof. Curious, he crosses the street to see the face. The ending turns on whose it is.
War by Luigi Pirandello. In a crowded railway carriage parents of soldiers compete over whose grief is greatest, until a fat man insists that sons die content and their parents should be proud. A woman asks him one simple question about his own son.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. Peyton Farquhar, a planter caught trying to burn a railway bridge, stands on the boards with a rope around his neck while the soldiers take their positions. The ticking of his watch becomes unbearable.
Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce. A small deaf boy wanders from home and meets hundreds of wounded men crawling through the woods toward a creek. He leads them like a general, then follows the glow back to his own house.
A Horseman in the Sky by Ambrose Bierce. Carter Druse, a Virginian fighting for the Union, is on sentry duty when he sees a Confederate horseman on a cliff edge above his camp. He aims at the horse. The sergeant later asks him who the man was.
The Attack on the Mill by Emile Zola. On the eve of a wedding the Merlier mill becomes a French outpost and then a Prussian one, and the miller's daughter Francoise tries to free her fiance from his captors. The last word is a captain's shout of victory over a ruin.
The Last Lesson by Alphonse Daudet. Little Franz arrives late for school in Alsace and finds the villagers sitting at the back, because an order from Berlin means this is the last lesson in French. Monsieur Hamel writes his final words on the board in his largest hand.
Two Friends by Guy de Maupassant. Two Parisians go fishing outside the lines during the siege and are captured by Prussians who want a password they do not have. They look at each other and say nothing.
Boule de Suif by Guy de Maupassant. Ten travellers fleeing Rouen share a coach with a prostitute who feeds them from her basket, and are then held at an inn by a Prussian officer who wants her. They talk her into it and then will not share their food.
One of the Missing by Ambrose Bierce. A Union scout is trapped in a collapsed shed with his own rifle wedged so that its muzzle points at his forehead. He cannot know whether it is loaded, and the story counts what that does to a man in twenty-two minutes.
Reading them together
The collection argues that war stories are about the moment a person becomes a category: brother, enemy, sniper, whore, the missing. O'Flaherty and Bierce make the category collapse on a face; Pirandello makes it collapse on a question; Maupassant shows a coachload of people upholding it against the woman who fed them. Zola and Daudet write about what an occupation takes from a village: a mill, a language.
Bierce has four stories here, and they are best read as one argument: that the body keeps a time the mind cannot, whether it is Farquhar's watch or Searing's twenty-two minutes.
If you want to write about war
What writers can take from this
- Start with The Sniper, then A Horseman in the Sky; they are two versions of the same shot written fifty years apart.
- Read War and Two Friends on the same evening; both are under two thousand words and each ends on a silence.
- Boule de Suif is the longest here and the most novelistic; note how Maupassant seats the passengers and keeps that seating plan to the end.
- In The Last Lesson, watch how Daudet makes the schoolroom furniture carry the politics.
- Bierce's four stories can be read in an hour; The Attack on the Mill needs its own.
Try it yourself
Write a story set in a single confined space during a war, in which no shot is fired on the page and the outcome turns on a question one civilian asks another.
Questions
What is the best short story about war?
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is the most studied, and Boule de Suif the most admired by writers. War by Pirandello is the shortest and the most often quoted in essays.
Which short stories about war are good for students?
The Sniper, War, The Last Lesson and A Horseman in the Sky are short, clear and built around one decision. Two Friends works well for discussing loyalty and silence.
Which classic war story is the shortest?
War by Pirandello and The Sniper are each around fifteen hundred words. The Last Lesson is roughly the same length.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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