A Farmboy Goes to War

One day, and only because I asked her what life had really been like in the Blitz, my mother told me not about terrifying explosions and damage and injury, but about a cold rainy day in November 1940, when with many others she watched an endless procession of lorries and carts pass in silence through the bombed centre of Coventry. The vehicles were carrying the bodies of the dead to mass graves. Most of the memories of that time are now like this; a few words passed down through families. And, inevitably, adult witnesses of that war become fewer and fewer as the years pass.

In a way, the continuing production of war films – usually regarded with scorn by veterans of non-fictional wars – and books of popular military history is only the latest sign of a ceaseless nostalgia for the heroic; an endlessly unsatisfied need to somehow experience the feelings of those who suffered, who were there. Didn’t even Samuel Johnson, a gentle man under his crust, say to Boswell, ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been to sea . . . The profession of soldiers and sailors has the dignity of danger. Mankind reverences those who have got over fear, which is so general a weakness.’ This is the direct theme of one of the first modern novels to show how war is experienced by the common soldier: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. Praised to this day as one of the few realistic accounts of battle, Crane’s book is set in the American Civil War of 1861–5. But Crane was not born until 1871, and the book was first published in 1895. How could such a powerfully convincing account have been written by someone with no experience of fighting? Crane’s father was a clergyman and the males on his mother’s side seem to have been almost exclusively Methodist ministers. From childhood on Crane had no intention of following their example. At the age of 16, obsessed with the idea of becoming a soldier, he talked his mother into letting him transfer to a school with a military training department. He grew into an attractive, athletic boy who received a good schooling in the classics, literature, art and music – and military life. He excelled in drill and was soon promoted to first lieutenant in the cadet corps. He read much of the vast literature that the Civil War had produced but was disappointed by many of the memoirs – ‘these fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps!’ More to the point, actual vivid memories of war were provided by talk among the war veterans who helped to drill the cadets, men who had been through the fire of war in the most brutal and immediate way. Crane did not go on to West Point; he needed immediate adventure and by the age of 19 was a professional journalist, writing for the New York Tribune and other papers, mostly about life among the bums and prostitutes on the Bowery, in their world of saloons, cheap hotels and brothels. He attacked police corruption and the injustice of the courts. He disguised himself as a tramp, saying that he must experience directly how such a life felt. That is what interested Crane – how people behave, morally and physically, in extreme circumstances – how he himself would behave. The ultimate test was war, and the American Civil War had been devastating and bitterly fought: its causes and effects were still vividly present in the minds of ordinary Americans in Crane’s youth. By writing The Red Badge of Courage, Crane was determined to show as closely as he could how one man would experience the horrors of war.

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

So the book opens. Apart from brief flashbacks it concerns itself with just a few days of battle. Crane chose as his protagonist a young private soldier, Henry Fleming, an uneducated farm boy who has joined up in a swell of patriotism. It is in Henry’s mind that we live during the battle – not in that of the young officer we see rallying and bullying his troops, who is perhaps Crane’s sardonic picture of how he might himself have behaved in action. Henry is in the Union Army camped in the hills. Across the valley and river is the camp of the Confederate Army. Henry is 18. He has joined up dreaming of valour and military glory, reflected in the admiring eyes of the girls who waved him off in his home town. He has spent months in camp, in drilling, in musketry and bayonet practice, and he has learned to accept the rough camaraderie of the other recruits. That first morning, as the fogs disperse, they march all day, to make camp again as night falls. The next day they descend to file across the river. They make camp and sleep again. At dawn he is kicked roughly out of sleep.

Before he was entirely awake, he found himself running down a wood road in the midst of men . . . His canteen banged rhythmically upon his thigh and his haversack bobbed softly. His musket bounced a trifle from his shoulder and made his cap feel uncertain upon his head . . . he felt carried along by a mob.

He feels excitement that ‘the time had come. He was about to be measured,’ and then, only a second later, terror that ‘they were taking him out to slaughter’. Locked in a mass of running men, there is no escape. He hears the first sounds of firing close at hand and the troops pass the first dead body in their path. In a clearing, they are ordered to dig in, piling mounds of earth in front of them to await the expected attack. It doesn’t come. They are ordered to withdraw. The seemingly irrational orders and counter-orders irritate and bewilder them. But then they are ordered to go forward once more and to make a stand. Through the enveloping smoke of cannon and musket, gun flashes give them their first sight of the troops rushing towards them. They fire and fire again, in seemingly endless and exhausting rounds of loading and reloading their weapons, amid smoke and shouts and screams, until the enemy suddenly retreats. Henry stands up and sees the result of the encounter on the ground.

They lay twisted in fantastic contortions. Arms were bent and heads were turned in incredible ways. It seemed that the dead must have fallen from some great height to get into such positions. They looked to be dumped out upon the ground from the sky.

In the valley below, men still move and fight in and out of the smoke, but it seems they have won the battle.

So it was all over at last! The supreme trial had been passed. The red, formidable difficulties of war had been vanquished . . . Upon his fellows he beamed tenderness and good will . . . There were some handshakings and deep speeches with men whose features were familiar but with whom the youth now felt the bond of tied hearts.

The new bond does not last long. Before the men have had time to celebrate further, a devastating counter-attack almost sweeps their line away.

A man near him who up to this time had been working feverishly at his rifle suddenly stopped and ran with howls . . . Others began to scamper away through the smoke. The youth turned his head. He yelled then with fright and swung about . . . He began to speed toward the rear in great leaps. His rifle and cap were gone. His unbuttoned coat bulged in the wind. The flap of his cartridge box bobbed wildly, and his canteen, by its slender cord, swung out behind.

The slightly comic but earnest figure who had set out newly uniformed just a few days before has become a coward and a renegade. The remaining two-thirds of this short book concern the shame and guilt and self-deception and deception of others in which Henry indulges to try and disguise what he has done – deserted in the face of the enemy. And more importantly it shows how he redeems himself in the eyes of others. That was what was important to Crane. He sets up the failure of a very young man and allows him a final triumph. So, although we call the book an early modern work (it had a tremendous influence on Ernest Hemingway when he came to write A Farewell to Arms and it changed how the great wars of the last century were dealt with in fiction), it is not a conventional ‘anti-war’ novel of the type that we now expect. The red badge of courage of the title is a visible wound sustained in action. The American Civil War may have been one of the first to display the characteristics of modern warfare in its use of entrenchment and heavy artillery, but it was also a war of muskets and bayonets, and the greater part of most battles was conducted in hand-to-hand combat. For a long time readers assumed that Crane’s experience of combat came from his experiences in the Greco-Turkish and the Spanish-American wars that he covered as a correspondent. But these came some years after his book was written. He proved a seemingly fearless reporter and acted with considerable bravery when carrying, under heavy fire, supplies to wounded men in Cuba. Stephen Crane was 23 when his novel was published. He had had a first novel privately published at his own expense and it had disappeared without trace, but The Red Badge of Courage was an immediate success in both America and Britain. Crane was only 28 when he died from tuberculosis in a Bavarian clinic in 1900, but his fiction, journalism and poetry fill ten volumes. In some strange way it was as if, knowing how short a span he would have to live, Crane contrived to live his life in reverse. Tortured by doubts about his own courage, he first wrote his totally imagined novel, and then went out to seek the real dangers – courageous campaigning journalism, shipwreck and foreign wars – that would test him. Above all, his book asks this question of every one of its readers – how would you behave in this inferno?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © William Palmer 2023