In brief
A farm boy enlists in the Union army dreaming of Homer, waits for months in camp, stands through one attack and runs from the next. He wanders through the wood and the wounded, is struck on the head by a panicking soldier from his own side, and goes back to his regiment, where everyone assumes a bullet grazed him. The next day he fights like a madman and carries the flag. That is the whole plot: two days, no names of generals, no cause, and a battle the novel never identifies.
Stephen Crane wrote it in his early twenties, without ever having seen a battle. Veterans took it for memory. Its real subject is not the Civil War but the gap between what a man does and the story he tells himself about it, and the book’s power lies in how long it refuses to close that gap.
The argument
War stories of Crane’s day wanted to know whether a man was brave. Crane’s proposal is that the word hardly applies. Henry Fleming stands in ch. 5 because he is caught in the regiment’s mass: “He became not a man but a member”; he runs in ch. 6 because men near him run. When he fights in ch. 17 he goes on firing after the enemy has gone and has to be told, and he finds out he is a hero from others’ faces: “He had slept, and, awakening, found himself a knight.” In neither case has he decided anything. Courage and cowardice are things that happen to him, and only afterwards does he give them a name.
What he truly fears is not death but being seen. As he walks among the wounded he feels that the “letters of guilt” are burned into his brow (ch. 9). Back with the regiment, safe behind his false wound, he works it out with perfect complacency: “He had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man” (ch. 15). That sentence is the book’s coldest. Honour, it suggests, is a matter of witnesses.
The novel also takes away the comfort of Nature, which Henry keeps asking for a verdict. He throws a pine cone at a squirrel, and when it flees he is delighted: “There was the law, he said. Nature had given him a sign” (ch. 7). Then he walks into a green chapel of boughs and finds himself “being looked at by a dead man” sitting against a tree with ants crossing his face. Nature has no opinion, and Henry’s reasoning has been shown up within a page.
The shape of the book
The book falls cleanly in two around ch. 12. The first half is a descent: the waiting and boasting of camp (ch. 1–4), the first fight and the flight (ch. 5–6), the wood, and the procession of the wounded (ch. 7–11). The second half is a climb, and its steps mirror the first half’s almost too neatly: he is restored (ch. 13), condescends to his friend (ch. 15), fights (ch. 17), overhears an officer calling his regiment “mule drivers” (ch. 18), seizes the flag (ch. 19) and takes part in a charge that wins and means nothing.
The centre of the first half is the death of Jim Conklin in ch. 9, one of the great set pieces in American writing. Henry’s friend, shot and dying on his feet, refuses all help and walks off into a field to meet his death in private, “at the rendezvous”. It ends with one of the most discussed sentences Crane wrote: “The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.” Readers have argued for decades over whether that wafer is a communion wafer, a sacrament over a man with the initials J. C., or the small disc used to seal letters, which is a colder and more exact thing. Whatever it is, it is flat and indifferent, and the sky has nothing else to say.
Then there is the abandonment that follows. The tattered soldier, badly hurt, has shown Henry more kindness than anyone, and is plainly in danger. Henry walks away from him in ch. 10 because his innocent questions about a wound are unbearable. The book does not forget this even when Henry tries to.
The voice
Crane’s prose begins like nothing else of its time: “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting” (ch. 1). The army is an animal and the fires are eyes. The sentences are short and the images come at a strange angle, in strong colours: red, black, grey and yellow. Critics have called it impressionist, naturalist and realist, and the first is the most useful, since Crane gives you what the eye and nerves report before the mind sorts it out.
The narration stays almost entirely inside Henry’s head while keeping a small, deadly distance from it. The high diction belongs to him: when the book says he “had been to touch the great death”, it is partly Crane’s music and partly Henry’s inflation. The reader has to listen hard for the difference. Set against this is the dialogue, which is flat, profane, comic and exact, a chorus of men arguing about rumours and insulting each other: “Oh, shet yeh mouth!” (ch. 24).
Crane also withholds names. For long stretches they are the youth, the tall soldier, the loud soldier and the tattered man. The novel never tells us the state the regiment comes from, and a rare hint of geography is a joke about “All quiet on the Rappahannock” (ch. 16). The effect is less allegory than anonymity: these are the people history textbooks leave out.
The wound
The title phrase occurs when Henry, among the wounded, envies them: “He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage” (ch. 9). Three chapters later he gets one. He grabs a fleeing soldier to ask what is happening; the man, terrified, screams to be let go, and “He adroitly and fiercely swung his rifle. It crushed upon the youth’s head” (ch. 12). The badge is given by a coward to a coward, in a moment when neither knows what he is doing.
The rest of the book depends on what happens next. A corporal examines his head and announces, “Yeh’ve been grazed by a ball” (ch. 13). Henry says nothing to correct him. It is a lie by silence, the first lie that has ever worked for him, and it makes him feel “immensely superior” to his friend Wilson, whose packet of farewell letters he has kept. In ch. 15 he considers using it as a weapon and hands it back: “It was a generous thing.” Crane’s irony is at its best here: Henry’s moral growth consists of not blackmailing someone.
And so to ch. 24. Marching away, Henry reviews his deeds: the public ones parade “in wide purple and gold”, and “He saw that he was good”. Then the tattered soldier returns to his memory and “a wretched chill of sweat” comes over him at the thought that he might be found out. Exposure is what frightens him. The chapter then mounts a sequence of grand claims: “Yet gradually he mustered force to put the sin at a distance”; “He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood”; “He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man”.
Is that true? He marches through a “trough of liquid brown mud”, yet “the youth smiled”. The last line gives him “a golden ray of sun”, and the critics are split: Hergesheimer saw a boy learning self-command; Stallman saw a spiritual change that then ends in self-deception. My own reading is that Crane meant the growth and could not stop himself doubting it. Henry has gained something real, namely that he has seen death and is less afraid of it, and he has also learned to forget the man he left to die. A book which called that maturity would be simple-minded, and so would one that called it fraud.
The people
Henry Fleming
Henry enlists against his mother’s advice: she packs socks and tells him, “Yeh must never do no shirking, child, on my account” (ch. 1), and he finds this disappointing because it is not heroic. He is intelligent enough to analyse himself and vain enough to get it wrong.
Jim Conklin
The tall soldier is the rumour-carrier of ch. 1, cheerful and unreflective, who says he will run if the others run and otherwise does his job. He is the novel’s only uncomplicated person, and it kills him in ch. 9.
Wilson
The loud soldier, a braggart in camp, hands Henry a packet in ch. 3 because he is sure he will die, and comes through the first day changed: “He was no more a loud young soldier” (ch. 14). Wilson is the control in the experiment. His growth is quiet and real, and he seizes the enemy’s colours in ch. 23. Henry notices his own glory instead.
The tattered soldier and the cheery soldier
These are the two unnamed men who judge Henry and do not know it. The first asks, “Where yeh hit, ol’ boy?” in a brotherly tone (ch. 8) and is abandoned for it. The second takes him by the arm in the dark, leads him through the chaos to his regiment and goes off, and only then does it strike Henry that he has not once seen his face (ch. 12). Kindness in this book arrives anonymously and goes unrepaid.
The two texts
Crane’s manuscript ran to about 55,000 words under a working title, “Private Fleming/His various battles”. An abridged 18,000-word version ran in newspapers in December 1894 through the Bacheller syndicate. The book from D. Appleton in October 1895 was about 5,000 words shorter than the manuscript. In 1982 W. W. Norton published Henry Binder’s edition based on that longer text, and its advocates treat the Appleton cuts as damage. Others hold that Crane made them himself. The dispute turns on the question the ending raises: how sure the novel is of Henry’s growth. The version linked here and read by nearly everyone is the 1895 text, and I think it is the better book, partly because it leaves that question open.
How it was made
Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, on 1 November 1871, and he was twenty-one when he began the book in June 1893, after Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) had failed. He read the Century magazine’s “Battles and Leaders” series in a friend’s studio, and complained that the old soldiers told what they did and never how they felt. He wrote through the nights and finished in April 1894. He later said that he got his sense of the rage of conflict “on the football field”. He had Chancellorsville in mind, as his story “The Veteran” (1896) confirms, in which an old Henry Fleming admits he ran there and then dies going back into a burning barn for some colts.
The fame the book won him sent him to real wars, as a correspondent in Greece and Cuba. A filibustering ship he sailed on, the Commodore, sank off Florida in January 1897, and that gave him “The Open Boat”. He died of tuberculosis at Badenweiler, Germany, on 5 June 1900, aged twenty-eight.
Readers and critics
Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic praised it, the British most warmly. George Wyndham called it a masterpiece, and Harold Frederic wrote that it had no fellows. H. G. Wells later spoke of an “orgy of praise”. Not all veterans agreed. General Alexander McClurg attacked it in The Dial in 1896 as “a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies”, and Ambrose Bierce, who had fought at Shiloh and was the better-qualified writer on battle, mocked “the Crane freak”. Joseph Conrad, Crane’s friend, wrote the lasting summary of Henry: “He is alone with the problem of courage.” Hemingway printed it entire in Men at War (1942), calling it “one of the finest books of our literature”.
Since the 1950s, argument has centred on the ending and on the Christian imagery that R. W. Stallman found everywhere. John Berryman’s 1950 biography made the case for Crane as a major writer. A warning about older sources: Thomas Beer’s 1923 biography, long the standard life, is now regarded as unreliable, and stories from it should be checked before being repeated.
Afterlives
John Huston filmed it in 1951 with Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated American soldiers of the Second World War, as Henry, and the cartoonist Bill Mauldin as Wilson. MGM cut it to seventy minutes against Huston’s wishes, and the wreckage is recorded in Lillian Ross’s book Picture (1952). A television version with Richard Thomas followed in 1974. Its deeper afterlife is in every later war book that puts fear and confusion in the foreground.
How to read it
- Read it in a sitting or two. It is short, and the effect is cumulative; the book moves at the speed of Henry’s panic.
- Do not trust the big words. When the prose goes grand, ask whether the grandeur is Crane’s or Henry’s. That habit is the main skill the book teaches.
- Read chapters 9 and 12 twice. They are the death of Jim and the blow to the head, and the whole book hangs between them.
- Keep the tattered soldier in mind. Henry wants you to forget him by the end, and the last chapter is a test of whether you have.
- Follow it with “The Veteran”. It is a few pages long and gives a surprising answer to the book’s final question.
Read next
- Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat” (1897). Crane’s own shipwreck, and the indifference of Nature proved on his body.
- Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890). The Civil War by someone who fought in it, and a story about what the mind does at the last moment.
- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Crane’s premise applied by a real infantryman to a far worse war.
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1990). Vietnam, and the same question of what a war story can truthfully claim.
- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (1997). The deserter’s walk home, which Crane’s youth only dreamed of.