Wastelands – Stephen Crane’s War

I discovered Stephen Crane in a comic book. Like a lot of English-speaking North Americans of a certain generation, my first exposure to literature was through a series of comics called Classics Illustrated. Now long gone (the last one was printed around 1970), Classics Illustrated sampled the core texts of what we now call the Western Canon – from The Odyssey and Crime and Punishment to The Conquest of Gaul and Don Quixote – and recast them in comic book form.As a kid, I loved Classics Illustrated. Growing up in Thailand, the child of expats, I sought out and painstakingly curated any artifact of North American culture that came my way. There was one place in Bangkok that sold American comics – a pharmacy in Rajprasong Market. For me, going there with my mom was like a trip to Ali Baba’s cave.I devoured every Classics Illustrated comic I could get my hands on, over and over again. But the one that really stuck with me was the Red Badge of Courage. With its cover art depicting a terrified soldier running for his life, its graphic images of battlefield gore, and its carefully drawn protagonist who looked barely older than I was, there was something about that particular comic that both haunted and fascinated me.Remember, this was the mid-60s, the Vietnam War was spinning up and in Bangkok, a critical staging area, it seemed like the war was all the grown-ups ever talked about. Most of my friends’ fathers had something to do with it, the Seventh Fleet was alongside Klong Toey wharf, and the streets were full of GIs, working, partying, or just wandering around killing time. Lying in my bed at night, I could see flashes in the sky from the Rolling Thunder aerial bombardment of North Vietnam – heat lightning on a far horizon.For me, the war depicted in my comic book version of Crane’s classic novel became conflated with the war that everybody seemed to be involved with. I didn’t understand war, beyond the rudiments, but somehow, the words and images on my flimsy comic book pages helped me contextualize it, to imagine the experiences of the soldiers that I saw out on the street, or going in and out of the bars around my dad’s office downtown. There was something happening all around me and it wasn’t good – that much I understood because Stephen Crane told me so.Stephen Crane was never a soldier. As a journalist, he covered both the Greco-Turkish war and America’s first adventure in colonialism, the Spanish-American War. And despite having written The Red Badge of Courage – arguably the best-known fictional account of the American Civil War – he was actually born six years after Appomattox. Nevertheless, The Red Badge of Courage endures, not only as a story about war and what happens to people in war, but also as a remarkable experiment in literary modernism that defied many of the conventions of 19th century storytelling. As an early proponent of naturalism in American literature, Crane, like the French writer Emile Zola, created fictional landscapes that were hyper-realistic and populated by people whose actions were determined purely by their environments. And as a writer about war, he experimented with many of the themes and tropes deployed in 20th century accounts of conflict and its effects.The Red Badge of Courage recounts a couple of days in the life of Henry Fleming, a Union Army recruit from rural New York. Henry fights at Chancellorsville, one of the bloodiest engagements of the entire war. When we first meet him, he is a naïve farm kid, with just enough education to understand that the distant conflict is unlikely to be something out of The Iliad, but enough imagination to believe that it may yet hold out the possibility of adventure, even heroism (and, more likely, an escape from the narrowness and drudgery of life on an upstate farm):

From his home his youthful eyes had looked upon the war in his own country with distrust. It must be some sort of play affair. He had long despaired of witnessing a Greeklike struggle. Such would be no more, he had said. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.He had burned several times to enlist. Tales of great movements shook the land. They might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them. He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all. His busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid with breathless deeds.

It is hard to get a sense of who Henry really is, either as a person or as a literary character. There is a deeply childlike, unformed quality to this boy, setting off to war with a jar of his mother’s blackberry jam in his knapsack. Indeed, Crane rarely even names him, mostly referring to him simply as “the youth.”Henry’s strange non-personality is a fascinating departure from 19th century literary convention in which central characters like Henry would have been described in painstaking detail, right down to their jug ears and knobbly knees. And as a writer, Crane was really good at creating and developing characters – Maggie, the “fallen woman” of his first novel, A Girl of the Streets, is one of the most memorable figures of 19th century American fiction.Henry seems to be less a literary character than a literary device, a kind of Everyman whose unfiltered, unmediated sensation of the real-life horror of the battlefield allows Crane to advance an aesthetic vision that is profoundly anti-war. Certainly, there is a huge corpus of brilliant war fiction (especially anti-war fiction) that is driven by fully-drawn characters. But as an American literary pioneer, Crane was addressing an audience still freshly imbued with either the triumphalism of the victorious Union, or the simmering resentments of the old Confederacy. So Fleming’s particularity is far less important than the horrific totality of war and its soul-shattering impact.

The man at the youth’s elbow was babbling. In it there was something soft and tender like the monologue of a babe…of a sudden another broke out in a querulous way like a man who has mislaid his hat. “Well, why don’t they support us? Why don’t they send supports? Do they think…”The youth in his battle sleep heard this as one who dozes hears.The lieutenant of the youth’s company had encountered a soldier who had fled screaming at the first volley of his comrades. Behind the lines these two were acting a little isolated scene. The man was blubbering and staring with sheeplike eyes at the lieutenant, who had seized him by the collar and was pommeling him. He drove him back into the ranks with many blows. The soldier went mechanically, dully, with his animal-like eyes upon the officer…he tried to reload his gun, but his shaking hands prevented. The lieutenant was obliged to assist him.

Gruesome depictions of shell shock and trauma thread their way through Crane’s narrative like a recurring nightmare. This kind of subversive messaging did not become the norm in popular European or American war fiction until the publication of novels like All Quiet on the Western Front in the aftermath of the First World War.Statistically speaking, the men who fought in the Civil War were comparatively elderly: the average age of combatants on both sides was about 25. But even a casual troll through the vast archive of Civil War photography reveals that startling numbers of children were in uniform, not just as drummer boys and camp servants, but as combat soldiers. It was, like so many wars before and since, a Children’s Crusade.In Alan Gurganus’ 1989 novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, the titular Lucy Marsden describes the heart wrenching vision of a couple of teenagers leaving home to join the Confederate Army:

Captain Marsden was thirteen when the Confederacy called. You think he knew enough to stay home safe in civvies? No way. The only male mammals still at large in Falls, North Carolina, were either livestock, or babies or our geezers left over from the 18 and 12 one…My husband and his pal felt right overlooked. “We’re ready,” says the boys. Thirteen, and didn’t even have to lie about their age. They had trigger fingers and some eyesight, didn’t they? Was enough.So Marsden trooped off with his best friend…Pressed into service in ’62 when General Lee was already running out of living bodies to put the gray on and get shot at. – Those boys left town holding hands like girls that age would.

Even as a kid myself, poring over my comic book version of The Red Badge of Courage, I understood how truly young Henry Fleming was. So for contemporary readers of Crane, Fleming’s partially formed and gormless nature would have been a discomforting reminder of the true cost of this defining moment in American history.There is an amazingly visual quality to The Red Badge of Courage, a literary echo of the art of cinema that was emerging even as the novel was being written. There are intense moments of close focus and clarity, like this panicked encounter between two officers:

A hatless general pulled his dripping horse to a stand near the colonel of the 304th. He shook his fist in the other’s face. “You’ve got to hold ‘em back!” he shouted, savagely; “you’ve got to hold ‘em back!”In his agitation, the colonel began to stammer. “A-all r-right, General, all right, by Gawd! We-we’ll do our – we-we’ll do – do our best General.” The general made a passionate gesture and galloped away. The colonel…began to scold like a wet parrot.

These are almost always followed by panoramic tracking shots that take in huge swaths of the field of battle, imparting a vision of war that is more felt than seen:

The youth, light-footed, was unconsciously in advance. His eyes still kept note of the clump of trees. From all places near it the clannish yell of the enemy could be heard. The little flames of rifles leaped from it. The song of the bullets was in the air and shells snarled among the treetops. One tumbled directly into the middle of a hurrying group and exploded in crimson fury. There was an instant’s spectacle of a man, almost over it, throwing up his hands to shield his eyes.Other men, punched by bullets, fell in grotesque agonies. The regiment left a coherent trail of bodies.

There is no honor here and certainly no courage, just smoke and noise and pain and death. That is the world in which Henry finds himself. When he enlisted, his mother “…had disappointed him by saying nothing whatever about returning with his shield or on it. He had privately primed himself for a beautiful scene.” But Crane’s brutal descriptions of battlefield death – again, completely counter-intuitive to popular sentiment of the day – are a rude awakening for Henry and his half-formed dreams of classical heroism:

…the chest of the doomed soldier began to heave with a strained motion. It increased in violence until it was as if an animal was within and was kicking and tumbling to be free.He was invaded by a creeping strangeness that slowly enveloped him. For a moment the tremor of his legs caused him to dance a hideous hornpipe. His arms bent wildly about his head in an expression of imp-like enthusiasm.The body seemed to bounce a little way from the earth. “God!” said the tattered soldier.The youth…sprang to his feet and, going closer, gazed upon the pastelike face. The mouth was open and the teeth showed in a laugh.As the flap of the blue jacket fell away from the body, he could see that the side looked as if it had been chewed by wolves.

Realistic portrayals of death are, by now, a staple of writing about war. Isaac Babel, that four-eyed Odessa yeshiva bokher who ended up in a Cossack cavalry brigade during the Russian Civil War, also used violent death as a means of exploring the vast gulf that yawned between his own (and his readers’) illusions about war and its reality. In the Red Cavalry story cycle, published in the 1920s, Babel describes a particularly harrowing encounter with a dying man.

“Here, look,” Dolgushov said, as we pulled up to him. “I’m finished…know what I mean?”“…You’ll have to waste a bullet on me…”He was sitting propped up against a tree. He lay with his legs splayed far apart, his boots pointing in opposite directions. Without lowering his eyes from me, he carefully lifted his shirt. His stomach was torn open, his intestines spilling to his knees, and we could see his heart beating.Afonka…shot Dolgushov in the mouth.“Afonka,” I said, riding up to him with a pitiful smile. “I couldn’t have done that.”“Get lost, or I’ll shoot you!” he said to me, his face turning white. “You spectacled idiots have as much pity for us as a cat has for a mouse!”

It is not combat that is the defining moment of war, it seems, but rather the first encounter with death. And not even mass battlefield death which, as we have seen, very quickly becomes impersonal, but the death of friends and comrades. It may be that experience, and the implied limits on one’s own mortality, that require real courage in the truest sense of the word, to say nothing of real compassion. For Babel, and for Crane, this is the true measure of a soldier, and of a human being. There is a tremendous irony implicit in the title of The Red Badge of Courage. It is not courage but cowardice that is the problem lying at the heart of this novel. As a practitioner of literary naturalism, Crane was a Darwinist, fully cognizant of the effect of environment on human behavior. So his views on the question of cowardice, and the manner in which they manifest themselves in Henry, are a departure from the prevailing attitudes of the time (and our own) in which great significance was attached to constructs like “bravery” and “courage.”In his first experience of combat, Henry, along with most of his comrades, breaks and runs in the face of what seems to be almost certain annihilation by advancing Rebels:

To the youth, it was an onslaught of redoubtable dragons. He became like the man who lost his legs at the approach of the red and green monster. He waited in a sort of a horrified, listening attitude. He seemed to shut his eyes and wait to be gobbled.A man near him who up to this time had been working feverishly at his rifle suddenly stopped and ran with howls. A lad whose face had borne an expression of exalted courage, the majesty of he who dares give his life, was, at an instant, smitten, abject. He blanched like one who has come to the edge of a cliff at midnight and is suddenly made aware. There was a revelation. He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit.

Henry runs and runs until he finds himself alone. Fearing that his comrades might come looking for him and see him in his panic, he pushes himself further and further into a forest. “So he went far,” says Crane, “seeking dark and intricate places.”Faced with the near certainty of death, Henry seems to do more than simply run away. The “dark and intricate places” evoked by Crane, the literary naturalist, seem almost to be a reversal of the human life cycle; a return to the security and the warmth of the womb.Henry’s flight and his subsequent “de-evolution,” find an echo in The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, Randall Jarrell’s 1945 poem about the transformation of a young American bomber crewman into a terrorized feral creature, hopelessly longing for its own infancy.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Jarrell does not pass any judgement on the unnamed gunner, curled like a fetus in his turret, any more than Crane judges Henry for his cowardice. How can they? The two soldiers, caught up in something beyond their control, are only doing what any of us might do in the same circumstances. In fact there are plenty of indications that Crane does not view cowardice as such, but actually a perfectly normal outcome of the instinct towards self-preservation. As Henry rests, the world around him seems to affirm that cowardice or, at least, a healthy degree of caution, is the natural order of things:

He threw a pine cone at a jovial squirrel, and he ran with chattering fear. High in a treetop he stopped, and, poking head cautiously from behind a branch, looked down with an air of trepidation.The youth felt triumphant at this exhibition. There was the law, he said. Nature had given him a sign. The squirrel, immediately upon recognizing danger, had taken to his legs without ado. He did not stand stolidly baring his furry belly to the missile, and die with an upward glance at the sympathetic heavens. On the contrary, he had fled as fast as his legs could carry him; and he was but an ordinary squirrel, too – doubtless no philosopher of his race. The youth wended, feeling that Nature was of his mind. She re-enforced his argument with proofs that lived where the sun shone.

Crane doesn’t dismiss the possibility of courage under fire. Indeed, there are many conspicuous examples in The Red Badge of Courage. But somehow, bravery is never quite what it seems. Apparently oblivious to the imminence of violent death, officers race across the battlefield “…with the skillful abandon of a cowboy…,” barking orders like Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. But they, arguably, are professionals, their courage deriving from a combination of training and proclivity. And like Colonel Kilgore, they are often contemptuous of the men under their command and profligate with their lives:

“What troops can you spare?”The officer who rode like a cowboy reflected for an instant. “Well,” he said, “I had to order in th’ 12th to help the th’ 76th, an’ I haven’t really got any. But there’s the 304th. They fight like a lot a’ mule drivers. I can spare them best of any.”“Get ‘em ready then. I’ll watch developments from here an’ send you word when t’start them. It’ll happen in five minutes.As the other officer tossed his fingers toward his cap and wheeling his horse, started away, the general called out to him in a sober voice: “I don’t believe many of your mule drivers will get back.”The other shouted something in reply. He smiled.

But even in the midst of all of this bloodletting, humans are not inevitably reduced to their most basic, or basest, instincts. There is room here for compassion, for tenderness. When Henry returns injured to his regiment, a comrade cares for him in a firelit moment that recalls a Michelangelo or a Raphael rendition of the Madonna and Child.

He fussed around the fire and stirred the sticks to brilliant exertions. He made his patient drink largely from the canteen that contained the coffee. It was to the youth a delicious draught. He tilted his head afar back and held the canteen long to his lips. The cool mixture went caressingly down his blistered throat…He later produced an extensive handkerchief from his pocket. He folded it into a manner of bandage and soused water from the other canteen upon the middle of it. This crude arrangement he bound over the youth’s head, tying the ends in a queer knot at the back of the neck.The youth contemplated his friend with grateful eyes. Upon his aching and swelling head the cold cloth was like a tender woman’s hand.

But even here, in the sweetest moment in the entire story, there is an implicit irony that takes us back to the much larger irony of its title. Henry’s wound, his red badge of courage, was sustained not in battle, but in the midst of a rout from the battlefield, accidentally inflicted by another panicked Union soldier. Apparently, courage is a matter of happenstance and, even at that, it may not be what it seems.Crane was certainly not the first artist to question war, or to subvert popular notions of what war is about. But he was notable for his willingness to question whether or not courage, or bravery, or whatever we choose to call it, are normal responses to the reality of combat. Even the story’s ending, with Henry basking in martial glory after seizing the regimental colors and leading his comrades into battle, is fraught with ambiguity. The “lover’s thirst” with which he turns to “…images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks – an existence of soft and eternal peace” is in direct juxtaposition to the reality around him:

It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky.

These are not the Elysian Fields where heroes dwell. In fact, it sounds a lot more like the wasteland populated by miserable and terrified conscripts in Wilfred Owen’s First World War poem Dulce et Decorum Est:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludgeTill on the haunting flares we turned our backs,And towards our distant rest began to trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hootsOf gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Fifty years after my first encounter with him in the comics, Stephen Crane still speaks to me. And even with (or perhaps because of) its lovely late-Victorian prose and its archaic turns of phrase, The Red Badge of Courage exerts a powerful hold on the imagination and on the conscience. The anti-war message implicit in Crane’s evocation of the battlefield is very clear. But what’s really important is the way he plays with notions of heroism and cowardice. In Stephen Crane’s war, cowardice is a normal reaction to a pathological situation and not vice-versa. And with the strangely modernist “non-character character” of Henry Fleming, we have an opportunity to project our own fears, our own cowardice, onto Crane’s bare bones sketch of a Civil War soldier. It worked for me as a child, giving me a strange sense of kinship with the young soldiers I saw in the streets around me. It still works today.Most of all, Crane seems to be telling us to avoid the temptation to make false heroes out of these men, these children. For if we do, we will not hesitate to send even more of them off to die. And that’s something that we have yet to learn, much less internalize.____ A.E. Smith is a writer in Ottawa, Canada.