My
reading’s been all over the map this year, but since I hadn’t tackled any Civil
War-era war stories, I didn’t see any reason to turn my nose up at Stephen
Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage .
Truth
is, I had no idea what I was about to read. If you asked me a week ago, I would
have been hard-pressed to tell you the difference between Captains Courageous , Profiles
in Courage , and The Red Badge of
Courage . All reportedly great books, all on my mental To-Be-Read list for
years, but all of them a confusing jumble of "courage" in my poorly-read head.
Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage , as it
turns out, is not a daring rescue at sea or an examination of valiant senators,
it is a fictionalized account of the Battle of Chancellorsville, and of the
second bloodiest day of the American Civil War as told from the perspective of
a “youth” who is seeing battle for the very first time. And while there’s lots
of tactical blow-by-blow, that’s not what makes it great. What makes it great
is Crane’s fascinating probing into the psyche of soldiers who are in fact scared
spitless.
You
see them wrestling with the same questions we would all probably face in their
shoes: Will I run when it gets ugly? Or will I have what it takes to stand up
and fight? And what’s great about it is that we get to follow a main character
whose experience runs the gamut: over the course of a few days he turns tail
and runs, he deserts wounded comrades, he finds his regiment again and then fights
bravely, he picks up the flag when the color sergeant goes down- and through it
all he doesn’t come to consider himself a coward or a hero, so much as he comes
to truly know himself and grow through the experience. It’s a book that’ll make
you think.
And
the language is beautiful. Here’s the first paragraph:
“The
cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army
stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to
green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of
rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs
of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of
its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become
of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of
hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.”
Anyway,
it’s short, and it’s sweet. You should do yourself the favor of checking it
out.
