The Red Badge of Courage

Summary

The Red Badge of Courage follows Henry Fleming, a young private of the 304th New York, through two days of fighting in an unnamed Civil War battle that readers have long identified with Chancellorsville in May 1863. Crane calls him almost always simply the youth. As the novel opens, the army is camped along a river in spring, and the tall soldier, Jim Conklin, comes back from washing a shirt with a rumor that they will move at last. Henry had enlisted against his mother's wishes, dreaming of Greeklike struggles; she sent him off while peeling potatoes, with knitted socks, a cup of blackberry jam and plain advice to do his duty. Now he lies awake wondering whether he will run. In the first engagement he fires mechanically and the regiment holds, but when the enemy charges a second time he panics, throws down his rifle and flees into the woods. There he tells himself that he saved himself sensibly, throws a pine cone at a squirrel and takes its flight as a law of nature, and then stumbles into a green chapel of boughs where a dead soldier sits against a tree with ants crawling on his face. Joining a column of wounded men, he is shamed by the gentle questions of a tattered soldier about where he is hit. He finds Jim Conklin mortally wounded, follows him into a field and watches him die in a terrible upright convulsion, then abandons the tattered man, who is wandering in a daze. Henry half wishes for a wound of his own. He gets one by accident: a panicking Union soldier clubs him on the head with a rifle butt. A cheerful stranger leads him back to his regiment, where he claims to have been shot, and his friend Wilson, once a loud braggart and now quietly changed, binds his head and gives him his own blankets. The next day Henry fights in a kind of fury. Sent for water with Wilson, he overhears a general call the regiment mule drivers who can be spared. In the charge that follows Henry seizes the colors from a dying color sergeant, and later Wilson captures a Confederate flag at a rail fence. As the regiment marches away in the rain, Henry recalls his desertion of the tattered man with shame, but feels a quiet manhood. The novel appeared in abridged form in newspapers through the Bacheller syndicate in December 1894 and as a book from D. Appleton and Company in New York in the autumn of 1895, subtitled An Episode of the American Civil War.

Top Lessons

• Courage is not the absence of fear

  Henry imagines courage as a feeling he will either have or lack, and his first test proves that feelings can fail. On the second day he fights well not because fear has vanished but because his attention has turned outward to the regiment, the flag and his friend. Crane shows courage as something done more than something felt.

• The excuses we make

  After running, Henry builds argument after argument to excuse himself: he saved a valuable life, nature itself teaches flight, the army was doomed anyway. Crane lets the reader watch self-justification at work, and each argument collapses at the sight of the corpse in the chapel, the wounded column and Jim Conklin's death.

• A false badge and a true one

  Henry's head wound comes from a fleeing comrade's rifle butt, yet he lets the regiment believe he was shot, and the lie protects him. The novel leaves readers to weigh whether his later bravery and the flag he carries truly answer for the lie and for leaving the tattered man.

• Friendship that changes a man

  Wilson begins as the loud soldier who boasts and quarrels and ends as a modest friend who nurses Henry without asking questions. His change happens offstage, in the same first day Henry spends running, and it quietly judges Henry's vanity when Henry is tempted to use the packet of letters against him.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novel is less about wounds than about fear, and it is often cited as an early literary study of combat stress. Crane renders anticipatory dread in Henry's sleepless nights before battle, an acute panic in which he flees without deciding to, the dissociative sense of becoming part of a machine in the firing line, and afterwards a long stretch of rationalization, guilt and hypervigilance about being found out; later readers sometimes compare these states with modern accounts of acute stress, though Crane writes before any such vocabulary existed and the parallels should be held loosely. The wounded column in Chapter VIII is a moving picture of Civil War casualties walking to the rear without stretchers or surgeons in sight. Jim Conklin's death from a side wound, with his fear of being run over by the artillery wagons, his determined walk into a field and his final convulsion, is one of the most exact deathbed scenes in American fiction, and the tattered soldier's confused wandering suggests a head or abdominal wound advancing toward collapse; neither is diagnosed in the text. Henry's own injury is a scalp blow from a rifle butt, treated only by Wilson's wet handkerchief, a glimpse of the comrade care that made up much of a private soldier's medicine. Crane himself died of tuberculosis in 1900 at twenty-eight.

• Chapter I

  Henry lies awake in his hut calculating whether he will run, an extended portrait of anticipatory anxiety before a first battle.

• Chapter VI

  Henry's flight: he sees others running, drops his rifle and runs blindly to the rear before he has decided anything.

• Chapter VIII

  The procession of walking wounded on the road to the rear: a man with a shoeful of blood laughing hysterically, a singing soldier, an officer carried by two privates, the spectral soldier with the gray seal of death on his face, and the tattered man with wounds to the head and arm.

• Chapter IX

  Jim Conklin's death from a torn side, his fear of being crushed by artillery, and his final rigid convulsion in a field.

• Chapter XII

  Henry is struck on the head by a retreating soldier's rifle and walks on dazed and bleeding until a stranger guides him.

• Chapter XIII

  Wilson nurses Henry by the fire with coffee, a wet handkerchief bandage and his own blankets.