The Red Badge of Courage

"Right, it has courage in the title, and it actually never mentions the word ‘coward’. I speculate in my book about a moment when someone who is talking about an officer who shirks his duty gets interrupted, he says something like, ‘I always thought he was a –.’ But the word never gets mentioned, and I assume that he was going to say ‘coward’. Red Badge obsesses over that word it doesn’t quite name. It’s the classic novel of the American Civil War. Henry Fleming — the youth whose tale is told — is worried throughout whether he will find he’s a man of traditional courage, or whether he’ll find that he is a coward. And he thinks the way he’ll find this out is by going into battle. Then he runs away from battle, and feels that he is a coward. But then he realises that no one actually saw him run, and so he feels better about himself. He convinces himself that he had run with dignity, while others who fled looked like chickens. The comedy of the novel is underrated. There’s another very humorous moment — one of my favourite moments — they’re having some kind of debate and the line is: ‘it was hard to have a fierce argument in the presence of such sandwiches.’ They’re sitting at the camp and there is something about being comfortable and well-fed that leads us away from hard talk and hard thinking. Being comfortable itself becomes a kind of evasion. “I’m still trying to find a famous coward.” The other interesting thing about Henry Fleming for my purposes is that in a later story that Crane wrote, called ‘The Veteran,’ he tells us the tale of how Henry Fleming dies. This happens thirty years later: having survived the war, he’s in a grocery store with his grandson and he’s joking about how he had fled when he fought for the Union Army. He never would have joked like this when he was 17. His grandson is there and is just shocked to see his grandfather make a joke about running. He’s scandalised. But then the second half of the story tells of how Henry’s barn catches fire and he dies rescuing animals from it. So the courage is there but it seems like a courage that is not driven by the fear of being cowardly, it seems driven by a love of all God’s creatures. Maybe I should have offered my working definition before — cowardice being a failure of duty because of excessive fear. Of course cowardice can be used as an instrument of the powerful and it can infect the powerful themselves, who can become fearful of being cowardly and so go on to do reckless things. But just going by the simple definition and applying it to the question that the young Henry was asking — would I run if battle came because of fear? — that would clearly be cowardice because his duty was to stay in place. But in the case of the older Henry, maybe his duty was to save those animals, and the fear may have been of dying, but I speculate that his fear of death has diminished here and so he is able to do the truly courageous thing. The shame of cowardice can brace people to do their duty; but maybe the highest courage doesn’t need such bracing? No control, sometimes, but Miller is eager not to dismiss such seemingly spontaneous courage because philosophers often do — it not being a courage informed by, say, knowledge of the good and noble. Miller wants to save courage from the extremes of self-regarding philosophy. Too much love of thought makes us underestimate virtuous acts that seem not deeply considered or deliberative: the quick bravery of the trained soldier, for example. A famous line of his is that everything he needed to know about war he learned playing sand lot football. He said: ‘I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field.’ Fears of cowardice are engrained in the genre of war writing, but though the battlefield is the quintessential arena for cowardice, it’s also true that it’s not the sole arena. The football field can be too. Crane also read a magazine called The Century , which had a series of Civil War memoirs around the time he wrote the book, when he was, I think, 24. Being a young man in nineteenth-century America he was also steeped in a culture that celebrated courage. He did witness actual war a couple years later, in Greece, I think, and in the Spanish-American War."

"The Red Badge of Courage marked a crucial moment in the history of Civil War literature. Prior to its publication in 1895, writing about the war was dominated by veterans North and South. Former soldiers were numerous and widely respected, and they came to flood the literary marketplace with memoirs and regimental histories at the turn of the century. The public proved to have an enormous appetite for these accounts of camp and battle. While this meant that millions of Americans were reading and thinking about the recent war, veterans’ stranglehold on the subject ensured that memoirs of women, former slaves, and civilians of every kind were overshadowed or ignored. Indeed, Civil War veterans came to actively police the literary market, intimidating any nonveteran who would presume to write about the conflict. No wonder that when Crane’s Red Badge of Courage first saw publication, many readers assumed he must be a veteran. Not only did the novel take the Civil War battlefield as its subject, but it offered readers an account of battle as seen through the eyes of a Union private during his first experiences in combat. When the surprising truth became known, that author Stephen Crane was both a nonveteran and a young man born after the war, many veterans objected. At least one prominent veteran dismissed Crane’s novel as the work of a “diseased imagination,” and not just because of the author’s civilian status. With rare exception, veterans had avoided graphic details in their memoirs, preferring to share highly romanticized and sanitized accounts in keeping with Victorian sensibilities. By contrast, Crane drew on his considerable talent as a writer, and on his physical and emotional experiences on the football field, to breathe life into the dry accounts so often published by veterans. The Red Badge of Courage teems with the speed, dirt, blood, fear, adrenaline, and chaos of the battlefield – precisely those details that are missing from most nineteenth-century accounts of the war. “The Civil War stands as the central moment in all American history” Ultimately the public found Crane’s novel entrancing because it brought the war to life in a way readers had not before experienced. Dropped breathlessly into the Civil War battlefield they had long read about and even revered from afar, Crane’s readers found themselves asking new questions about the motivation and ideology of the war’s participants. In short, the novel helped readers in 1895 move from asking, ‘What was the war like?’ to ‘Why did its participants take part? Why endure these harrowing and often brutal experiences?’ In that sense, then, the bestseller led readers to think of the war in terms of lived experience, body and mind, and reframed the conflict in terms of personal participation. We see that emphasis on participation still today, not just in Civil War literature but in everything from Civil War reenacting groups to museum exhibits that employ sounds and even smells to stimulate the senses of visitors. The Red Badge of Courage has experienced a surge in readers every time the U.S. has entered an armed conflict during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Readers seem to turn to the book for answers. What is the nature of warfare, and what role can an individual play within its sweep? Crane’s narrative shows warfare to be an all-encompassing force over which the individual has little or no control. At best, survivors can try to interpret their traumatic experiences and assign meaning and order to the chaos. That is what we see Crane’s everyman protagonist struggling to do throughout the novel, and we sympathize with the youth, even if his interpretations are too narrow and self-interested to satisfy us. For instance, the young soldier concludes that combat has made him ‘a man.’ He cannot break free of his personal anxieties and psychological needs to consider war’s meanings beyond himself. I would argue that its honesty – more than any sense of war-weariness – explains readers’ enduring interest in The Red Badge of Courage . Its portrait of warfare as harsh, amoral, and untamable explodes romantic notions and insists that we explore our reasons for participating in such a traumatic undertaking."

"I chose these next three examples about the actual experience of war. This is a novel about a young soldier volunteering in the American Civil War who has no experience of war at all, has no idea whether he is going to be brave or whether he is going to be cowardly. The way in which he suddenly finds himself caught up in a battle is absolutely brilliant in its description of the battle itself and the emotions he feels, the way he reacts, the impression made on him by fear, horror, dread, exhilaration, triumph, exhaustion, hunger sweeping over him in great waves. He stumbles through these battles and emerges at the end saying, that was what it was like and I have survived. Even if one has no interest in war at all and dislikes the whole idea, it is a great novel. It is very short, incredibly vivid and I would put it on my list of the best 12 books that everybody ought to read. He starts not as a grand idealist. War is like an examination. You are discovering the kind of person that you are. I had my own examination. Like the hero of this novel, I started not knowing what to expect, not knowing how I was going to behave. Was I going to be cowardly? Was I going to be heroic? Was I going to be ingenious? How was I going to stand up to it all? At the end of it I had been through a number of experiences which did show me the kind of person that I was. By the end of the war I was grown up. One of the few things that war does help one to do is to get to know oneself in depth. There are some things one discovers about oneself which are lamentable and others which are rather surprising. Well, they’ve been through different kinds of experiences which have matured them, but war is a maturing process and there is nothing quite like it in the world. People are trying to kill you and you discover yourself in a situation in which people really are trying to get you. It is very interesting and scary. There is nothing quite like it in civil life. Fear is a great examiner of one’s character. Yes. Yes. Indeed. Much less. It’s a very complicated business and the personal experience is a very interesting test. It really comes down, irrespective of who the enemy is and what the cause is, to some people over there who are trying to kill you and it is your job to try to kill them. It becomes very basic to that extent. I certainly didn’t go to war in a state of high idealism. I found myself in an intensely disagreeable situation in which the war seemed to be a necessity and my taking part in it at that particular age was also a necessity. I’d have been faintly relieved if I had not had to do it but, as it was, it was a job that had to be done. I think an earlier generation that went into the First World War had greater expectations and higher ideals of the kind that I certainly didn’t have, if only because the First World War had knocked that out of people."

"It’s the story of a very young soldier, about 14 or 15 years old, in the American Civil War , and it’s about him fearing that he’s a coward. He runs away and finds himself and finds the courage to come back and take his place alongside his fellow soldiers. I think in the heart of almost every man and woman there is this fear that if you were put in that position where you had to show courage, your courage might fail you. Increasingly as I get older I know that to be the case. It’s a book that encourages you to believe that you can do it. It’s not about the violence of war but about how people manage to get through it. Yes. I’ve just finished a book called The Kites are Flying , which I think is life affirming in the same way as my last book choice. It’s a book about a wall. And it’s very interesting because people have been talking a lot about the Berlin Wall coming down. The people who pulled it down were children in the sense that they had been children and saw this wall around them as they were growing up. And when they got older they decided to pull it down. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. My story is about a reporter who goes to Palestine to find out about the wall that the Israelis have put up to protect themselves from the Palestinians. The Israelis naturally see it as some form of protection while the Palestinians resent it. There are two children in the book living on either side of the wall. One starts sending messages across the wall with a kite and eventually his faith is rewarded because the Israeli children get together and send all the kites back with their messages of goodwill. The book is all about the hope and the promise that in the end the children will put it right – which will happen. It’s seems inconceivable at the moment, but that is what happened with East and West Germany. So it’s a book about peace and a book about hope. We are in the middle of a conflict which is touching the world in such a disastrous way in that people take sides, and the whole point of this book is to show that if you stop taking sides you can work it out."