The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

He had fled, he told himself, because annihilation approached. He had done a good part in saving himself, who was a little piece of the army. He had considered the time, he said, to be one in which it was the duty of every little piece to rescue itself if possible. Later, the officers could fit the little pieces together again, and make a battle front. If none of the little pieces were wise enough to save themselves from the flurry of death at such a time, why, then, where would be the army? It was all plain that he had proceeded according to very correct and commendable rules. They had been full of strategy. They were the work of a master's legs.

Henry Fleming enters the Union Army against his mother's wishes, hoping to do great things. As his regiment waits and waits for something to happen, he wonders if he will really be up to the task when the time comes, or if he will turn and run. When the battle does come, his fears are confirmed: he high-tails it away from the battle, and spends a day wandering in confusing and frightening scenes of death and destruction. Trying to get news from another frightened soldier, he's hit in the head with the butt of a rifle, and the ensuing wound proves to be the "red badge of courage" he needs to return to his own regiment to lead them as color guard into renewed battle. Seeing it, his fellow soldiers think him heroic; seeing their admiration, he becomes the soldier they imagine him to be.

I re-read The Red Badge of Courage, along with March, because I'm writing a book with scenes in it from the Civil War, and I don't want to do the real research I really ought to do. March is full of such fine details, expert at the names of things, but ironically, Red Badge--written thirty years after the war's end--has less specificity to it. There are cannons and cartridges, sure, but Henry knows little to nothing about larger strategies or quartermaster stores or anything like that. His war has no specificity; it's a parade of grotesque images, all blood and smoke and fire. Red Badge, at times, reads like a book written sixty or seventy years after it really was, with its modernist staccato sentences and its stark and metaphor-heavy images. Shells are "strange war flowers bursting into fierce bloom." A cavalry regiment on a faraway hill is reduced to: "The tiny riders were beating the tiny horses."

It's funny, in a way, because both Red Badge and March are about idealists coming up against the limits of their ideals. Rev. March is an abolitionist who learns in great detail just how challenging the task of abolition really is, but Henry's ideals are much more vague and fluid: they are ideals of heroism and personal sacrifice, crafted not from sermons or books, but from the the cloudy stuff of boyhood dreams and old songs. The war turns out to be as shifting and ever-changing as his ideals; he turns from self-hatred to pride from one paragraph to the next, and he has no awareness of this mutability at all. It is exactly this indeterminacy of war that allows him to cast off cowardice and fashion himself into a hero; it doesn't seem to matter, really, whether he's got a "real" wound or not. The fog of war allows such lies to become truths.