The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories

Henry Fleming joins the Union Army imagining that battle will prove his courage, but the approach of his first engagement replaces heroic expectation with anxiety. When panic drives him from the fighting, he searches for a way to understand his flight and envies the wounded soldiers whose injuries seem to provide visible proof that they have faced the enemy.

Henry’s return to combat forms the psychological centre of The Red Badge of Courage, a novel commonly associated with the Battle of Chancellorsville although Crane leaves the battlefield unnamed. The accompanying stories extend his unsentimental treatment of war, violence and survival, using compressed scenes and shifting points of view rather than conventional celebrations of military glory.