“The tall soldier turned and,
lurching dangerously, went on. The youth and the tattered soldier followed,
sneaking as if whipped, feeling unable to face the stricken man if he should
again confront them. They began to have thoughts of a solemn ceremony. There
was something rite-like in these movements of the doomed soldier….
“At last, they saw him stop and
stand motionless. Hastening up, they perceived that his face wore an expression
telling that he had at last found the place for which he had struggled. His
spare figure was erect; his bloody hands were quietly at his side. He was
waiting with patience for something that he had come to meet. He was at the
rendezvous. They paused and stood, expectant….
“Finally,
the chest of the doomed soldier began to heave with a strained motion. It
increased in violence until it was as if an animal was within and was kicking
and tumbling furiously to be free.”—Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Memorial Day
(originally known as Decoration Day) began in the period after the Civil War to
honor the dead from that conflict. By common agreement, Stephen Crane (1871-1900)—who was not even alive while the war was
raging, and so never witnessed the events he described—produced the most vivid
summary of the common soldier’s experience under fire.
That experience is, for Henry Fleming, far different
from the romantic vision of glory he had expected. With chaos bursting all
around him, he deserts his unit—only to find, when he links up with it again,
that the “tall soldier” of this passage, his friend Jim Conklin, has been
fatally wounded.
In reading the Library of America’s volume of
Crane’s collected Prose and Poetry, I came across the short story “The Veteran.” I
imagine that Crane wrote what was, in effect, a short coda to his most famous
work to satisfy those who wanted to know what happened to his alternately
vainglorious and confused protagonist.
In it, Fleming is identified as having fought at the
Battle of Chancellorsville, a resounding Union defeat marked by confusion. In sharp contrast to the novel, where he is almost
always referred to as “the youth,” Fleming is called by the omniscient narrator
of the short story “the old man.”
In fact, at the time of this story, Fleming would be
somewhere between his late 40s and mid 50s—not really what we would think of
today as old. But the war has surely aged him, and in few instances so much as
the death of Conklin, a sight horrible enough to haunt him the rest of his
days.
In the most real sense, America remains as haunted
by the Civil War as Henry Fleming is by Jim. The nation’s wounds were gaping and
raw, especially in the South—enough so that, during Reconstruction, a balance
could not be achieved between reconciliation and rights. We live with these
consequences today, in the form of racial resentments that shows little sign of
abating.
"Old" Henry Fleming dies putting out a fire in “The
Veteran,” in an act that makes literal what Abraham Lincoln called the Civil
War: “this fiery trial.” Even as we honor the soldiers who made the supreme
sacrifice in the Civil War and all America’s other conflicts, it would do well
to remember that victories on the battlefield are made necessary by peacetime
political failures, before—and, sadly, after—the gunfire rages.
(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1951
film of The Red Badge of Courage,
starring Audie Murphy, the most decorated combat soldier of World War II. His
wartime memoir—adapted for the screen with Murphy playing himself—was entitled,
appropriately enough, To Hell and Back.
In the 26 years between his return from Europe and his death in a plane crash,
he was afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder—a late casualty of the war.)
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