The Red Badge of Courage

Smoke, a noise like the world coming apart, and a young private who has spent months wondering whether he will run. He does run, on the first day, and the book's real subject begins there, with Henry Fleming loose behind his own lines among the wounded, looking at their bandages with something close to envy. A wound is a certificate: it says a man stood where he was told to stand, and he wants one badly enough to let others believe a lie about how he got his. Stephen Crane was born six years after the war ended and had never heard a shot fired in anger, yet veterans read this and swore he had been in the ranks beside them. He wrote it in colour, the red sun pasted in the sky like a wafer, war itself a blood-swollen god that eats men. Courage here is not a virtue a man has. It is weather, arriving and departing without permission, and the terror is that he will never learn which one he is.