Burning boy, p.23
Burning Boy, page 23
Certain things about Henry’s character are already becoming clear in these flashbacks. Above all, his ferocious need to make a good impression on others, to stand out and be recognized as an anointed one, superior to the rest of the human horde, and once he dons his “blue and brass” he becomes so full of himself as he struts around with his fellow enlistees that he is mocked for it by the light-haired girl. Because he has not yet established a moral ground within himself, he can see himself only by imagining how others see him—not who he is, exactly (he has no idea who he is), but who he wants others to think he is. For a short time, the real had fortuitously matched up with this desire, and on the train down to Washington “the regiment was fed and caressed at station after station until the youth believed that he must be a hero … [and] as he basked in the smiles of the girls and was patted and complimented by the old men, he felt growing within him the strength to do mighty deeds of arms.”
Then the real had turned against him, and in the disappointing “months of monotonous life in a camp,” he was forced to come to grips with the everyday truth of army existence, a doleful realization that continued to weigh down on him after his training ended and he was sent into the field to face the enemy, where he and his regiment “had done little but sit still and try to keep warm.” His dreams of glory had dissolved, and he had gone back to his old idea that “Greeklike struggles would be no more.”
He had grown to regard himself merely as part of a vast blue demonstration. His province was to look out, as far as he could, for his personal comfort. For recreation he could twiddle his thumbs and speculate on the thoughts which must agitate the minds of the generals. Also, he was drilled and drilled and reviewed, and drilled and drilled and reviewed.
So there he is now down in his solitary hole, trying to prepare himself for what promises to be his first combat and nervously pondering the big, unanswerable question that has come to dominate his thoughts over the last little while: whether he will run when he is thrown into action or not. He seeks to “mathematically prove to himself” that he will not, but he is soon forced to admit “that as far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself.”
A little panic-fear grew in his mind. As his imagination went forward to a fight, he saw hideous possibilities. He contemplated the lurking menaces of the future, and failed in an effort to see himself standing stoutly in the midst of them.…
He sprang from the bunk and began to pace nervously to and fro. “Good Lord, what’s th’ matter with me?” he said aloud.
He felt that in this crisis his laws of life were useless. Whatever he had learned of himself was here of no avail. He was an unknown quantity. He saw that he would again be obliged to experiment as he had in early youth. He must accumulate information about himself, and meanwhile he resolved to remain close upon his guard lest those qualities of which he knew nothing should everlastingly disgrace him. “Good Lord!” he repeated in dismay.
“Disgrace” is the pivotal word in this passage. To hold his own in battle would win him the respect of his fellow soldiers. To crack under pressure and turn tail would brand him a coward, and he would carry that black mark with him for the rest of the war. Again, his overriding concern is with how others see him, not how he sees himself, but at this early point in the story, what he sees when he looks at himself is a cipher, an “unknown quantity,” and when the rumor of an imminent skirmish disintegrates into yet another bogus report by the following day, the agony of the unanswered question—Will he run or not run?—grows ever more unbearable to him. He decides that “the only way to prove himself was to go into the blaze, and then figuratively to watch his legs to discover their merits and faults.” No more mathematical calculations to posit the inevitability of one answer or the other; what he needs now is empirical evidence, a test under fire. “To gain it [the answer], he must have blaze, blood, and danger, even as the chemist requires this, that, and the other. So he fretted for an opportunity.”
As he frets, he asks himself if there isn’t a like-minded soul in the company, someone equally tormented by doubts who would be willing to talk to him and compare “mental notes,” but when he searches around for someone who appears to be in the proper mood for such a conversation, he finds no one, and even if he did, how could he open his mouth and confess his fears when the other would probably make fun of him and insult him for being a coward? So the youth goes on suffering in silence, locked inside his head with no one to talk to but himself.
Meanwhile, his own moods lurch about in a jumble of clashing impulses and wildly inconsistent thoughts. One minute, he imagines that all the other soldiers in the regiment are heroes and reproaches himself for having committed “many shameful crimes against the gods of traditions,” and the next minute he imagines that they are no different from himself, “all privately wondering and quaking.” He resents the generals for their “intolerable slowness” and holds them responsible for his miseries, in effect blaming them for his fear, which continues to intensify as he waits for the decisive moment, his mind increasingly haunted by grotesque, supernatural images. “Staring once at the red eyes across the river, he conceived them to be growing larger, as the orbs of a row of dragons advancing.” And even his own regiment, as it marches off into the darkness, is “now like one of those moving monsters wending with many feet.” The trek comes to a halt with the “despondent and sullen” Henry still “engaged in his own eternal debate.”
In the evening he wandered a few paces into the gloom. From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird and satanic effects.
He lay down in the grass. The blades pressed tenderly against his cheek. The moon had been lighted and was hung in a treetop. The liquid stillness of the night enveloping him made him feel vast pity for himself.…
He wished, without reserve, that he was at home again making the endless rounds from the house to the barn, from the barn to the fields, from the fields to the barn, from the barn to the house.… He told himself that he was not formed for a soldier.
When the youth hears a rustling in the grass and spots the loud soldier walking by, he beckons Wilson over, and the two of them begin to talk. Still too afraid to bare his innermost feelings to anyone, not even to his old boyhood friend, Henry nevertheless comes close, transferring his doubts about himself into a question about Wilson and how he can be sure he won’t run “when the time comes.”
“‘Run?’ said the loud one; ‘run?—of course not!’ He laughed.”
When Henry persists, Wilson becomes peeved at so much idle speculation, accuses Henry of talking “as if you thought you was Napoleon Bonaparte,” and then stomps off in a huff. Henry calls him back, but Wilson is already gone, and from then until the youth retires for the night, “he felt alone in space … a mental outcast.”
The next three chapters are packed with incident as the company moves from one place to another for unknown military reasons, commanded to march, commanded to run, commanded to stop, and Henry’s jangled thoughts, driven by his ever-growing fear, bounce from dread to anger to despondency. The fateful hour is approaching, which is also “the stealthy approach of his death,” and for a moment he imagines himself haranguing his comrades to break ranks to avoid being “killed like pigs,” then stifles the impulse, knowing it will lead to a barrage of ridicule, and then, not long after, begins to imagine “it would be better to be killed directly and end his troubles,” for in death “he would go to some place where he would be understood,” and then, as the moment of battle nears, something unexpected happens. Wilson, the loud, cocky soldier who has shown not the smallest sign of indecision or doubt, comes to Henry with “his girlish lip … trembling” and hands him a packet of letters to send to his family after he is killed, for he is convinced (“Something tells me—”) that he will die today, that this battle will be both the first and the last of his brief life, and when Henry stammers forth an incoherent “Why, what the devil—,” “the other gave him a glance as from the depths of a tomb, and raised his limp hand in a prophetic manner and turned away.”
Then come the first glimmers of chaos that prefigure the impending skirmish. Crane’s short sentences follow one another as a series of swift, jabbing punches, each one aimed at a specific target, each detail clear and precise and yet adding to the overall sense of confusion.
A shell screaming like a storm banshee went over the huddled heads of the reserves. It landed in the grove, and exploding redly flung the brown earth. There was a little shower of pine needles.
Bullets began to whistle among the branches and nip at the trees. Twigs and leaves came sailing down. It was as if a thousand axes, wee and invisible, were being wielded. Many of the men were constantly dodging and ducking their heads.…
Wild yells came from behind the walls of smoke. A sketch in gray and red dissolved into a moblike body of men who galloped like wild horses.
The company has halted at the edge of a grove of trees, and as Henry awaits his first test under fire, Crane bears down into the moment by allowing the boy’s mind to wander for a few seconds just before the battle begins, fixing on a small, inconsequential memory that can be read as a sign of dissociation, homesickness, or merely as one of those stray, random thoughts that continually rush through our heads. Crane, so brilliant in his depiction of the tangible world out there, is equally adept at penetrating the rapid fluctuations of the in here, and the joining of these two talents, the visual and the psychological, is what distinguishes this book from all other American books of the period. And how subtle Crane is in presenting Henry’s mental fugue not as a sentimental excursion into the past but as a real memory unearthed in all its tawdry, rather comical vigor—a memory of anticipation that invades the thoughts of a boy anticipating his own possible death. The memory takes on substance as one particular piles on top of another, the seconds tick by, and then a voice calls out and interrupts him, and just like that the spectacle of war begins.
There were moments of waiting. The youth thought of the village street at home before the arrival of the circus parade on a day in the spring. He remembered how he had stood, a small, thrillful boy, prepared to follow the dingy lady upon the white horse, or the band in its faded chariot. He saw the yellow road, the lines of expectant people, and the sober houses. He particularly remembered an old fellow who used to sit upon a cracker box in front of the store and feign to despise such exhibitions. A thousand details of color and form surged in his mind. The old fellow upon the cracker box appeared in middle prominence.
Some one cried, “Here they come!”
Contrary to his dire predictions about himself, Henry does not run—nor does he even think of running. Crane’s account of this first battle covers six densely loaded pages as the regiment hunkers down to fend off a Confederate charge, and there is Henry fumbling with his rifle, not sure if he has remembered to load it or not, not sure of anything, but eventually settling down until he is methodically fighting beside his fellow soldiers and against all odds holding his own in battle.
He suddenly lost concern for himself and forgot to look at a menacing fate.… He was welded into a common personality dominated by a single desire.…
There was a consciousness always of the presence of his comrades about him. He felt the subtle battle brotherhood more potent even than the cause for which they were fighting. It was a mysterious fraternity born of the smoke and danger of death.
The sense of the group keeps him bound to the group, enables him to dissolve into the group, but for all that he is still alone in his own body, curiously poised between two physical states or else shuttling back and forth between them, at once locked in a trancelike, out-of-body experience and suffering through intense physical discomfort, as if he were both there and not there at the same time.
He was at a task. He was like a carpenter who has made many boxes, making still another box, only there was furious haste in his movements. He, in his thought, was careering off in other places, even as the carpenter who as he works whistles and thinks of his friend or his enemy, his home or a saloon. And these jolted dreams were never perfect to him afterward, but remained a mass of blurred shapes.
Presently he began to feel the effects of the war atmosphere—a blistering sweat, a sensation that his eyeballs were about to crack like hot stones. A burning roar filled his ears.
Following this came a red rage.…
Buried in the smoke of many rifles his anger was directed not so much against the men whom he knew were rushing toward him as against the swirling battle phantoms which were choking him, stuffing their smoke robes down his parched throat. He fought frantically for respite for his senses, for air, as a babe being smothered attacks the deadly blankets.
All three of the book’s essential elements are continually at play in this chapter, zigging and zagging from one to the other with astonishing rapidity, now focusing on the soldiers and officers in the regiment, now focusing on the thoughts in Henry’s head, now focusing on the scene at large, which is a scene of battle, filled with the inevitable images of the dead and wounded as each man’s plight is captured in a vivid, starkly lit snapshot:
The men dropped here and there like bundles. The captain of the youth’s company had been killed in an early part of the action. His body lay stretched out in the position of a tired man resting, but upon his face there was an astonished and sorrowful look, as if he thought some friend had done him an ill turn. The babbling man was grazed by a shot that made the blood stream widely down his face. He clapped both hands to his head. “Oh!” he said, and ran. Another grunted suddenly as if he had been struck by a club in the stomach. He sat down and gazed ruefully. In his eyes was mute, indefinite reproach. Farther up the line a man, standing behind a tree, had had his knee joint splintered by a ball. Immediately he had dropped his rifle and gripped the tree with both arms. And there he remained, clinging desperately and crying for assistance that he might withdraw his hold upon the tree.
The line does not bend, the attack is repulsed, and as Henry slowly comes out of his battle trance, he goes “into an ecstasy of self-satisfaction,” looking back on his conduct as “magnificent” and judging himself to be “a fine fellow.” Who would begrudge him these moments of relief and exaltation? He has vanquished his fears and come through the trial with his honor intact. One wonders: What can be in store for him now, and what, precisely, does it mean to talk about a red badge of courage? Crane quickly answers the first part of the question before the reader can pursue it any further. A soldier cries out: “Here they come ag’in! Here they come ag’in!” The entire company is shocked by this sudden turn, but even as the men pick up their rifles to defend themselves against the second attack, the addled, disbelieving Henry has trouble pulling himself together again. His strength has been depleted by the first wave, his mental command is diminished for the second, and in his eyes the enemy forces are no longer men but “machines of steel,” who then turn into “redoubtable dragons,” in any case and in both cases something beyond what is merely human, and he feels as if he is someone “who has lost his legs at the approach of the red and green monster,” a defenseless creature waiting “to be gobbled.” It doesn’t help that one of the men fighting next to him suddenly stops and runs off howling, nor that one of his fellow boy soldiers, who until now has been the very picture of courage, unexpectedly turns white, throws down his gun, and flees. Others begin “to scamper away in the smoke,” and before long Henry senses that the regiment is leaving him behind. If he stays where he is, he will be destroyed. A moment later, he turns and runs, and for the next forty-five pages he will continue to run—not only from the war but from the shame he has brought upon himself.
Fear is fear, an uncontrollable force that cannot be subdued by an effort of will, not so much a crime as a misfortune, a mental affliction that paralyzes its victim and leaves him powerless to resist, but in the pages that follow Henry also commits a number of moral transgressions that expose his tenuous character more dramatically than the pardonable sin of running from battle out of fear. Crane has not set out to justify the youth or turn him into a noble or sympathetic figure. Nor does he ever deign to pity him. Henry Fleming is a complex, troubled young man, flawed in the ways nearly all human beings are flawed, worse than some, better than some, an example of ordinary, run-of-the-mill life caught in the grip of extraordinary circumstances. Not a saint, not a madman, not even a hero—just a person. With the same steady gaze he applied to the characters in Maggie, Crane doesn’t judge his flailing, panicked, self-deluding protagonist. He simply watches him and tells what he does, what he thinks, what he thinks about in the course of doing what he does, and then, once Crane has told us that, he goes on watching and tells us more. The honesty of such an approach can be excruciating, at times even unbearable, but to do it any other way would be cheating, and unlike the character in his blazing little book, Crane does not cheat.
First, the headlong sprint to the rear and into the woods, stumbling and thrashing forward, banging his shoulder into a tree, falling down, standing up again, losing his cap, losing his rifle, running, running hard, running harder and harder, driven by the thought of death gaining on him in closer and closer pursuit, running with all the other running men until he is far in front and leaving them behind, running until he is alone, until he alone has outrun death, and as shells fall and the ground explodes around him, imagining the shells with rows of cruel teeth grinning at him, then chancing upon other companies calmly going about the business of fighting and thinking them fools for not knowing they are about to be killed, and then, farther on, as he continues to run, seeing a general mounted on his horse and calling out to everyone, “They’ve held ’im!… They’ve held ’im, by heavens!”—and with those words the sickening knowledge that he has run away from a victory, that his regiment has pushed back the new Confederate charge and won for the second time.
