. . . Crane seems plainly to be showing that he has not achieved a lasting wisdom or self-knowledge.”13 Put another way, the tall soldier (Jim Conklin) is a responsible adult when the novel opens; the loud soldier (Wilson) becomes an adult after his first day in battle; but “the youth” (Fleming) does not change at all. He remains a dupe to his illusions to the final page.

In fact, he has been conditioned to harbor his illusions from an early age. His ideas about war have been gleaned from reading classical Greek authors, Homer’s Iliad in particular. “He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all,” but Fleming now despairs that “Greeklike struggles would be no more.” Modern warfare would be neither as noble nor as savage as it was for the Greeks. Henry fears he will run in battle, moreover, and he conceives of war (as would a good Darwinian) as a crucible for testing character: “He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.” On the eve of his first skirmish, he rationalizes that he has been coerced to volunteer in the army, that he has not enlisted of his own free will, that he is a mere will of the wisp in a naturalistic universe. “He was in a moving box” of “tradition and law.” The army and the war are consistently described with animal metaphors—as “two serpents crawling from the cavern of the night,” “the red animal,” a “brown swarm of running men,” a “red and green monster”—and the individual soldier is but an impersonal cog in a war machine, a “part of a vast blue demonstration,” “not a man but a member” of his unit who is “welded into a common personality” and “dominated by a single desire.” At first, confident he will “become another thing in battle,” Fleming stands his ground in a condition of “battle sleep.” But during a second charge, Fleming does run when he thinks his entire regiment is retreating: “A man near him . . . ran with howls. . . . He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit.” Fleming rationalizes his fear and trepidation in naturalistic terms: “He had fled, he told himself, because annihilation approached.” Wandering through the woods, Fleming throws a pinecone at a squirrel who “ran with chattering fear,” which he considers a sign from Nature. He had run from danger exactly like the squirrel in a personal “struggle for existence.” (Obviously, animal metaphors appeared in literature before Darwin, but it is fair to say they had a different resonance in the late nineteenth century, after the publication of The Origin of Species.) Fleming soon detects a second sign from Nature that reinforces the lesson of the first. He sees a small animal catch a fish from a pool of standing water, and then in a type of chapel in the woods he comes across the decaying body of a Union soldier whose eyes resemble those of “a dead fish.” The implication is clear, at least to Henry: Had he not fled the battle, he would have been prey to the enemy, killed like the fish. In brief, as Milne Holton concludes, “Confronting Henry is a Darwinian Nature, a Nature red in tooth and claw.”14

Fleming’s ostensible “heroism” throughout the remainder of the novel merely consists of mindless, instinctive, animal-like acts of self-preservation. “He forgot that he was engaged in combating the universe,” the reader learns. “He threw aside his mental pamphlets on the philosophy of the treated and rules for the guidance of the damned.” In the chaos of the retreat, Fleming accosts another soldier who, in a fit of rage, slams his rifle butt against Fleming’s head, inflicting an utterly ironic “red badge of courage.” (That is, the very title of the novel drips with sarcasm.) In the melée, Fleming meets the “tattered soldier,” who embarrasses him with repeated questions about his wound. (Conscience, it seems, is simply a fear of social condemnation, not an innate faculty.) He also crosses paths with the “cheery soldier,” the one figure in the novel who exhibits genuine kindness toward him, though not until they separate does Fleming realize “that he had not once seen his face.” And he again encounters his friend Jim Conklin, the “tall soldier,” whom Fleming watches die from his wound, a genuine “red badge of courage.” The next several chapters reinforce the notions of war as a ruthless Darwinian struggle and violence as the essence of life. In this respect, Crane anticipated such war novels as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951).

In the exact center of the novel, the beginning of chapter XIII (of twenty-four chapters), Fleming returns to his regiment. Wilson, now a veteran of combat, exhibits “a fine reliance” and an “inward confidence” in sharp contrast to his friend, who continues to rationalize his conduct the day before: “he had fled with discretion and dignity.” Fleming returns the letters Wilson had entrusted to him to mail in the event of his death, but does so patronizingly: “It was a generous thing.” But he soon rebels against the constant threat of renewed war. He feels “like a damn’ kitten in a bag” or “a kitten chased by boys. . . .