by William Cobbs

Created on: June 02, 2009   Last Updated: June 10, 2009

We must remember that Stephen Crane was first of all a newspaper man. That he was sensitive to all forms of horror is also without doubt. Think of him first as a very young person who has the brain and mental equipment to look past the yellings and gesticulating of the "reasons" for a war between the states, and arrive at one fact of great truth: War is not only hell, we create it ourselves and dress it in metaphors. The present generation looks with great favor on the war excuse of releasing a people from slavery. Thank God that the end of the war did finally, after a hundred and fifty years, get us to an end of maltreatment to some extent; but the war was about money and taxes and the struggle between farmers and manufacturers. Also, the vestiges of royalty in the South vaguely resented our Democracy; they enthroned on large plantations.

But the self-preservation in the story (keep in mind it was a story), was mostly psychological. Crane created a self in his main character who is concerned about his life and about his family but caught up in the Civil War, which was vicious on both sides and had few rules excepting punishment. The fact that Northerners and Southerners were mates and brothers created a rage on both sides that terminated in the predicament our main character finds himself in. It is of no importance which side our soldier belongs to.

The story is exactly the same in psychological content as the following incident narrated by Ambrose Bierce in "Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge." Bierce and Crane had a similar belief in courage - one committed suicide and the other disappeared at an advanced age while exploring Mexico. Both were linguists, but Bierce was the most influenced by other peoples as he spent long times in Japan.

Can you visualize the Civil War as I do? I spent my first fifteen years listening to males and females (mostly females) talking about the wonderful struggle that the South had put up to no avail. Those people (my Grandfather was a Confederate Captain and my Great-Grandfather, a General killed by a sniper at Second Manassas) had to create an air of self-preservation for the survivors and descendants of the losing side of the war. Similarly, Crane has created a psychological world where a court-martialed soldier, as he is hanged from a bridge, exits himself from the absurdity of his punishnent by creating a mental world that takes him completely away from the noose and puts him at home with his loved ones, though the process is completely mental! Here is exposed Crane, who in the face of death, creates - even if fictional - an escape from reality.

You and I, the readers, are kept in suspense until the last mind-stopping moment when we realize that though triumphant in death, our negative hero is dead.

Crane was reportedly homosexual. If so, he had that cross to bear of the times, not at all as easy as our present more human attitudes toward "gays". What we do know is that he was sensitive to all kinds of misery, and dwelling upon that, wrote this story and about thirty-eight others and a thousand poems based in misery.

That deepening infliction led him to finally walk in the rain across the newly-built Brooklyn Bridge, and putting on his Red Badge Of Courage, jump to his death in the rushing waters below.

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