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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Stephen Crane - Ultimate Collection: 200+ Novels, Short Stories & Poems presents a remarkable compendium of the literary genius that shaped American Naturalism. This extensive anthology captures the breadth of Crane's oeuvre, showcasing his innovative use of imagery, symbolism, and psychological insight. Spanning from the harrowing experiences of war in "The Red Badge of Courage" to the hauntingly evocative tales in "The Open Boat," Crane's narratives probe the depths of human experience and the stark realities of existence. The collection reflects the tumult of the late 19th century, a period defined by social upheaval and technological change, lending context to Crane's explorations of isolation, fear, and resilience amidst chaos. Stephen Crane, a pivotal figure in American literature, was known for his unorthodox narrative techniques and a penchant for exploring existential themes. His tumultuous upbringing, marked by a fascination with journalism and the harsh realities of life, profoundly influenced his writing. Crane's experiences as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American War infused his stories with authenticity and visceral portrayals of human struggle, offering readers profound insights into the nature of conflict and suffering. This ultimate collection is a must-read for aficionados of American literature and those seeking to understand the evolution of literary expression through the lens of human emotion and struggle. Crane's works resonate with contemporary themes of fragility and courage, making this anthology invaluable for scholars and casual readers alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Stephen Crane - Ultimate Collection: 200+ Novels, Short Stories & Poems
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection gathers the core body of Stephen Crane’s work into a single, comprehensive volume, enabling readers to follow his imagination across battlefield, city, sea, and small-town America. It brings together his complete novels and novellas alongside his principal short story cycles and both of his poetry books. The aim is to present, in one place, the range and coherence of a writer whose compressed style and probing attention to human experience reshaped American prose and verse. By placing his fiction and poetry side by side, the collection highlights how Crane’s themes resonate across forms and how his voice evolves while retaining a singular intensity.
Within these pages are novels and novellas such as The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George’s Mother, The Third Violet, Active Service, The Monster, and The O’Ruddy. The short story artistry is represented by The Little Regiment and Other Episodes from the American Civil War, The Open Boat and Other Stories, Blue Hotel & His New Mittens, Whilomville Stories, Wounds in the Rain: War Stories, Great Battles of the World, and Last Words. Complementing the prose are two landmark poetry volumes, The Black Riders and Other Lines and War is Kind, revealing another dimension of Crane’s vision.
Across these works, certain concerns bind the whole: the testing of courage and conscience under pressure; the sway of social judgment; the gulf between romantic expectation and lived reality; and the stark encounter between human aspiration and an indifferent world. Crane’s prose is notable for its vivid, impressionistic description and disciplined economy, while his poetry distills the same tensions into sharp, compact utterances. Together, they form a sustained meditation on perception and truth, the stories and myths people tell themselves, and the behaviors that emerge in crisis. The result is a body of work that remains urgent for its clarity, irony, and imaginative force.
The literature of conflict stands at the forefront of this collection. The Red Badge of Courage follows a young Union soldier through the first shock of battle, presenting war from the inside out with psychological precision. The Little Regiment and Other Episodes from the American Civil War extends that inquiry through varied scenes of duty and fear. Wounds in the Rain: War Stories and Great Battles of the World widen the compass to other theaters and historical encounters, translating combat into vivid episodes and narrative sketches. Without sensationalism, Crane isolates the rhythms of danger and endurance, and the fragile codes by which people measure themselves.
Crane’s urban narratives trace the pressures of poverty, crowding, and reputation. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets depicts the constrictions of a tenement world and the social forces that bear on a young woman’s fate. George’s Mother examines family strain, neighborhood scrutiny, and the fragile ambitions of a son under the watch of an anxious, devout parent. In both, Crane draws on a naturalistic sense of causation—how environment, chance, and custom shape choices—yet he refuses easy moralizing. The prose compresses whole social milieus into sharp images and charged scenes, making the streetscape itself an actor that tests character and exposes the cost of appearances.
Small-town life receives equally searching treatment. Whilomville Stories assembles portraits of community, childhood, and everyday trials in a fictional setting that condenses the rituals and judgments of a close-knit town. The Monster, set in a similar milieu, studies the price of compassion and the limits of communal solidarity when fear and rumor take hold. These works show Crane as a careful observer of collective behavior—how groups form, punish, and forgive, and how individuals navigate the tension between belonging and conscience. The local details are crisp and concrete, yet the moral atmosphere is expansive, illuminating patterns recognizable far beyond their immediate landscapes.
Other works turn to art, romance, and peril at sea to test perception and resolve. The Third Violet follows an artist’s world of ambition, attraction, and social performance. Active Service juxtaposes drawing room and wartime currents to explore how public events press upon private lives. The Open Boat and Other Stories distills maritime ordeal into a study of fellowship and fragility before nature. Blue Hotel & His New Mittens pairs frontier tensions with a lighter domestic piece, revealing Crane’s tonal range. Across these settings, he maintains a spare diction and quick scene-making, trusting incident and atmosphere to carry complex human dynamics.
Crane’s short stories are models of concentration. He builds pressure through suggestive detail, silences, and shifts of vantage rather than elaborate backstory. Dialogue tends to be sharply idiomatic; action is staged in crisp strokes; and description often moves by flashes of color, motion, and sound that give the impression of immediate experience. Irony is central: characters speak in codes they only half understand; fate interrupts carefully held assumptions; groups misread signs. Yet the stories avoid cynicism. They observe people at close range as they improvise meanings in uncertain situations, and they invite readers to complete the pattern without prescriptive commentary.
The poetry volumes, The Black Riders and Other Lines and War is Kind, compress Crane’s sensibility into intense, brief lyrics. The lines are spare and often aphoristic, moving through paradox, satire, and harsh tenderness. Themes familiar from the prose recur in distilled form—war, pride, fear, the lure and failure of consoling fictions, and a stark awareness of nature’s indifference. The diction is plain but charged, and the structures favor swift turns of thought over ornament. Read alongside the fiction, these poems deepen the sense of a writer intent on stripping language to the essentials to test belief and expose self-deception.
Imagery and pattern unify the whole. Colors, weather, and landscape often mirror states of mind, yet they also retain a stubborn autonomy that resists human wish. Crane juxtaposes lofty rhetoric with blunt sensation, allowing readers to feel the distance between story and reality. Names, uniforms, and roles matter in his worlds—they confer identity and impose scripts—but circumstances quickly strain those labels. Across genres, he composes scenes in which perception is provisional, courage is a contested term, and solidarity is fragile. The cumulative effect is to disclose the fragile agreements by which people find meaning, and the costs of those agreements.
The enduring significance of these works rests on their clarity of observation and stylistic boldness. Crane condensed action and psychology into swift, luminous scenes that broke with ponderous narration and embellished sentiment. His battlefield pages remain central to war literature for their refusal to romanticize and their focus on inner weather; his city and village pieces do similar work for social life, neither sentimental nor detached. The poetry, likewise, anticipates lean, modern tones while remaining distinctly his own. Taken together, the collection shows an artist who rethought how American writing could sound, look, and move, and whose pages still feel newly struck.
Readers may enter anywhere—by a novel of war or poverty, a sea story, a Whilomville sketch, or a bracing poem—and find the same stringent honesty and startling concision. Moving among novels, story cycles, and poems reveals recurring motifs from fresh angles and invites comparisons of method across forms. This volume’s purpose is to make that cross-reading natural, keeping Crane’s major achievements in close conversation. Whether returning to a familiar text or encountering a lesser-known piece for the first time, the reader will find a unified vision unfolding through varied genres, a testament to the breadth and focus of Stephen Crane’s art.
Author Biography
Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was an American novelist, short‑story writer, poet, and journalist whose compressed, impressionistic prose helped define literary naturalism at the close of the nineteenth century. He is best known for The Red Badge of Courage, a psychologically acute novel of the American Civil War, and for short stories such as The Open Boat, The Blue Hotel, and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. Working largely in the 1890s, Crane fused a reporter’s eye for detail with a bold, experimental style, portraying urban poverty, fear, and the contingencies of violence. Though his career was brief, his innovations in point of view, irony, and imagery reshaped subsequent American fiction.
Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in various parts of New Jersey and New York, environments that later informed his depictions of small towns and city streets. He attended several schools in the Northeast and briefly enrolled at Lafayette College and Syracuse University in the early 1890s, but he left without a degree to pursue journalism. In newsrooms and on city beats he absorbed the idiom and cadences of everyday speech, which shaped his fiction. He read widely and responded to currents of realism and naturalism then circulating in American periodicals, blending those tendencies with a distinctive, impressionistic approach to scene and character.
Turning his urban observations into literature, Crane wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a stark novella about slum life that he initially published at his own expense in the early 1890s and later revised for wider release. Its uncompromising portrayal of tenement hardship and social determinism drew limited attention at first but gradually came to be recognized as a landmark of American naturalism. The book’s economy of description and unsentimental tone exemplified his method: a spare surface that suggests complex moral and psychological pressures. Maggie also foreshadowed Crane’s enduring interest in the gap between romantic illusions and the harsh contingencies of experience.
Crane’s breakthrough came with The Red Badge of Courage, issued in the mid‑1890s after initial newspaper serialization. Without having seen Civil War combat, he created a vivid interior portrait of a young soldier’s terror and self‑scrutiny, drawing on his reading in soldiers’ reminiscences and contemporary histories. Reviewers in the United States and Britain praised the novel’s psychological realism and unconventional treatment of battle as a swirl of sensation rather than a pageant of heroics. The book brought him international notice, yet it did not end his financial precariousness. He continued to report and to publish fiction that tested narrative perspective and the reliability of perception.
Crane’s journalism took him far beyond New York. While attempting to reach Cuba during insurgency and war in the late 1890s, he survived a shipwreck that became the basis for The Open Boat, a widely anthologized meditation on chance, fellowship, and the indifference of nature. He also covered the Greco‑Turkish War and the Spanish‑American War as a correspondent, filing dispatches that blended crisp observation with a skeptical eye toward martial rhetoric. These experiences broadened his sense of hazard and contingency, informing later fiction in which social codes falter under pressure and individuals confront extreme situations with a mixture of bravado, fear, and fatalistic humor.
Alongside reportage, Crane produced a remarkable body of short fiction and poetry. Stories such as The Blue Hotel, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, and The Monster display taut plots, colloquial dialogue, and a haunting irony that leaves readers to weigh competing moral claims. His verse collections, The Black Riders and Other Lines and War Is Kind, use compressed, unconventional forms and stark imagery to probe belief, violence, and disillusionment. He also wrote additional novels, including George’s Mother, The Third Violet, and Active Service. Settling in England in the late 1890s, he formed friendships with writers such as Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Henry James, who recognized his originality.
Crane’s health deteriorated in the late 1890s, and he died of tuberculosis in 1900 in Germany, not yet thirty. Despite his short life, his influence has been durable. The Red Badge of Courage remains a foundational text in American war literature for its interior focus and unsparing portrayal of fear, while his stories are mainstays of anthologies and classrooms for their narrative economy and tonal complexity. His impressionistic techniques, ironic stance, and pared‑down style anticipated aspects of literary modernism and shaped writers from the early twentieth century onward. Today his work is read for its psychological insight, stylistic daring, and vivid engagement with the tensions of modern life.
Historical Context
Stephen Crane’s career unfolded amid the accelerated transformations of the United States between 1871 and 1900, from Reconstruction’s aftermath to the cusp of the Progressive Era. Railroads, telegraphs, and mass-circulation newspapers knit a vast nation together, while immigration, industrial capitalism, and urbanization remade social life. American Realism and its more deterministic cousin, Naturalism, rose in response to these pressures, promoting unvarnished depictions of city streets, battlefields, and frontier towns. At the same time, a fin de siècle aesthetic—framed by Impressionism in prose and Symbolist inflections in verse—encouraged formal experiment. Crane’s oeuvre, spanning urban sketches, war stories, and stark poems, crystallizes these converging cultural and literary currents.
Born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, to Methodist parents Jonathan Townley Crane and Mary Helen Peck Crane, Stephen Crane absorbed an environment steeped in moral rhetoric and reformist zeal. His family moved frequently, including to Port Jervis, New York, and he later reported for the Asbury Park press. Brief studies at Lafayette College and Syracuse University ended as he chose New York City’s streets for an education. The Bowery and tenements, along with small-town memories, furnished raw material for his fiction and stories of childhood. By 1892 he had immersed himself in journalism, an apprenticeship that shaped his fiction’s compression, irony, and visual immediacy.
The slum novel and urban sketch were forged in the upheavals of the Gilded Age, when the Panic of 1893 deepened poverty and joblessness in cities like New York. Tenement reformers such as Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives, 1890) spotlighted overcrowding, tuberculosis, and child labor, prompting housing legislation and social work. Saloons, street gangs, and temperance activism framed debates over moral responsibility and structural injustice. Crane’s depictions of desperate families, precarious labor, and youthful vulnerability emerged from this milieu. His city narratives grapple with the period’s contested ethics: philanthropy versus surveillance, uplift versus stigma, and the complex agency of those living within harsh economic constraints.
Civil War memory loomed large in the 1890s, shaped by Grand Army of the Republic reunions, Lost Cause mythologies, and reconciliationist pageantry. Born after the war, Crane wrote into a market saturated with veterans’ reminiscences yet hungry for psychological realism. His war fiction displaced grand tactics with the confusion of smoke, noise, and rumor, mirroring a nation reconsidering heroism thirty years on. The Red Badge of Courage appeared in newspapers in 1894 before D. Appleton’s 1895 volume; British praise, including early notice in London, catalyzed American recognition. Later Civil War tales continued to test memory against modern skepticism, probing fear, panic, group cohesion, and the fragile prestige of bravery.
Crane’s rise was inseparable from the late nineteenth-century press. Syndication networks funneled stories across the Atlantic, and illustrated weeklies craved vivid copy. Rival empires run by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst paid correspondents to chase sensation and speed. Magazines like Scribner’s and McClure’s cultivated prestige short fiction. Crane honed a reporter’s economy and an experimenter’s daring across this ecology, where fact and fiction blurred under deadline. Collections that gathered war narratives, frontier tales, and sea stories were often born as magazine pieces, then revised for book form. His later miscellanies and historical sketches demonstrate how periodical culture shaped both theme and structure throughout his career.
In January 1897 Crane survived the wreck of the SS Commodore, a filibustering steamer running arms to Cuban insurgents. The ship went down off the Florida coast near Mosquito Inlet; survivors drifted for roughly thirty hours before reaching the surf near Daytona Beach. The episode crystallized a maritime realism attentive to comradeship, chance, and the sea’s indifferent force. It also tied his literary concerns to hemispheric politics: clandestine support for Cuban independence and the porous line between reporting and participation. Crane’s sea narratives from this period compress nautical detail, fatal weather, and exhausted endurance, prefiguring later war-zone dispatches and his recurring focus on small groups under elemental pressure.
The Spanish-American War of 1898 drew a global press corps to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, where fervent jingoism sat uneasily beside battlefield carnage and disease. Crane reported around the Santiago campaign, observing naval blockades, volunteer regiments, and the logistics of modern war. His Cuba work tracks an army learning the limits of valor amid barbed wire, smokeless powder, and yellow fever. These experiences inform his late war stories and ironized verse, which question patriotic spectacle even as they record the immediacy of gunfire and heat. The popular market for war narratives and illustrated histories in 1898–1901 encouraged him to refashion reportage into literature.
Crane’s engagement with European conflict came through the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, a brief but intense struggle focused on Thessaly. Filing dispatches from Greece and following the rapid collapse of the front, he observed a theater where nationalist fervor, great-power diplomacy, and uneven military preparation collided. This continental vantage confirmed his interest in ordinary participants caught in events too large to master. The war’s compressed timeline and fluid fronts suited his impressionistic method: quick scenes, overheard speech, and sudden reversals. In fiction about this conflict, he explored the dissonance between romantic expectations of war and its anticlimax or brutality, a transatlantic extension of his earlier American concerns.
In 1897 Crane left the United States for England, traveling with Cora Taylor—later known as Cora Crane—and entering a literary circle that included Joseph Conrad, Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Ford Madox Ford. By 1899 they were living at Brede Place near Rye, Sussex, where dinners mixed journalists, novelists, and artists. British reception had buoyed his career since 1895, and Heinemann editions broadened his audience. Transatlantic friendships reinforced his experiments with point of view and pared style, while money troubles kept him close to magazines. Late in life he turned to romance and historical pastiche in line with a broader vogue, even dictating an unfinished swashbuckler completed after his death.
Crane’s small-town fiction draws on Port Jervis, New York, where he spent formative years. The idyll of parades, kitchens, and schoolyard rites coexists with the darker social currents of the 1890s, when the United States entered the nadir of race relations. The 1892 Port Jervis lynching of Robert Lewis exemplified the persistence of mob violence in northern communities. His stories of childhood mischief, family loyalty, and communal discipline thus sit beside narratives about scapegoating and civic cowardice. While sentimental children’s literature remained popular, Crane complicated it with moral ambiguities, staging conflicts between reputation and conscience and exposing how quickly neighborly familiarity could harden into collective cruelty.
The frontier, officially declared closed by the 1890 census, lived on in dime novels and travelers’ tales. Railroads threaded Nebraska and the Plains, boardinghouses and hotels arose in trackside towns, and immigrant labor altered local dynamics. Crane used this fraught social geography to dissect hospitality, suspicion, and violence among strangers. The Great Plains became a laboratory for his Naturalist preoccupations: how weather, alcohol, rumor, and fragile honor codes incite catastrophe. His western settings permit collisions between cosmopolitan drifters and rooted settlers, dramatizing misunderstandings sharpened by snowstorms, saloons, and poker tables. In compressing such confrontations, he challenged romantic frontier myth with an anatomy of fear, bravado, and fatal miscalculation.
Crane’s poetry belongs to a transitional moment between late Victorian verse and literary modernism. The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) offered jagged, untitled fragments, biblical cadences, and aphoristic paradoxes that anticipated Imagist concision without adopting its later doctrine. War Is Kind (1899), published in New York with Art Nouveau decorations by designer Will Bradley, sharpened irony against the pageantry of battle and the sentimental rhetoric of sacrifice. These slender volumes share techniques with his prose: stark imagery, compressed syntax, and bitter refrain. They also reflect the magazine era’s fusion of text and visual design, aligning verbal experimentation with the period’s graphic innovations in posters, covers, and typography.
Crane’s professional life was precarious, shaped by deadlines, debt, and scandal. In September 1896 he testified in a New York police-court case on behalf of a woman accused of solicitation, publicly challenging vice-squad methods. The backlash, amid municipal corruption inquiries, hastened his departure for Europe. Financially, he relied on advances, syndicate fees, and hospitality from friends; bouts of illness further strained output. Posthumous volumes such as Great Battles of the World (1901) and Last Words (1902) drew on magazine pieces, lectures, and uncollected manuscripts. The pattern—reportage repurposed, fiction from notebooks, history rendered as scene—reveals a writer who worked at journalism’s pace while reaching for lasting form.
Crane’s Naturalism absorbed the period’s scientific idioms, from evolutionary struggle to crowd psychology. French models like Émile Zola and intellectual fashions such as Social Darwinism informed an emphasis on environment and heredity without erasing moral conflict. His men in ranks, gamblers in snowbound towns, and children in kitchens confront forces—weather, disease, panic, or rumor—that suggest an indifferent universe. Yet agency flickers in sudden acts of courage or kindness. Technological change also matters: smokeless powder, rapid-fire weapons, and the telegraph altered battle experience and reportage. The result is fiction acutely attentive to sensory distortion—haze, glare, concussion—and to how groups form, fracture, and cohere under stress.
Raised in a minister’s household, Crane inhabited a world of sermons, revival language, and hymnbook rhythms, even as he drifted from doctrinal belief. His prose and poetry frequently invert pulpit rhetoric, staging mock liturgies of war and charity to expose sanctimony. Urban stories probe the gap between Sunday benevolence and weekday neglect; martial pieces deflate the exaltation of sacrifice. This moral dialectic was current in the 1890s, when the Social Gospel urged structural reform while moral-purity campaigns policed sexuality and poverty. Crane’s spare parables and ironies position readers as uneasy judges, forcing recognition of mixed motives, institutional failures, and the difficulty of discerning virtue in extremis.
Censorship and obscenity prosecutions shaped the American literary field in the 1890s. Anthony Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice targeted booksellers and publishers, pressuring authors to self-censor. Crane’s early urban novel appeared in 1893 via private printing under a pseudonym, partly to sidestep moral gatekeepers and commercial timidity. The climate also affected depictions of prostitution, alcoholism, and domestic violence in city fiction. By treating these subjects directly and without euphemism, Crane helped anticipate the bolder Naturalism of the next decade, including Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). His reception charts a shift from scandal to critical recognition as literary taste modernized.
Crane died of tuberculosis on June 5, 1900, in Badenweiler, Germany, aged twenty-eight, leaving debts and unfinished projects. Cora Crane returned to England to settle affairs, and friends arranged posthumous publications. Robert Barr completed The O’Ruddy (1903), reflecting a contemporary appetite for historical romance. Crane’s influence reverberated through twentieth-century American prose: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and others cited his pared sentences, irony, and unsentimental war writing. As a whole, this collection traces the itinerary of a generation confronting slums, seas, battlefields, and small-town rituals. It records the speed and strain of an age when journalism, art, and commerce collided to make modern literature.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Red Badge of Courage
A young Union recruit confronts fear, shame, and the chaos of battle as he searches for a personal measure of courage during the Civil War. Crane’s impressionistic prose captures shifting perceptions of war and self.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
In New York’s Bowery, a young woman tries to escape poverty and a brutal home through romance, only to be crushed by social hypocrisy and circumstance. A stark early work of American naturalism.
George's Mother
An aimless Bowery youth clashes with his devout, domineering mother as nightlife and bravado give way to disillusion. The novel traces small-scale decline without melodrama.
The Third Violet
A light romantic novel about a struggling artist and a society woman, contrasting bohemian circles with fashionable resorts. It satirizes manners and the myths of artistic success.
Active Service
An American journalist and a young woman are drawn into the Greco–Turkish War, exposing the confusion of modern conflict and the theatrics of the press. The story blends wartime episodes with a hesitant love plot.
The Monster
After a catastrophic accident, a small town turns on a Black coachman and the doctor who shelters him, revealing the mechanics of stigma and communal fear. A compact study of conscience set in Whilomville.
The O'Ruddy
A swashbuckling romance of an Irish gentleman adventurer seeking his inheritance and love amid duels and intrigues. Left unfinished by Crane and completed by Robert Barr.
The Little Regiment and Other Episodes from the American Civil War
Linked tales of Union soldiers navigating brotherhood, rumor, and the fog of war. Emphasizes battlefield confusion and the small dramas that shape courage.
The Open Boat and Other Stories
Anchored by a shipwreck survival tale about men adrift before an indifferent sea, this volume gathers stories of chance, violence, and human solidarity. Its narratives test endurance and perception in hostile settings.
Blue Hotel & His New Mittens
The Blue Hotel tracks a tense prairie encounter where suspicion turns ordinary frictions into violence, while His New Mittens offers a wry vignette of childhood pride and misadventure. Together they show Crane’s range from psychological realism to domestic sketch.
Whilomville Stories
Short tales set in the fictional town of Whilomville, often centered on children and small-town rituals. They reveal how everyday slights, bravado, and moral lessons shape character.
Wounds in the Rain: War Stories
Stories drawn from the Spanish–American War portray soldiers, correspondents, and camp life under fire. Crane balances battlefield spectacle with the absurdities and costs of campaign life.
Great Battles of the World
Dramatic retellings of notable historical battles written in vivid, scene-driven prose rather than academic analysis. Emphasizes the mood and motion of combat across eras.
Last Words
A posthumous assortment of stories, sketches, and journalism showcasing Crane’s compressed style, irony, and dark humor. Subjects range from travel and street life to brief war pieces.
Other Short Stories
A miscellany of urban, Western, and experimental tales that probe chance, bravado, and isolation across American and foreign settings. Often concise and ironic, they spotlight moral ambiguity and sudden turns of fortune.
The Black Riders and Other Lines
Brief, free-verse aphorisms and allegories that challenge piety, fate, and human vanity with stark imagery. The voice is terse, skeptical, and paradoxical.
War is Kind
A bitterly ironic antiwar sequence that juxtaposes martial pageantry with intimate loss through refrain and sharp visual detail. The poems compress battlefield scenes and homefront grief into stark, memorable lines.
Stephen Crane - Ultimate Collection: 200+ Novels, Short Stories & Poems
Novels and Novellas
The Red Badge of Courage
CHAPTER I.
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.
Once a certain tall soldier developed virtues and went resolutely to wash a shirt. He came flying back from a brook waving his garment bannerlike. He was swelled with a tale he had heard from a reliable friend, who had heard it from a truthful cavalryman, who had heard it from his trustworthy brother, one of the orderlies at division headquarters. He adopted the important air of a herald in red and gold. "We're goin' t' move t'morrah—sure," he said pompously to a group in the company street. "We're goin' 'way up the river, cut across, an' come around in behint 'em."
To his attentive audience he drew a loud and elaborate plan of a very brilliant campaign. When he had finished, the blue-clothed men scattered into small arguing groups between the rows of squat brown huts. A negro teamster who had been dancing upon a cracker box with the hilarious encouragement of twoscore soldiers was deserted. He sat mournfully down. Smoke drifted lazily from a multitude of quaint chimneys.
"It's a lie! that's all it is—a thunderin' lie!" said another private loudly. His smooth face was flushed, and his hands were thrust sulkily into his trousers' pockets. He took the matter as an affront to him. "I don't believe the derned old army's ever going to move. We're set. I've got ready to move eight times in the last two weeks, and we ain't moved yet."
The tall soldier felt called upon to defend the truth of a rumor he himself had introduced. He and the loud one came near to fighting over it.
A corporal began to swear before the assemblage. He had just put a costly board floor in his house, he said. During the early spring he had refrained from adding extensively to the comfort of his environment because he had felt that the army might start on the march at any moment. Of late, however, he had been impressed that they were in a sort of eternal camp.
Many of the men engaged in a spirited debate. One outlined in a peculiarly lucid manner all the plans of the commanding general. He was opposed by men who advocated that there were other plans of campaign. They clamored at each other, numbers making futile bids for the popular attention. Meanwhile, the soldier who had fetched the rumor bustled about with much importance. He was continually assailed by questions.
"What's up, Jim?"
"Th' army's goin' t' move."
"Ah, what yeh talkin' about? How yeh know it is?"
"Well, yeh kin b'lieve me er not, jest as yeh like. I don't care a hang."
There was much food for thought in the manner in which he replied. He came near to convincing them by disdaining to produce proofs. They grew excited over it.
There was a youthful private who listened with eager ears to the words of the tall soldier and to the varied comments of his comrades. After receiving a fill of discussions concerning marches and attacks, he went to his hut and crawled through an intricate hole that served it as a door. He wished to be alone with some new thoughts that had lately come to him.
He lay down on a wide bank that stretched across the end of the room. In the other end, cracker boxes were made to serve as furniture. They were grouped about the fireplace. A picture from an illustrated weekly was upon the log walls, and three rifles were paralleled on pegs. Equipments hunt on handy projections, and some tin dishes lay upon a small pile of firewood. A folded tent was serving as a roof. The sunlight, without, beating upon it, made it glow a light yellow shade. A small window shot an oblique square of whiter light upon the cluttered floor. The smoke from the fire at times neglected the clay chimney and wreathed into the room, and this flimsy chimney of clay and sticks made endless threats to set ablaze the whole establishment.
The youth was in a little trance of astonishment. So they were at last going to fight. On the morrow, perhaps, there would be a battle, and he would be in it. For a time he was obliged to labor to make himself believe. He could not accept with assurance an omen that he was about to mingle in one of those great affairs of the earth.
He had, of course, dreamed of battles all his life—of vague and bloody conflicts that had thrilled him with their sweep and fire. In visions he had seen himself in many struggles. He had imagined peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess. But awake he had regarded battles as crimson blotches on the pages of the past. He had put them as things of the bygone with his thought-images of heavy crowns and high castles. There was a portion of the world's history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it, he thought, had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever.
From his home his youthful eyes had looked upon the war in his own country with distrust. It must be some sort of a play affair. He had long despaired of witnessing a Greeklike struggle. Such would be no more, he had said. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.
He had burned several times to enlist. Tales of great movements shook the land. They might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them. He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all. His busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid with breathless deeds.
But his mother had discouraged him. She had affected to look with some contempt upon the quality of his war ardor and patriotism. She could calmly seat herself and with no apparent difficulty give him many hundreds of reasons why he was of vastly more importance on the farm than on the field of battle. She had had certain ways of expression that told him that her statements on the subject came from a deep conviction. Moreover, on her side, was his belief that her ethical motive in the argument was impregnable.
At last, however, he had made firm rebellion against this yellow light thrown upon the color of his ambitions. The newspapers, the gossip of the village, his own picturings had aroused him to an uncheckable degree. They were in truth fighting finely down there. Almost every day the newspapers printed accounts of a decisive victory.
One night, as he lay in bed, the winds had carried to him the clangoring of the church bell as some enthusiast jerked the rope frantically to tell the twisted news of a great battle. This voice of the people rejoicing in the night had made him shiver in a prolonged ecstasy of excitement. Later, he had gone down to his mother's room and had spoken thus: "Ma, I'm going to enlist."
"Henry, don't you be a fool," his mother had replied. She had then covered her face with the quilt. There was an end to the matter for that night.
Nevertheless, the next morning he had gone to a town that was near his mother's farm and had enlisted in a company that was forming there. When he had returned home his mother was milking the brindle cow. Four others stood waiting. "Ma, I've enlisted," he had said to her diffidently. There was a short silence. "The Lord's will be done, Henry," she had finally replied, and had then continued to milk the brindle cow.
When he had stood in the doorway with his soldier's clothes on his back, and with the light of excitement and expectancy in his eyes almost defeating the glow of regret for the home bonds, he had seen two tears leaving their trails on his mother's scarred cheeks.
Still, she had disappointed him by saying nothing whatever about returning with his shield or on it. He had privately primed himself for a beautiful scene. He had prepared certain sentences which he thought could be used with touching effect. But her words destroyed his plans. She had doggedly peeled potatoes and addressed him as follows: "You watch out, Henry, an' take good care of yerself in this here fighting business—you watch out, an' take good care of yerself. Don't go a-thinkin' you can lick the hull rebel army at the start, because yeh can't. Yer jest one little feller amongst a hull lot of others, and yeh've got to keep quiet an' do what they tell yeh. I know how you are, Henry.
"I've knet yeh eight pair of socks, Henry, and I've put in all yer best shirts, because I want my boy to be jest as warm and comf'able as anybody in the army. Whenever they get holes in 'em, I want yeh to send 'em right-away back to me, so's I kin dern 'em.
"An' allus be careful an' choose yer comp'ny. There's lots of bad men in the army, Henry. The army makes 'em wild, and they like nothing better than the job of leading off a young feller like you, as ain't never been away from home much and has allus had a mother, an' a-learning 'em to drink and swear. Keep clear of them folks, Henry. I don't want yeh to ever do anything, Henry, that yeh would be 'shamed to let me know about. Jest think as if I was a-watchin' yeh. If yeh keep that in yer mind allus, I guess yeh'll come out about right.
"Yeh must allus remember yer father, too, child, an' remember he never drunk a drop of licker in his life, and seldom swore a cross oath.
"I don't know what else to tell yeh, Henry, excepting that yeh must never do no shirking, child, on my account. If so be a time comes when yeh have to be kilt or do a mean thing, why, Henry, don't think of anything 'cept what's right, because there's many a woman has to bear up 'ginst sech things these times, and the Lord 'll take keer of us all.
"Don't forgit about the socks and the shirts, child; and I've put a cup of blackberry jam with yer bundle, because I know yeh like it above all things. Good-by, Henry. Watch out, and be a good boy."
He had, of course, been impatient under the ordeal of this speech. It had not been quite what he expected, and he had borne it with an air of irritation. He departed feeling vague relief.
Still, when he had looked back from the gate, he had seen his mother kneeling among the potato parings. Her brown face, upraised, was stained with tears, and her spare form was quivering. He bowed his head and went on, feeling suddenly ashamed of his purposes.
From his home he had gone to the seminary to bid adieu to many schoolmates. They had thronged about him with wonder and admiration. He had felt the gulf now between them and had swelled with calm pride. He and some of his fellows who had donned blue were quite overwhelmed with privileges for all of one afternoon, and it had been a very delicious thing. They had strutted.
A certain light-haired girl had made vivacious fun at his martial spirit, but there was another and darker girl whom he had gazed at steadfastly, and he thought she grew demure and sad at sight of his blue and brass. As he had walked down the path between the rows of oaks, he had turned his head and detected her at a window watching his departure. As he perceived her, she had immediately begun to stare up through the high tree branches at the sky. He had seen a good deal of flurry and haste in her movement as she changed her attitude. He often thought of it.
On the way to Washington his spirit had soared. The regiment was fed and caressed at station after station until the youth had believed that he must be a hero. There was a lavish expenditure of bread and cold meats, coffee, and pickles and cheese. As he basked in the smiles of the girls and was patted and complimented by the old men, he had felt growing within him the strength to do mighty deeds of arms.
After complicated journeyings with many pauses, there had come months of monotonous life in a camp. He had had the belief that real war was a series of death struggles with small time in between for sleep and meals; but since his regiment had come to the field the army had done little but sit still and try to keep warm.
He was brought then gradually back to his old ideas. Greeklike struggles would be no more. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.
He had grown to regard himself merely as a 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.
The only foes he had seen were some pickets along the river bank. They were a sun-tanned, philosophical lot, who sometimes shot reflectively at the blue pickets. When reproached for this afterward, they usually expressed sorrow, and swore by their gods that the guns had exploded without their permission. The youth, on guard duty one night, conversed across the stream with one of them. He was a slightly ragged man, who spat skillfully between his shoes and possessed a great fund of bland and infantile assurance. The youth liked him personally.
"Yank," the other had informed him, "yer a right dum good feller." This sentiment, floating to him upon the still air, had made him temporarily regret war.
Various veterans had told him tales. Some talked of gray, bewhiskered hordes who were advancing with relentless curses and chewing tobacco with unspeakable valor; tremendous bodies of fierce soldiery who were sweeping along like the Huns. Others spoke of tattered and eternally hungry men who fired despondent powders. "They'll charge through hell's fire an' brimstone t' git a holt on a haversack, an' sech stomachs ain't a-lastin' long," he was told. From the stories, the youth imagined the red, live bones sticking out through slits in the faded uniforms.
Still, he could not put a whole faith in veterans' tales, for recruits were their prey. They talked much of smoke, fire, and blood, but he could not tell how much might be lies. They persistently yelled "Fresh fish!" at him, and were in no wise to be trusted.
However, he perceived now that it did not greatly matter what kind of soldiers he was going to fight, so long as they fought, which fact no one disputed. There was a more serious problem. He lay in his bunk pondering upon it. He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.
Previously he had never felt obliged to wrestle too seriously with this question. In his life he had taken certain things for granted, never challenging his belief in ultimate success, and bothering little about means and roads. But here he was confronted with a thing of moment. It had suddenly appeared to him that perhaps in a battle he might run. He was forced to admit that as far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself.
A sufficient time before he would have allowed the problem to kick its heels at the outer portals of his mind, but now he felt compelled to give serious attention to it.
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 recalled his visions of broken-bladed glory, but in the shadow of the impending tumult he suspected them to be impossible pictures.
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 of 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.
After a time the tall soldier slid dexterously through the hole. The loud private followed. They were wrangling.
"That's all right," said the tall soldier as he entered. He waved his hand expressively. "You can believe me or not, jest as you like. All you got to do is to sit down and wait as quiet as you can. Then pretty soon you'll find out I was right."
His comrade grunted stubbornly. For a moment he seemed to be searching for a formidable reply. Finally he said: "Well, you don't know everything in the world, do you?"
"Didn't say I knew everything in the world," retorted the other sharply. He began to stow various articles snugly into his knapsack.
The youth, pausing in his nervous walk, looked down at the busy figure. "Going to be a battle, sure, is there, Jim?" he asked.
"Of course there is," replied the tall soldier. "Of course there is. You jest wait 'til to-morrow, and you'll see one of the biggest battles ever was. You jest wait."
"Thunder!" said the youth.
"Oh, you'll see fighting this time, my boy, what'll be regular out-and-out fighting," added the tall soldier, with the air of a man who is about to exhibit a battle for the benefit of his friends.
"Huh!" said the loud one from a corner.
"Well," remarked the youth, "like as not this story'll turn out jest like them others did."
"Not much it won't," replied the tall soldier, exasperated. "Not much it won't. Didn't the cavalry all start this morning?" He glared about him. No one denied his statement. "The cavalry started this morning," he continued. "They say there ain't hardly any cavalry left in camp. They're going to Richmond, or some place, while we fight all the Johnnies. It's some dodge like that. The regiment's got orders, too. A feller what seen 'em go to headquarters told me a little while ago. And they're raising blazes all over camp—anybody can see that."
"Shucks!" said the loud one.
The youth remained silent for a time. At last he spoke to the tall soldier. "Jim!"
"What?"
"How do you think the reg'ment 'll do?"
"Oh, they'll fight all right, I guess, after they once get into it," said the other with cold judgment. He made a fine use of the third person. "There's been heaps of fun poked at 'em because they're new, of course, and all that; but they'll fight all right, I guess."
"Think any of the boys 'll run?" persisted the youth.
"Oh, there may be a few of 'em run, but there's them kind in every regiment, 'specially when they first goes under fire," said the other in a tolerant way. "Of course it might happen that the hull kit-and-boodle might start and run, if some big fighting came first-off, and then again they might stay and fight like fun. But you can't bet on nothing. Of course they ain't never been under fire yet, and it ain't likely they'll lick the hull rebel army all-to-oncet the first time; but I think they'll fight better than some, if worse than others. That's the way I figger. They call the reg'ment 'Fresh fish' and everything; but the boys come of good stock, and most of 'em 'll fight like sin after they oncet git shootin'," he added, with a mighty emphasis on the last four words.
"Oh, you think you know—" began the loud soldier with scorn.
The other turned savagely upon him. They had a rapid altercation, in which they fastened upon each other various strange epithets.
The youth at last interrupted them. "Did you ever think you might run yourself, Jim?" he asked. On concluding the sentence he laughed as if he had meant to aim a joke. The loud soldier also giggled.
The tall private waved his hand. "Well," said he profoundly, "I've thought it might get too hot for Jim Conklin in some of them scrimmages, and if a whole lot of boys started and run, why, I s'pose I'd start and run. And if I once started to run, I'd run like the devil, and no mistake. But if everybody was a-standing and a-fighting, why, I'd stand and fight. Be jiminey, I would. I'll bet on it."
"Huh!" said the loud one.
The youth of this tale felt gratitude for these words of his comrade. He had feared that all of the untried men possessed a great and correct confidence. He now was in a measure reassured.
CHAPTER II.
The next morning the youth discovered that his tall comrade had been the fast-flying messenger of a mistake. There was much scoffing at the latter by those who had yesterday been firm adherents of his views, and there was even a little sneering by men who had never believed the rumor. The tall one fought with a man from Chatfield Corners and beat him severely.
The youth felt, however, that his problem was in no wise lifted from him. There was, on the contrary, an irritating prolongation. The tale had created in him a great concern for himself. Now, with the newborn question in his mind, he was compelled to sink back into his old place as part of a blue demonstration.
For days he made ceaseless calculations, but they were all wondrously unsatisfactory. He found that he could establish nothing. He finally concluded 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. He reluctantly admitted that he could not sit still and with a mental slate and pencil derive an answer. To gain it, he must have blaze, blood, and danger, even as a chemist requires this, that, and the other. So he fretted for an opportunity.
Meanwhile he continually tried to measure himself by his comrades. The tall soldier, for one, gave him some assurance. This man's serene unconcern dealt him a measure of confidence, for he had known him since childhood, and from his intimate knowledge he did not see how he could be capable of anything that was beyond him, the youth. Still, he thought that his comrade might be mistaken about himself. Or, on the other hand, he might be a man heretofore doomed to peace and obscurity, but, in reality, made to shine in war.
The youth would have liked to have discovered another who suspected himself. A sympathetic comparison of mental notes would have been a joy to him.
He occasionally tried to fathom a comrade with seductive sentences. He looked about to find men in the proper mood. All attempts failed to bring forth any statement which looked in any way like a confession to those doubts which he privately acknowledged in himself. He was afraid to make an open declaration of his concern, because he dreaded to place some unscrupulous confidant upon the high plane of the unconfessed from which elevation he could be derided.
In regard to his companions his mind wavered between two opinions, according to his mood. Sometimes he inclined to believing them all heroes. In fact, he usually admitted in secret the superior development of the higher qualities in others. He could conceive of men going very insignificantly about the world bearing a load of courage unseen, and although he had known many of his comrades through boyhood, he began to fear that his judgment of them had been blind. Then, in other moments, he flouted these theories, and assured himself that his fellows were all privately wondering and quaking.
His emotions made him feel strange in the presence of men who talked excitedly of a prospective battle as of a drama they were about to witness, with nothing but eagerness and curiosity apparent in their faces. It was often that he suspected them to be liars.
He did not pass such thoughts without severe condemnation of himself. He dinned reproaches at times. He was convicted by himself of many shameful crimes against the gods of traditions.
In his great anxiety his heart was continually clamoring at what he considered the intolerable slowness of the generals. They seemed content to perch tranquilly on the river bank, and leave him bowed down by the weight of a great problem. He wanted it settled forthwith. He could not long bear such a load, he said. Sometimes his anger at the commanders reached an acute stage, and he grumbled about the camp like a veteran.
One morning, however, he found himself in the ranks of his prepared regiment. The men were whispering speculations and recounting the old rumors. In the gloom before the break of the day their uniforms glowed a deep purple hue. From across the river the red eyes were still peering. In the eastern sky there was a yellow patch like a rug laid for the feet of the coming sun; and against it, black and patternlike, loomed the gigantic figure of the colonel on a gigantic horse.
From off in the darkness came the trampling of feet. The youth could occasionally see dark shadows that moved like monsters. The regiment stood at rest for what seemed a long time. The youth grew impatient. It was unendurable the way these affairs were managed. He wondered how long they were to be kept waiting.
As he looked all about him and pondered upon the mystic gloom, he began to believe that at any moment the ominous distance might be aflare, and the rolling crashes of an engagement come to his ears. 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. He turned toward the colonel and saw him lift his gigantic arm and calmly stroke his mustache.
At last he heard from along the road at the foot of the hill the clatter of a horse's galloping hoofs. It must be the coming of orders. He bent forward, scarce breathing. The exciting clickety-click, as it grew louder and louder, seemed to be beating upon his soul. Presently a horseman with jangling equipment drew rein before the colonel of the regiment. The two held a short, sharp-worded conversation. The men in the foremost ranks craned their necks.
As the horseman wheeled his animal and galloped away he turned to shout over his shoulder, "Don't forget that box of cigars!" The colonel mumbled in reply. The youth wondered what a box of cigars had to do with war.
A moment later the regiment went swinging off into the darkness. It was now like one of those moving monsters wending with many feet. The air was heavy, and cold with dew. A mass of wet grass, marched upon, rustled like silk.
There was an occasional flash and glimmer of steel from the backs of all these huge crawling reptiles. From the road came creakings and grumblings as some surly guns were dragged away.
The men stumbled along still muttering speculations. There was a subdued debate. Once a man fell down, and as he reached for his rifle a comrade, unseeing, trod upon his hand. He of the injured fingers swore bitterly and aloud. A low, tittering laugh went among his fellows.
Presently they passed into a roadway and marched forward with easy strides. A dark regiment moved before them, and from behind also came the tinkle of equipments on the bodies of marching men.
The rushing yellow of the developing day went on behind their backs. When the sunrays at last struck full and mellowingly upon the earth, the youth saw that the landscape was streaked with two long, thin, black columns which disappeared on the brow of a hill in front and rearward vanished in a wood. They were like two serpents crawling from the cavern of the night.
The river was not in view. The tall soldier burst into praises of what he thought to be his powers of perception.
Some of the tall one's companions cried with emphasis that they, too, had evolved the same thing, and they congratulated themselves upon it. But there were others who said that the tall one's plan was not the true one at all. They persisted with other theories. There was a vigorous discussion.
The youth took no part in them. As he walked along in careless line he was engaged with his own eternal debate. He could not hinder himself from dwelling upon it. He was despondent and sullen, and threw shifting glances about him. He looked ahead, often expecting to hear from the advance the rattle of firing.
But the long serpents crawled slowly from hill to hill without bluster of smoke. A dun-colored cloud of dust floated away to the right. The sky overhead was of a fairy blue.
The youth studied the faces of his companions, ever on the watch to detect kindred emotions. He suffered disappointment. Some ardor of the air which was causing the veteran commands to move with glee—almost with song—had infected the new regiment. The men began to speak of victory as of a thing they knew. Also, the tall soldier received his vindication. They were certainly going to come around in behind the enemy. They expressed commiseration for that part of the army which had been left upon the river bank, felicitating themselves upon being a part of a blasting host.
The youth, considering himself as separated from the others, was saddened by the blithe and merry speeches that went from rank to rank. The company wags all made their best endeavors. The regiment tramped to the tune of laughter.
The blatant soldier often convulsed whole files by his biting sarcasms aimed at the tall one.
And it was not long before all the men seemed to forget their mission. Whole brigades grinned in unison, and regiments laughed.
A rather fat soldier attempted to pilfer a horse from a dooryard. He planned to load his knap-sack upon it. He was escaping with his prize when a young girl rushed from the house and grabbed the animal's mane. There followed a wrangle. The young girl, with pink cheeks and shining eyes, stood like a dauntless statue.
The observant regiment, standing at rest in the roadway, whooped at once, and entered whole-souled upon the side of the maiden. The men became so engrossed in this affair that they entirely ceased to remember their own large war. They jeered the piratical private, and called attention to various defects in his personal appearance; and they were wildly enthusiastic in support of the young girl.
To her, from some distance, came bold advice. "Hit him with a stick."
