Red Badge Of Courage

3 Pages 754 Words

Henry’s Greatest Failure: Fleeing From Battle

The trials of war force young men to make decisions that they may not be ready to make. In Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, Henry is faced with many challenges. Many elements of his manhood are challenged. Some of those elements are courage, bravery, and integrity. Fleeing from war because of his fear for his life and leaving a tattered soldier whom he hardly knew were his hardest challenges. Henry’s greatest moral error is his flight from battle because running away from a war is much more cowardly than leaving the tattered soldier to his death.
When the rebel forces were charging the union forces, many of the northern fighters had second thoughts about fighting. They had battled hard the previous day and they had their minds set on resting for a while before clashing with the rebels again. Henry observed other soldiers running from the battle as he was watching the fight break out. As was quoted about one young man running, “There was a revelation. He too threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit” (Crane 32). While he was running wildly towards the back of the pack “like a proverbial chicken” (Crane 32), other men were standing their ground and fighting. The commitment of joining the army is to give your life for the cause of the war. Instead of staying and fighting with his fellow brothers of war, he fled the battle and left them all to die.
When Henry found out that the union army had held their position, he was “amazed and angry. He felt that he had been wronged” (Crane 35). He knew what he had done was wrong, and now he felt bad about it because his fellow fighters that had stayed held off the rebel attack. He did not want to think about it in this way though. He thought that he did his job by saving his own life. “He had considered the time, he said, to be one in which it was the duty of ever...