Stephen Crane had a short but prolific literary career at the end of the nineteenth century, publishing five novels, three collections of short stories, and two collections of poetry before he died in 1900 at the age of twenty-eight. He is best known for his writing about the American Civil War, particularly his novel The Red Badge of Courage. “A Mystery of Heroism,” which is one of six war stories in Crane’s first collection, The Little Regiment, deals with several of the same themes as the novel, including the nature of courage and the grim reality of war. Crane experimented with various literary styles in the 1890s, and “A Mystery of Heroism” is an example of what was to become his dominant strain, American Naturalism.

The writing in “A Mystery of Heroism” is full of vivid imagery. One of the first aspects to strike the reader is the sheer number of similes. The flames of an exploding shell “seemed like lances,” and the noise is “like an imprecation in the face of a maiden.” A shell cuts through the sky “like a monstrous bolt of lightning.” Eyes shine like beads or like pieces of metal. The column of soldiers moves in unison, like an animal with four hundred eyes. Fear cuts the senses “like a knife” and comes upon the heart “like a grasp of claws.” The dying artillery officer’s arm “bent like a twig,” and his head “drooped as if his neck were of willow.”

The effect of these comparisons, however, is the opposite of that achieved by extended Homeric similes, which vary the monotony of battle by taking the reader away from the action for a line or two. Crane’s similes intensify the action, taking only a few words to distill the essence of the experience into a sharp, clear image. For the reader as for the protagonist, there is no escape from the battle. Aural and visual imagery are constantly combined to emphasize the chaos. In the brief opening paragraph, the author mentions the colors red, white, and blue (the gunfire, the men’s uniforms, and the sky) as the battery “was arguing in tremendous roars with some other guns.”

The arguing guns are just one instance of the way in which the weapons are personified and given malevolent intention. A beautiful green meadow suffers “a massacre of the young blades of grass,” which fall victim to “the red hate of the shells.” The wounded artillery officer’s cries are “heard only by the shells, bullets.” There is personification, too, when Fred Collins is struggling to fill the canteens at the well. “The stupid water derided him.” The bucket is lazy and uncooperative. Again, these literary elements do not detract from the realism of the story but enhance it psychologically. Any soldier is bound to think of the shells and bullets flying around him as malevolent and intentional or to feel that the water and the bucket are being recalcitrant when one will not flow into the other at a moment of great danger.

The flashes of humor and absurdity in the story are equally realistic. Collins runs across the battlefield with his bucket “in the manner of a farmer chased out of a dairy by a bull.” There is nothing inherently absurd about thirst, which can be as deadly as a bullet. However, it takes days to die of thirst, whereas Collins and his fellow soldiers are in immediate danger from the shells and bullets flying around them. In such circumstances, an activity as normal as fetching a drink of water seems like insanity. Normal life...