In "A Mystery of Heroism," is Collins a real hero?

In Stephen Crane's short story "A Mystery of Heroism," Fred Collins crosses a battlefield in order to obtain a drink of water from a well. He does this, he says, because he is thirsty. This seems like an act of reckless bravado, courageous and foolish in equal measure, to Collins's captain and his fellow soldiers, but his motives are never quite clear to the reader or to Collins himself. He muses as he walks to the well:

He was, then, a hero. He suffered that disappointment which we would all have if we discovered that we were ourselves capable of those deeds which we most admire in history and legend. This, then, was a hero. After all, heroes were not much.

Collins then decides that he cannot be a hero. He is an ordinary person, with typically human failings. Once, he borrowed money and avoided the lender for ten months so that he would not have to pay it back. When his mother used to try to make him work on the family farm, he often reacted in a childish, irritable manner, quite incompatible with the glamor of heroism.

Crane's story makes the point that if heroes are remote and mysterious figures like Julius Caesar or George Washington, then no one can ever be a hero to himself. Introspection makes one all too aware of cowardice, pettiness, and any number of other unheroic qualities. A hero must always be someone about whom one does not know too much.

How is Collins, the main character in "A Mystery of Heroism," an ordinary man?

"A Mystery of Heroism" is set against the backdrop of the Civil War. Collins, the protagonist, is a member of A Company, which is pinned down on the side of a hill by the relentless onslaught of an enemy battery. Although he's in the midst of horrific carnage, the sight of a well across the meadow suddenly fills the young soldier with a desire for a drink of water. When he expresses this desire to go to the well aloud, his fellow soldiers deride the notion that anyone would risk their lives so lightly, but hand him their canteens after he requests permission from his commanding officers to do so.

Once he begins to cross the meadow toward the well, with bullets and artillery shells whizzing past his head, he is disappointed to discover that, although viewed from the outside his action might appear to be heroic, he still feels like an ordinary man.

He wondered why he did not feel some keen agony of fear cutting his sense like a knife. He wondered at this, because human expression had said loudly for centuries that men should feel afraid of certain things, and that all men who did not feel this fear were phenomena -- heroes.

No, it could not be true. He was not a hero. Heros had no shames in their lives....

He saw that, in this matter of the well, the canteens, the shells, he was an intruder in the land of fine deeds.

So, despite an outwardly heroic deed, Collins was an ordinary man in his residual awareness of his flawed and finite nature.