As he goes to fetch water from the well, Fred Collins meditates on the nature of heroism. He thinks that a hero is someone who does not feel fear in the way that an ordinary person does and, since he is feeling dazed and numb, decides that he must be a hero. His immediate reaction is not pride but disappointment. If he is a hero, he thinks, then “heroes were not much.” Collins’s conception of a hero is a distant and romantic figure: Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. The distance is part of the point. If one is a hero, he thinks, one must be separate from the sordid nature of everyday life. Heroism is something to aspire to, not to achieve by accident.

It is this idea of separation from the sordid part of life that makes Collins change his mind and decide that he cannot himself be a hero. “Heroes had no shames in their lives.” He thinks of his own failure to pay back a loan and his irritable response when his late mother wanted him to work on the family farm. Even these minor flaws, he believes, are incompatible with heroism and make him “an intruder in the land of fine deeds.”

All the soldiers in the story strike attitudes that might be regarded as heroic, from the stoicism of Privates Smith and Ferguson, and the fat major, to the impetuous daring of the lieutenant of artillery and, for that matter, Collins himself. Collins’s quest for water seems to the other soldiers like the exact mixture of folly and bravado that constitutes heroism, but the reader sees his introspection, in which he rejects this idea. The other soldiers, whose interior monologues remain unknown to the reader, probably do not see themselves as heroes either. If the hero is always a glamorous, distant figure, then no man is a hero to himself.

Throughout the story, there is a relentless description of the sheer destructiveness of war and how much of this destruction is superfluous. The wounded officer reflects:

Why, they couldn’t shoot any harder if the whole army was massed here!

The enemy shells he sees are not even killing soldiers. They are massacring “young blades of grass” and flinging up the earth “in monstrous handfuls.” The first image in the story shows the men so caked in the dust their frenetic activity has thrown up that they almost appear to be part of the landscape they are destroying.

Another commentary on the pointlessness and destructiveness of war is provided by the horses, who drag the guns “wheresoever these incomprehensible humans demanded with whip and spur.” Among the human participants in the story, only Fred Collins is given more of an interior life than the horses. The soldiers are described purely in terms of their actions, but the horses have “fluttering hearts” as they observe the “relentless and hideous carnage,” for which they can see no reason and in which they participate unwillingly.

The story ends with a symbolic act of destruction as the bucket of water is overturned and Collins’s daring quest is rendered useless. This is not a malevolent act but a careless, wanton one, a waste of resources appropriate to the frivolous characters of the two young lieutenants. It is a fitting end to a story in which so much of the destruction appears random and motiveless.

“A Mystery of Heroism” might equally well be called “A Mystery of Motive.” Heroism may be intrinsically mysterious, but motives are generally regarded as relatively straightforward. The more commonplace the action, the...