"The cold passed reluctantly from 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, eye-like gleam of hostile campfires set in the low brows of the distant hills."
The opening line of the classic novel, The Red Badge of Courage. (1895). Stephen Crane was born in Newark in 1871, 5 years after the end of the American Civil War, on November 1st. This tale of redemption of a soldier struck a cord with readers, especially among Civil War veterans, some of whom claimed to have served with the lad. He was 24 years old when he wrote it. Henry Fleming, the character, was the embodiment of the foot soldier stuck in a conflict he did not fathom with people he did not know, in places he had never been. Welcome to war.
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