The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [99]
The tossing crowd on the sidewalk grew smaller and smaller. The snow beat with merciless persistence upon the bowed heads of those who waited. The wind drove it up from the pavements in frantic forms of winding white, and it seethed in circles about the huddled forms passing in one by one, three by three, out of the storm.
ENDNOTES
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
1 (p. 1) The Red Badge of Courage: The book was first published in 1894 in a greatly abridged version by a newspaper syndicate that included the Philadelphia Press, the New York Press, and hundreds of other dailies across the nation. D. Appleton and Company published the full version in book form in 1895.
Chapter I
2 (p. 3) an army stretched out on the hills: The time is late April 1863, on the eve of the Battle of Chancellorsville. The Army of the Potomac occupies the north bank of the Rappahannock River near Falmouth, Virginia, where it has been encamped since its defeat in the Battle of Fredericksburg the previous December. Abraham Lincoln has just placed Major General Joseph (“Fighting Joe”) Hooker in command. The Union’s opponent during the battle is the Army of Northern Virginia, under the command of Robert E. Lee. Hooker’s forces total about 135,000; Lee‘s, about 59,000.
3 (p. 3) tall soldier: One of Crane’s more significant manuscript revisions prior to publication involved replacing names of significant characters with epithets (characteristic words or phrases), a choice that reinforces the imagistic qualities of the novel and the universality of its characters. Here he substitutes “tall soldier” for Jim Conklin. Other significant epithets at the onset include “the youth” for Henry Fleming and “the loud soldier” for Wilson.
4 (p. 3) division headquarters: During the battle for Chancellorsville, the Union command structure was organized as follows: Hooker’s Army of the Potomac consisted of seven infantry corps, each commanded by a major general, and one cavalry corps. Each infantry corps was subdivided into three divisions, usually commanded by a brigadier general. Each division had three or four brigades, commanded by a , colonel or a brigadier general, along with artillery support. The brigade had from four to six regiments, each headed by a colonel or lieutenant colonel. At the beginning of the Civil War, each regiment was designed to have 1,000 men divided into ten companies, each with a captain in charge; in later years, however, new recruits were formed into new regiments rather than sent to existing regiments as replacements for men lost in battle and for other reasons. Because of such organizational peculiarities, historians estimate that by May 1863 the average size of a Union regiment had fallen to 530. Nevertheless, since Fleming’s regiment consists of recruits, it likely is manned at full strength, with approximately 100 men in his company, about 80 of them privates.
5 . (p. 5) a Greeklike struggle: Fleming’s initial misconceptions about war are formed in part from a romantic misreading of The Iliad, by Homer.
6 (p. 8) conversed across the stream: Because the Confederate Army had occupied positions just south of the Rappahannock since January, friendly exchanges between opposing sentries were common.
7 (p. 10) the cavalry: Two weeks prior to the battle, Hooker dispatched most of his cavalry corps on an independent mission to disrupt Confederate communication lines, a move that most historians agree was a tactical blunder.
Chapter II
8 (p. 13) a blue demonstration: Crane repeats this phrase several times in the novel, changing