The meadow, and what happens to it during the battle, is a symbol of the utter destructiveness of war. At the beginning of “A Mystery of Heroism,” the meadow is an example of natural beauty, covered in long grass waving in the breeze. It holds a farmhouse, too, which stands in for humanity’s symbiotic relationship with nature and a way of life based around cultivation rather than death. The battle and its barrage of shells destroys all of this. The farmhouse is bombed out. There is a “massacre” of the blades of grass. The very earth beneath the grass is torn up and flung into the air. War transforms the meadow from a place of peace and beauty, a place offering the potential for human civilization to flourish, into a chaotic field of confusion, violence, and death.
The destroyed meadow also functions as a kind of metaphorical land of death. Collins’s journey across the meadow and back is reminiscent of the classic mythical trope of the “descent and return” quest made by a mortal into the underworld and back. As he passes through the meadow, Collins exists in a kind of limbo: he is a living intruder passing through this deathscape, and yet he is also at constant risk of being killed, of joining the dead and the meadow becoming his permanent home. This sense of the imminence of death is overwhelming. At one moment, while collecting the water, Collins’s fear incapacitates him such that he feels that he is “no more than a dead man.” When sense returns to him and he recalls his life, he flees the meadow towards the land of the living. Interrupting that flight, Collins makes a brief stop to give water to the dying officer, a man, like Collins, caught still living among the death of the meadow. This moment captures a divergence between those facing the possibility of death: Collins then struggles to return to life and runs towards the safety of the hill, while the officer turns his face to the meadow, accepting his death.
The Meadow Quotes in A Mystery of Heroism
Then somebody yelled: “There goes th’ bugler!”
As the eyes of half the regiment swept in one machinelike movement, there was an instant’s picture of a horse in a great convulsive leap of a death wound and a rider leaning back with a crooked arm and spread fingers before his face.
Collins, of A Company, said: "I wisht I had a drink. I bet there's water in that there ol' well yonder!"
"Yes; but how you goin' to git it?"
For the little meadow which intervened was now suffering a terrible onslaught of shells. Its green and beautiful calm had vanished utterly. Brown earth was being flung in monstrous handfuls. And there was a massacre of the young blades of grass. They were being torn, burned, obliterated. Some curious fortune of the battle had made this gentle little meadow the object of the red hate of the shells, and each one as it exploded seemed like an imprecation in the face of a maiden.
The wounded officer who was riding across this expanse said to himself: "Why, they couldn't shoot any harder if the whole army was massed here!"
There was a quarrel in A Company. Collins was shaking his fist in the faces of some laughing comrades.
"Dern yeh! I ain't afraid t' go. If yeh say much, I will go!"
"Of course, yeh will! You'll run through that there medder, won't yeh?"
Collins said, in a terrible voice: "You see now!" At this ominous threat his comrades broke into renewed jeers.
The colonel was watching Collins's face. "Look here, my lad," he said, in a pious sort of a voice—"Look here, my lad"—Collins was not a lad—"don't you think that's taking pretty big risks for a little drink of water."
"I dunno," said Collins uncomfortably. Some of the resentment toward his companions, which perhaps had forced him into this affair, was beginning to fade. “I dunno wether ‘tis.”
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.
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.
No, it could not be true. He was not a hero. Heroes 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.
The sky was full of fiends who directed all their wild rage at his head.
When he came to the well, he flung himself face downward and peered into its darkness. (…) He grabbed one of the canteens, and, unfastening its cap, swung it down by the cord. The water flowed slowly in with an indolent gurgle.
And now as he lay with his face turned away he was suddenly smitten with the terror. It came upon his heart like the grasp of claws. All the power faded from his muscles. For an instant he was no more than a dead man.
There was the faintest shadow of a smile on his lips as he looked at Collins. He gave a sigh, a little primitive breath like that from a child.
Collins tried to hold the bucket steadily, but his shaking hands caused the water to splash all over the face of the dying man. Then he jerked it away and ran on.
The Meadow Symbol Timeline in A Mystery of Heroism
