Stephen Crane’s “A Mystery of Heroism” depicts an unnamed battle in an unnamed war. The purpose of the war is never made clear, and the tactics or goals of the battle are similarly left muddy. The enemy army is remote and never appears in person. Collins’s regiment engages with that enemy only through shells and bullets. Meanwhile, the story often focuses on the terrible destruction of the battle: houses blow up, a meadow burns, soldiers are mangled and die painfully, and even horses die horrifically. By portraying a war and battle that seem to have no larger purpose, in which heroic quests are undertaken for ridiculous reasons and then the fruits of the quest wasted, and in which the overwhelming consequence is the destruction and devastation of nature, human homes, human lives, and even animals, “A Mystery of Heroism” emphasizes the senseless waste and destruction of war.
The story studiously avoids offering any meaning or purpose to the battle taking place or the war at large. The protagonist Collins’s regiment has no identifiable goal. It is not attempting to advance or take ground, it is not fighting for any ideal or country or reason. The enemy, meanwhile, is both nameless and faceless, appearing only as shells and bullets. To Collins, it seems that the enemy is the shells themselves, capable of “red hate” and targeting their own victims. Even in Collins’s company, the artillery is hard at work firing from afar during the battle, while the infantry, which fights up close, stands around watching with nothing to do. Because of the shells, the deaths on the battlefield are sudden and senseless—war has become impersonal, mechanized, and disconnected from a human enemy. The battle could be occurring everywhere or anywhere, and story becomes not the portrayal of a single battle but rather a statement about the very nature of war.
The lack of any purpose to the battle, along with the aimlessness of the troops and the officers, makes it seem as if the primary purpose of the battle is the destruction it causes. Through vivid imagery, the story emphasizes how war destroys everything: lives, landscapes, and civilization itself. The story describes in detail the “convulsive” movements and “torn” bodies of dying men and horses. Descriptions of brutal violence are frequent and plainly offered as a simple fact of battle. The landscape of the battlefield is often personified to emphasize the pain inflicted by war on the land itself. In the meadow, which begins the story green and beautiful, there is a “massacre of the young blades of grass.” The very ground beneath the grass is then torn up and displaced, flung into the air by exploding shells. The meadow is not only burning; it is “suffering.” War’s destruction of not just nature but also human civilization is evident in the repeated bombing of the structures on the other side of the battlefield. The well-house and barn have been struck by a shell; only fragments, embers, and smoke remain. To emphasize the destruction, the well-house is struck again as the infantry watches, sending the fragments flying. These structures, the product of human effort, are completely obliterated. They are not strategic or intended demolitions, but rather the needless collateral damage of a purposeless war that breeds only devastation. The story, then, invites the essential question that none of the characters have an answer to: if all the destruction has no purpose and the deaths are simply senseless waste, why wage war at all?
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Brutality of War ThemeTracker
The Brutality of War 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!"
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.
When one tried to drink the other teasingly knocked his elbow. "Don't, Billie! You'll make me spill it," said the one. The other laughed.
Suddenly there was an oath, the thud of wood on the ground, and a swift murmur of astonishment among the ranks. The two lieutenants glared at each other. The bucket lay on the ground empty.
