The Red Badge of Courage Ch. 16-20

All the men of the regiment re led to a group of trenches where Wilson suddenly falls asleep. Henry then gets a glimpse of a column of gray-suited enemy soldiers, and his regiment is quickly marched into the forest. Henry begins complaining like a little kid about his army’s leadership, blaming the generals for their failure to win battles.The lieutenant shepherds the men to a spot in the woods, where he says they will encounter the enemy in only a few minutes. As the battle roar swells to a thunder, the men wearily await the fight. After a maddening and intense period of waiting for the inevitable, the enemy sweeps down upon the line of blue-uniformed men. Seized by a feverish hatred of the enemy, Henry fights in a frenzy, firing and reloading and refusing to retreat. In the heat and smoke, he is aware of nothing but his own rage. After a while, he hears one of his comrades laughing and realizes that he is firing at nothing; the battle is over, the enemy has fled. His regiment now regards Henry with awe, regaling him with stories of his ferocious prowess in the combat. As the Union troops rest, the fighting deeper in the forest intensifies until the air is parched with smoke and the battle-roar drowns out all other sounds. During a sudden lull in the battle, the men hear one of their comrades, Jimmie Rogers, crying out in pain.

The Red Badge of Courage Ch. 11-15

Henry watches closely to a column of infantry hurrying to reach the battle the senses that he is. Henry alleviates his guilt for wishing his comrades to get sick by reflecting that his army has surpass every defeat it has faced in past times. Still, he feels deeply guilty and brands himself a terrible villain and, the most unutterably selfish man in existence. Henry then finally gets a closer look at the battle field and sees enemy forces closing in on the column of the infantrymen he had envied earlier. The blue line breaks and the blue soldiers retreat. Soon, they rush toward him. Desperate and overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of warfare, Henry clutches a fleeing man’s arm and tries to ask him what went wrong. Henry is terrified that his fellow soldiers will revile him for fleeing from the battle, Henry slowly walks towards the burning fire. His friend immediately turns him over to the corporal. The corporal examines him and decides that Henry has been grazed by a shell, which has left little more than a lump, just as if some fellow had hammered him on the head with an over-sized club. Henry was very tired and dizzy after the doc had checked him so he fatefully dozed off to sleep. Henry woke up to see the gray, hazy mist of the early morning, feeling like he had been asleep for thousands of years. Looking around at his sleeping comrades, Henry believes for a moment that he is surrounded by dead men and cries out in anguish. A group of soldiers exchanges harsh words near Henry and Wilson, nearly coming to blows. Wilson intervenes, keeps the peace, and returns to Henry. He says that the regiment lost more than half of its men the day before, but that many of them have since returned they scattered in the woods, he reports, and fought with other regiments, just like Henry.

The Red Badge of Courage Ch. 7-10

Henry feels a sudden resentment toward those in his regiment who did not run but rather defeated the enemy without him; he feels betrayed by their stupidity and selfishness. He is consumed by rationalizations, as he plunges into the woods. He tosses a pinecone at a squirrel, and the squirrel scampers into a tree. Henry considers this sequence proof that fleeing from danger is a natural, universal tendency. He stumbles into a forest grove whose high ceiling of leaves makes it resemble a chapel. Henry stares in shock for a moment and then runs from the glade, half expecting the corpse to cry out after him. Stomping through the forest, Henry hears the crimson roar of battle, Hoping to get a closer look, he heads toward it. He comes upon a column of wounded men stumbling along a road, and notices one spectral soldier with a vacant gaze. Henry joins the column and a soldier with a bloody head and a dangling arm begins to talk to him. Henry tries to avoid this tattered man, but the wounded soldier continues talking about the courage and fortitude of the army, exuding pride that his regiment did not flee from the fighting. He asks Henry where he has been wounded, and Henry hurries away in a panic. Some times I go into the woods and it doesn't remind of a chapel but it reminds me of back home Pennsylvania, just looking at the trees and leaves changing colors and the smells and just everything reminds me of home. Henry falls back in the procession to avoid the tattered man. As he observes the wounded soldiers around him, he becomes envious of their injuries, he considers a wound proof of valor a red badge of courage and wishes that he had one. He walks by the spectral soldier that he noticed earlier, a gray man staring blankly into “the unknown. Henry suddenly realizes the man’s identity and cries out Gawd Jim Conlin Jim greets Henry wearily and asks where he has been, telling him, I got shot. The tattered man marvels at the strength that Jim mustered before death, wondering how he managed to run when his injury should have rendered him unable to walk. Henry and the tattered man move away from the corpse. The tattered man says that he is feeling “pretty damn’ bad,” and Henry worries that he is about to witness another death. The tattered man says, however, that he is not about to die—he has children who need him to survive. He mistakes Henry for his friend Tom Jamison and tells him that he also looks weak, and that he should have his wound looked at. He adds that he once saw a man shot in the head so that the man did not realize he was hurt until he was already dead. If I was ever to get shot, and not have died, I would consider that a miracle but seeing that he dies it just changes my mind about going into the army at all, because I'm to young to die