Historic accounts often frame war in romantic and distant terms, charting points on the arc of history — where clashes give way to ideas and nation-states emerge vanquished or victors.

The American novelist Stephen Crane, in his novel The Red Badge of Courage explored the complexity of war in his portrayal of Henry Fleming, a young Union soldier in the American civil war. Henry eagerly enlists, against his mother’s warnings, to idealistically fight for a virtuous cause. Yet, as Henry stands ready to step onto the battlefield, the space between his ‘dreams’ of battle and the ‘awakened’ reality emerge. He is astonished that the next day will likely “be a battle, and he would be in it.” He had “regarded battles as crimson blotches on the pages of the past. He had put them as things bygone with his thought-images of heavy crowns and high castles. There was a portion of the world’s history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it, he thought, had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever… Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-gripping instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.”

Crane’s depiction, written more than a century ago, and by an author who himself never experienced war, brilliantly exposes the dichotomy between an........

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