Summary: Chapter II The next morning, the soldiers learn that Jim was mistaken: the army does not move. Henry continues to worry about his courage, and watches his comrades for any sign that they share his self-doubt. One day, the army is given orders and begins to march. While marching, the soldiers debate when and if they will see battle. Henry keeps to himself, too preoccupied with his own speculations to join the other men. The regiment enjoys itself, and is wildly amused when a fat soldier attempts to steal a horse but the young girl who owns it stops him. At night, the men set up camp, and Henry, feeling “vast pity for himself,” asks Wilson if he can imagine himself running from battle. Wilson indignantly claims that he would do his part in a battle and leaves Henry feeling even more alone. Summary: Chapter III The next night finds the increasingly exhausted soldiers marching through a dark forest. Henry worries that the enemy might appear at any moment. When the enemy fails to materialize, Henry returns to thinking that his regiment is nothing more than a “blue demonstration.” One morning, however, Jim shakes Henry awake. They hear the crack of distant gunfire, and the regiment begins to run. Boxed in by his fellow soldiers as the officers goad them toward the battle, Henry realizes that even if he wanted to run, the throng of surrounding soldiers would trample him. Pressed forward, the regiment parts to move around the body of a dead soldier. As he passes the corpse, Henry grows increasingly vulnerable, and curses the commanding officers who, it seems, are leading them to certain death. The men stop several times, many using branches and stones to build protective trenches which they must abandon as the march drives them forward. The more the regiment moves, the faster the soldiers’ morale wanes. They gradually begin to think that their leaders are.
Chapter 1 The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills. Once a certain tall soldier developed virtues and went resolutely to wash a shirt. He came flying back from a brook waving his garment bannerlike. He was swelled with a tale he had heard from a reliable friend, who had heard it from a truthful cavalryman, who had heard it from his trustworthy brother, one of the orderlies at division headquarters. He adopted the important air of a herald in red and gold. We're goin' t' move t'morrah-sure, he said pompously to a group in the company street. We're goin' 'way up the river, cut across, an' come around in behint 'em. To his attentive audience he drew a loud and elaborate plan of a very brilliant campaign. When he had finished, the blue-clothed men scattered into small arguing groups between the rows of squat brown huts. A negro teamster who had been dancing upon a cracker box with the hilarious encouragement of twoscore soldiers was deserted. He sat mournfully down. Smoke drifted lazily from a multitude of quaint chimneys. It's a lie! that's all it is-a thunderin' lie! said another private loudly. His smooth face was flushed, and his hands were thrust sulkily into his trouser's pockets. He took the matter as an affront to him. I don't believe the derned old army's ever going to move. We're set. I've got ready to move.
Chapters XIII– XV Summary: Chapter XIII Terrified that his fellow soldiers will revile him for fleeing from the battle, Henry totters toward the fire. He navigates his way past the bodies of his sleeping comrades with great difficulty. Suddenly a loud voice instructs him to halt. Henry recognizes Wilson standing guard. He informs Wilson that he has been shot in the head after being separated from the regiment and fighting with another group. 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: “jest as if some feller had lammed yeh on th’ head with a club.” Wearily, Henry watches the camp until Wilson returns with a canteen of coffee. He nurses Henry, tending to his head with a wet cloth and giving him his blanket for the night. Grateful and dazed, Henry drifts off to sleep. Summary: Chapter XIV Henry wakes in the gray, misty dawn, feeling as though he has been “asleep for a thousand years.” In the distance he hears the roar of fighting which rumbles around him with a “deadly persistency.” Looking around at his sleeping comrades, Henry believes for a moment that he is surrounded by dead men and cries out in anguish. When the bugle blows, however, the men get up slowly. Wilson asks Henry how he feels as he tends to his head. “ Pretty bad,” Henry replies. As Wilson tends to Henry, Henry notices a change in his friend: he is no longer the loud soldier, that sensitive and prickly youth obsessed with his own sense of valor. Instead, he seems to have acquired a quiet, but remarkable, confidence. The two men discuss the battle, and Henry reports that Jim Conklin is dead. 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.
Download Now