Burning boy, p.64
Burning Boy, page 64
From London to Dover, from Dover to Paris, from Paris to Marseille, and then five days in the Mediterranean aboard the Guadiana until Crane and Cora arrived at Piraeus, the port of Athens.
6
In the big picture, there was the ever-present fear that war would break out among the major European countries. The fear was grounded in historical fact (the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars), and a loose alliance of those countries—England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, alternatively known as the Great Powers or the Concert of Europe—kept a close watch on the continent in order to ward off potential conflicts before they got out of hand. The troubled peace held for decades, but just seventeen years after Crane found his first little war, Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist and the universal bloodbath of the Great War began.
In the smaller picture, the picture that Crane and Cora entered in early April, there was the presence of the Ottoman Empire in Greece, a large force that had gradually overwhelmed a smaller force and claimed parts of its neighbor’s territory as its own. The point of greatest tension was on the island of Crete, where the Greek Christian community (eighty percent of the population) was ruled by its Muslim conquerors. Earlier rebellions had been suppressed, but after the latest one had started in 1896, Greece began taking an active role in arming the rebels, and in February 1897 it sent in forces to invade the island, declaring that Crete was henceforth to be united with Greece. Afraid that this would spark greater disturbances throughout the Balkans, the Powers sent in a massive fleet of warships to blockade the island and prevent it from receiving further assistance.
Turkey officially declared war on April seventeenth, and while the Greeks were supported by most of the foreign press and countless young men from European countries followed Lord Byron’s example by volunteering to take part in the heroic cause (a two-thousand-man brigade of Italian “Redshirts” was led by one of Garibaldi’s sons), the plain fact was that the Greeks were outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and ill-equipped to hold their own against the Ottoman forces, who were mostly under the command of experienced German generals. One hundred and twenty thousand men with modern weapons against seventy-five thousand men with old-fashioned, single-shot rifles, and yet the Greeks fought hard and well, routing the Turks in several battles, and if not for the waffling of the Danish-born Greek king George I, who had been put on his throne in 1863 by the same Powers who were now blockading Crete, the double-minded king who appointed his son, Crown Prince Constantine, as commander of the Greek forces, a young man who knew nothing about military tactics or strategy and consistently ordered his army to retreat when it was on the verge of winning crucial victories, the war surely would have lasted longer than it did. As it turned out, the whole thing ended after one month. For the Greeks, the humiliation of that Thirty Days’ War lived on in memory as Black ’97—or, even more bluntly, as the Unfortunate War.
Nevertheless, those weeks amounted to a small lifetime for Crane, an immersion course in the science and savagery of his personal obsession. Taking on the job of war correspondent had merely been an excuse to get close to war and see it with his own eyes, to discover if he had imagined it correctly in his work (he had, but it was only after witnessing his first major battle that he knew that he had), and once he put those lingering doubts behind him, he moved on to the more important task of assimilating what he had learned and progressing to a deeper understanding of the catastrophic human consequences of war—not in the disembodied ether of words but as flesh-and-blood actuality. At first, however, the excitement was too much for him, and the prospect of what he was about to see blinded him to what he had already learned for himself, the hard facts he had already confronted in his own imagination, and he arrived in Greece with an empty head and a pounding heart, as if he were three years old again and sitting on the floor with his army of buttons.
He began by writing a letter to his brother from Athens on April tenth, an absurdly childish letter that dwarfs all his other attempts to impress Judge Will, the exemplar of bourgeois rectitude and defender of the family’s name. “I expect to get a position on the staff of the Crown Prince,” he writes. “Won’t that be great? I am so happy over it I can hardly breathe. I shall try—I shall try like the blazes to get a decoration out of the thing.… The reputation of my poor old books had reached a few of the blooming Greeks and that is what has done the Crown Prince business for me.… They say I’ve got a sure thing.”
Who is they, and what kind of nonsense had they been feeding him? Crane had no military experience, he spoke not a word of Greek, and even if the crown prince had hired him, it would have been against the law for him to serve in a foreign army. This is Crane regressing into pure fantasy, both ignorant and contemptuous of the country he is in, and so naïve about the reality of war that he sounds even more stupid than Henry Fleming in the early days after his enlistment in the Union army. A medal. That is all Crane seems to want—a medal to prove to his big brother that the disgraced bohemian outcast was at heart a military hero. After all that Crane had written about war in the past, it is shocking to hear him spout such inane drivel—almost incomprehensible.
Three weeks later, in a dispatch entitled “Greek War Correspondents,” he alludes to himself as “the wild ass of the desert who wanted a decoration.” It was a long distance to travel in such a short time, but his education was well underway by then, and not only had he returned to his senses, he was no longer the person he had been when he arrived.*
For the first two weeks after war was declared, Crane tended to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and continued to miss out on the heavy fighting. Rapid excursions to Epirus and Thessaly with Cora had revealed only the last stages of dwindling minor skirmishes, and a couple of short articles he composed in Athens about the mood of the Greek people had misread the intensity of popular support for the war, which was less fervent than he supposed it to be. As Davis peevishly commented in a letter to his mother on April twenty-eighth: “He has not seen as much as I have for several reasons but then when a man can describe battles as well as he can without seeing them why should he care.”
All that changed on April thirtieth, when Crane and Cora, accompanied by Journal chief Bass and friend-foe Davis—who was reporting for the Times of London—left Athens by steamer at nine in the morning and headed for Thessaly, where a new round of fighting had broken out. By noon the next day, they had stopped at Chalkis, where they transferred to another steamer, which deposited them on the dock at Stylis at six P.M. From there they rode by carriage to Lamia, which took another six hours, but even though they arrived at midnight, they somehow found a place to sleep. Cora’s diary cryptically notes: “Bunked on Floor wierd [sic] Hotel—Café—Soldiers.” At seven the next morning, they left by carriage for Domokos, which entailed ten more hours of travel on roads filled with mobs of Greek civilians running away from the advancing Turkish army—the first such mobs Crane had encountered, which provided him with another crucial lesson in his education about the consequences of war. After a stopover of two hours, the party drove to Pharsala, where Cora spent the night on her own—as recounted in her unfinished article—sleeping on the billiard table in the shuttered café under the protection of the sympathetic owner, who stood at the door with a rifle to prevent any soldiers from breaking in. Armed with a letter from the United States minister to Greece, she was hoping to be granted an interview with the crown prince at army headquarters the next day. Meanwhile, the others were stopped by sentries on the outskirts of town and decided to split up. Bass and Davis headed for Velestino; Crane and some other correspondents went to nearby Volo. The next morning, May third, Cora sat and waited at army headquarters, only to learn that the crown prince was about to make another one of his sudden retreats, so she left Pharsala and joined Crane in Volo, which he would later describe as “a beautiful town, a summer resort in time of peace for wealthy Greeks,” but this was a time of war, and the harbor below the seaside village was crammed with English, Italian, and French battleships from the Concert fleet. The action was five miles off in Velestino, where three attacks by the Turkish army on three different days had failed to budge the Greek forces under the command of Colonel Constantine Smolenski, and the next day, May fourth, the Turks launched a full-scale, all-out offensive. This was the big battle Crane had wanted to see, the biggest, most decisive battle of the war, but as luck would have it, he was in no shape to go. He had come down with a case of dysentery, the secret curse and consequence of all wars, and was trapped in his room for the entire day. Cora’s diary says: “mouse ill—8 P.M.”
Bad luck, but there was good luck as well, and after the Greeks held off the superior Turkish forces once again, the two sides prepared to throw themselves into another round of fighting the next day. When Crane woke on the morning of the fifth, he was well enough to climb out of bed, well enough to stand, well enough to totter off to the killing ground in Velestino. He arrived at noon, and when other correspondents asked where he had been the day before, he told them he had been suffering from a toothache. After that, in the words of John Bass, he walked up “the steep hill to where the Greek mountain battery, enveloped in smoke, was dropping shells among the black lines of Turkish infantry in the plain below.” Then Crane sat down on an ammunition box, lit a cigarette, and settled in to watch his first real battle.
He couldn’t help himself. He knew he had come to a place of bloodshed and slaughter, but at the same time this was the long-anticipated moment of truth for him, and in the first moments of his first actual combat, the thrill of what he was seeing overwhelmed all the rest.
The roll of musketry was tremendous. From a distance it was like tearing a cloth; nearer, it sounded like rain on a tin roof and close up it was just a long crash after crash. It was a beautiful sound—beautiful as I had ever dreamed. It was more impressive than the roar of Niagara and finer than thunder or avalanche—because it had the wonder of human tragedy in it. It was the most beautiful sound of my experience, barring no symphony. The crash of it was ideal.
That is one point of view. Another might be taken from the men who died there.
A beautiful sound, he says, the most beautiful sound in the world, but what he is really talking about is an emotional sound, a sound so stirring and so thunderous that it reverberates through his entire body and nearly deafens him, a roar from the heavens that comes crashing down with a message of ultimate things, and if it is beautiful to him, it is only because it has “the wonder of human tragedy in it.” War, then, as the purest expression of the dark inner workings of human life, the most extreme example of what is true about all human life at all times: that life is lived face-to-face and nose to nose with death—which is the bedrock stance underpinning all of Crane’s best work.
The thrill passes, however. After the exultant, liberating crash of the guns of war, Crane comes back to earth and looks at the dead, nods to the dead as if apologizing for his effusive response to the guns that have killed them, and for the remainder of his first battle piece as a war correspondent, the four-and-a-half-page “Stephen Crane at Velestino,” he confines himself to a meticulous account of the action, impressed by how well the Greek troops push back against the squadrons of charging Turks, proving themselves to be “good fighters, long fighters, stayers,” but the battle ends with another one of the crown prince’s inexplicable retreats—an order so devastating to the brilliant colonel commanding the army that Crane writes, in the most memorable sentence of the article: “They say Smolenski wept.”
Bass was with him that day, and in an article he wrote for the Journal, “How Novelist Crane Acts on the Battlefield” (published May 23), he follows Crane up the hill, watches him plant himself on the ammunition box “amid a shower of shells,” then light a cigarette and settle in to watch the war. Crane’s conduct, as one would imagine from his previous conduct on the sinking Commodore, was calm throughout, and however excited he might have been at hearing the sound of the guns, none of it showed on his face or in the movements of his body.
Stephen Crane did not appear surprised, but watched with a quiet expression the quick work of the artillerymen as they loaded, fired and jumped to replace the small cannon overturned by the recoil.
I was curious to know what was passing through his mind, and said:
“Crane, what impresses you most in this affair?”
The author of The Red Badge of Courage lighted another cigarette, pushed back his long hair out of his eyes with his hat and answered quietly:
“Between two great armies battling against each other the interesting thing is the mental attitude of the men. The Greeks I can see and understand, but the Turks seem unreal. They are shadows on the plain—vague figures in black, indications of a mysterious force.”
By this time the Greek army was in full retreat.
As the last mountain gun was loaded on the mules Stephen Crane quietly walked down the hill. The Turkish artillery had drawn nearer, and amid the singing bullets and smashing shells the novelist had stopped, picked up a fat waddling puppy and immediately christened it Velestino, the Journal dog.*
Under heavy shelling, Crane and Cora managed to catch the last train back to Volo, which was where he wrote his article, but because of the retreat at Velestino, Volo would soon be falling as well, and the dispatch concludes with an ominous certainty: “I send this from Volo and before you print it the Turks will be here.” They were almost there already, and so Crane and Cora took off again, fleeing Volo on the day he sent in his article (May 10) and heading by ship to Chalkis. He reported on the experience in another dispatch he wrote the next day, a blistering piece that the Journal ran under the headline “The Blue Badge of Cowardice,” which was his first account of the civilian victims of war.
“So the enemy withdrew,” he writes, “and the Turks came on. The Greeks knew how disastrous this retreat must be. They knew Volo must be occupied by the enemy, and they guessed more might fall because of the incomprehensible order of the King’s son.” The beautiful town of Volo was being evacuated, and “every available ship in the harbor was employed to transport fugitives.… Fifteen hundred were on the Hydra alone. The condition of these people was pitiable in the extreme. Many of them were original refugees from Larissa and other northern points, who, flying before the march of the Turks, came to Volo as a place of certain harbor. Now they are obliged to flee even from there.”
Both demoralized and indignant, the young man who had come to witness war and had rejoiced at the sound of artillery fire on the plain at Velestino now says:
The scenes on the transports and merchant ships make one tired of war. Women and children are positively in heaps on the decks. They have no food, and they will be landed where they can.
I asked one of the officers how they expected to feed the people. He answered that they did not expect to feed them—that they could not feed them.
I went with a great crowd to Oreos. The town consists of six houses already crowded. The refugees came ashore carrying their household goods. They camped on the fields by great bonfires. These peasant women are patient, suffering in curious silence, while the babies wail on all sides.
Studio photograph of Crane dressed as war correspondent, Athens, spring 1897. (COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA)
This is war—but it is another picture from that we got at the front.
The Greek naval officers, with their eyes full of tears, swore to me the Turks would pay for all this misery. But the Turks probably will not; nobody pays for these things in war.
Eight thousand people at least fled from Volo. Their plight makes a man hate himself for being well fed and having a place to go.
