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To show his attitude to war and to carry his emotional message to the reader, Crane used colour in his novel in much the same way as the painters of the impressionist school. Crane sees the colour red as a symbol for blood, cruelty, and war. This is how he put it in words: "The red eye-like gleam of hostile camp-fires" seen from across "the sorrowful blackness" of the river at night; he had regarded battles as "crimson blotches on the pages of the past"; before the battle "they were going to look at war, the red animal — war, the blood swollen god"; in a lull after a battle that costs many lives "thered animal —war, the blood swollen god" is "bloated" to the full; gun-fire is a "crimson roar"; the wound of the soldier, thered badge", and the angry irony of the title itself —"The Red Badge of Courage".
Crane's psychological study of the soldier in war was suggested by Tolstoy. Crane inherited from Tolstoy the great writer's dislike for theatrical heroism. He deliberately avoids heroics, and yet never leaves the reader in doubt as to the existence of the heroic.
Crane's experience as a reporter in the Graeco-Turkish and in the Spanish-American War gave him valuable material for his stories. He wrote several collections of stories: "The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure" (1898) and "Wounds in the Rain' (1900), and two collections of poems: "The Black Riders" and" War Is Kind". The latter title is used ironically. In those poems we hear the roar of cannon, we see charging men, wounds and death. Here is part of the first poem; the poems of each collection follow one after another without a title.
Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls that thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom —
A field where a thousand corpses lie.
Hemingway considered Stephen Crane one cu his best teachers. It was from him that Hemingway took his concise style of writing. But Hemingway understood the causes of war, while Crane merely cried out against the cruelty and horror of war. Nevertheless Crane's vivid realistic description of the meaningless inhuman brutality of an imperialist war gives him a lasting place in realistic literature in America.
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