This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
A young Union soldier marches toward his first battle convinced that courage is a thing a man either has or lacks, and certain that he lacks it. When the firing starts he runs, and spends the next day among the wounded and the stragglers, telling himself stories that almost hold. He carries no wound, and the red badge he envies on the others is simply blood, which he finally earns by accident and in the dark.
Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage in 1895 without ever having seen a battle, and the book has been praised ever since for getting war right anyway: the smoke, the noise, the way fear arrives before thought and leaves just as suddenly. It follows no generals and names almost no places, only a boy called Henry Fleming and what goes on inside him across two days of fighting.
This unabridged recording keeps Crane's clipped, colour-soaked prose intact, from the first rumours of movement to the strange quiet at the end.
