STEPHEN CRANE AT THE FRONT

When the Spanish-American War broke out in April 1898, the author of America’s first great war novel had yet to see his nation’s troops in combat. Indeed, with the exception of one frustrating, illness-plagued month as a war correspondent in Greece a year earlier, Stephen Crane had never seen any troops in combat. But the brilliant young author of The Red Badge of Courage, published two years earlier, aimed to change that. With a contract in hand from London-based Blackwood’s Magazine and a verbal commitment from the New York World, Crane set sail for Cuba, where the suspicious explosion of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana Harbor that February had given warmongers in the U.S. Congress and their supporters in the American yellow press the excuse to declare war on Spain, which had ruled Cuba for nearly four centuries. Although the Spanish government maintained that it was blameless for the Maine’s destruction, an investigation by the U.S. Navy concluded that an explosion under the ship’s hull had ignited its gunpowder magazines, suggesting foul play and making war all but inevitable.

Seventeen months earlier, on a similar mission, Crane had nearly died when the steamship he was sailing on, the Commodore, foundered and sank off the Florida coast while en route to Cuba from Jacksonville with a load of guns for Cuban rebels. After 30 wave-tossed hours in a 10-foot dinghy, Crane and his three shipmates swam for safety through the breakers at Daytona Beach. (Ironically, the best swimmer in the lot drowned after being struck on the head by a piece of the dinghy, which broke apart in the heavy surf). The harrowing experience gave Crane the raw material for one his greatest short stories, “The Open Boat,” but it left the rail-thin young writer looking even more cadaverous than usual, and it only strengthened his resolve to get into Cuba. As his novelist friend Joseph Conrad observed: “Nothing could have held him back. He was ready to swim the ocean.”

As Crane’s novelist