Stephen Crane’s “War is Kind” is all about explaining why men choose to go and die in war. Even though it is brutal, war provides some level of satisfaction to its adherents, and thus, it is more complex than what it seems. In the work, one of the seminal lines is, “These men were born to drill and die / The unexplained glory flies above them” (Crane). The point here is that while the outside observer – in this case the “maiden” – may not understand why war is a good thing, the men who are fighting the war are doing it for a bigger purpose. While death might be their eventual destination, that does not make war unkind or even bad. Rather, their purpose is to fight, so anything that happens in the course of that fighting must be understood as a good thing for them and their souls.
The author describes war as “a field where a thousand corpses lie” (Crane). It is important not to mistake what the poet is saying. He is not discounting the idea that war is a horrid, terrible practice that sends young men to their deaths. Rather, he fully admits this, and in fact, part of his goal is to show the full horror of war through tremendously explicative language. This sets up the contrast which stands at the heart of this work. War is many things. It is one of those rare things that can be, at the same time, both brutal and wonderful. Even while men are slain in huge numbers and people are left home to weep about the dead, the men doing the fighting understand that they are doing it for a reason, and because of that, the women who are weeping should also try to understand war from the perspective of the man fighting it.
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"War is Kind".
