Like Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane (1871–1900) saw war at first hand, reporting as a journalist on the Greco-Turkish War in 1897 and the Spanish-American War in 1898. Like Bierce he was no pacifist, seeking to enlist in the latter war after the sinking of the Maine. Unlike Bierce he never served as a soldier; his application to enlist was rejected on medical grounds.
Most of Crane’s war writing, from The Red Badge of Courage (1895) on, takes no position for or against war in general or wars in particular, his aim and great success being simply the realistic depiction of war as it is. “War Is Kind” is the anomaly, regularly turning up in antiwar literature anthologies since its publication. Its opposition is not so much to war as to wartime rhetoric, its target the comforting lie, “war is kind,” which in the poem is repeatedly juxtaposed to uncomforting accounts of soldiers’ mass deaths. It is, in the critic and memoirist Paul Fussell’s wonderful phrase, not so much an antiwar poem as an “anti-home-front poem.”
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who 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.
Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.