23. Red Badge of Courage chapters 1-8

Last night I was reading chapters one through eight in our newest book, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. I knew that this was a war book, and honestly, I hate war books. I hate history all together and anything to do with it. This made it very difficult to give this book a chance. But I knew I had to read it so I just sat down and read it. I am not going to say something like this book surprised me and I actually loved it! Because I did not. It was pretty boring to me but I read it anyways. What I got out of it was that Henry went to war against his mom's hopes and told her he would not do anything she would be ashamed of. While he was there, before he actually started fighting, he started freaking out thinking he would run from the war when the moment came. He started feeling very self conscious for thinking like this, so he asked someone else if they would ever run from the war. The other soldier basically said that he would do whatever the rest of the soldiers did, whether they ran or stayed to fight, he would do what they did. This made Henry feel a little bit better about his feelings. He asked another person when he started feeling self conscious again, but this time the other person said that he would not run, he would stay and fight. This made Henry feel really bad. One day, the war began, and in the heat of the moment Henry did not run. He went with the other soldiers and fought. The most of them survived when it was over and they were all very excited. As they got back from fighting, they heard that they had to fight again. This time, Henry was scared so he ran. As he ran past a person of importance up on his horse he overheard the man say that the enemy was being held back. Now Henry was relieved, yet ashamed that he ran. He walked past this gnarly man missing body parts and bleeding. When that man asked Henry where he was injured, Henry felt horrible because he was a coward and ran away.