The Upturned Face

Stephen Crane (1871–1900)
From Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry

Interesting Links

“‘To Get at the Real Thing’: Stephen Crane’s ‘War Memories’” (Will Slattery, Essay Daily)

“Stephen Crane at Brede” (Edith R. Jones, Atlantic)

Previous Story of the Week selections • “The Price of the Harness,” Stephen Crane
• “War,” Jack London
• “In the North,” Edith Wharton
• “The Diary of a Retreat,” H. L. Mencken

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Drawing of a dead soldier, mid-nineteenth century; black, white chalk, graphite on gray-green paper by French artist Ange-Louis Janet Lange (1815–1872). Courtesy of Cooper Hewitt.

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In January 1899, Joseph Conrad wrote to Stephen Crane, who had just returned to London after spending six months covering the Spanish-American War in Puerto Rico and Cuba:

What have you got in your head? You must be full of stuff. I suppose the “Dead Man” story will have to wait till you unload your new experience. I know whatever it is it will be good. It will be great! . . . I am coming to see you directly I finish a rotten thing I am writing for B’wood. It is rotten—and I can't help it. All I write is rotten now. I am pretty well decayed myself. I ought to be taken out and flung into a dusthole—along with the dead cats—by heavens!

Crane had previously shared with Conrad the idea for the “Dead Man” tale; it would not be finished for another ten months and would become “The Upturned Face,” one of Crane’s most famous stories. And that “rotten thing” by Conrad would appear serially in the February, March, and April issues of Blackwood’s Magazine: his fourth novel, Heart of Darkness, followed later that year by Lord Jim, another short novel narrated by the fictional English seaman Charles Marlow.

Crane had been covering the Spanish-American War for the New York World. The night he arrived at the Marine camp at Guantánamo Bay in June 1898, he met John Blair Gibbs, a 39-year-old assistant surgeon at the military hospital. Bored by the lack of action, the 26-year-old author spent an evening talking with him. The very next night the Spanish launched a surprise attack on the camp. “I went in search of Gibbs, but I soon gave over an active search for the more congenial occupation of lying flat and feeling the hot hiss of the bullets trying to cut my hair,” Crane recalled in “War Memories,” a slightly fictionalized memoir published after his death. “For the moment I was no longer a cynic. I was a child who, in a fit of ignorance, had jumped into the vat of war.”

Gibbs was in the hospital tent treating the wounded; while moving patients to a safer location, he was shot in the head. With the bullets still flying, Crane came across him soon afterward. “It took him a long time to die,” he wrote. “He breathed as all noble machinery breathes when it is making its gallant strife against breaking, breaking.” The soldiers arranged to bury the surgeon, but a second attack “interrupted in some degree the services over the graves of Gibbs and some others.”

During the last months of his life, Crane worked on a series of stories inspired in part by his experiences in Cuba. He would finish four tales: “The Kicking Twelfth,” “The Shrapnel of Their Friends,” “And If He Wills, He Must Die,” and “The Upturned Face.” All four episodes describe members of an infantry regiment (“the Kicking Twelfth”) in a war between two imaginary countries, Spitzbergen and Rostina. With details suggested by Gibbs’s harrowing burial in Cuba, “The Upturned Face” was written last but, appearing in the March 1900 issue of Ainslee’s Magazine, it was the first in the series to be available to American readers.

“I am enclosing a double extra special good thing,” Crane began his cover letter when he sent the manuscript for “The Upturned Face” to James Pinker, his agent. “I will not disguise from you that I am wonderfully keen on this small bit of 1500 words. It is so good—for me—that I would almost sacrifice it to the best magazine in England rather than see it appear in the best paying magazine.” Crane also sent the story to British actor and theater manager Johnston Forbes-Robertson in the hope he might be interested in it as a one-act play and “so curdle the blood of the British public that it would be the sensation of the year.” Forbes-Robertson passed on the chance, probably in no small part because the piece was still a short story rather than a stage-ready adaptation.

Perhaps because of its macabre subject matter, the story itself was not a “sensation” with British magazine editors. Although immediately accepted and published in the U.S., “The Upturned Face” was rejected by Black and White and The Illustrated London News, each of which accepted another story in the series. The editor of the latter declined it during the summer of 1900, shortly after Crane’s death, and stated that the story was “scarcely likely to support the late author’s reputation.” It was finally available to British readers that fall in the first issue of the new Crystal Palace Magazine.

In the 125 years since, reviewers, critics, and scholars have universally praised it as Crane’s “tiny masterpiece” (as biographer James Colvert put it). Comparing it to Goya’s late etchings, the poet John Berryman found the tale “unlike all Crane’s other stories” and noted that “though perfectly naturalistic in technique, it affects one as pure symbol, senseless and ghastly.” A more recent biographer, Paul Sorrentino, concluded, “With lean, understated prose and a reliance on aural and tactile imagery rather than on plot, setting, and visual imagery, the tale demonstrates that Crane could still be innovative stylistically.”

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs

The Upturned Face

What will we do now?” said the adjutant, troubled and excited.

“Bury him,” said Timothy Lean.

The two officers looked down close to their toes where lay the body of their comrade. The face was chalk-blue; gleaming eyes stared at the sky. Over the two upright figures was a windy sound of bullets, and on the top of the hill, Lean’s prostrate company of Spitzbergen infantry was firing measured volleys.

“Don’t you think it would be better—” began the adjutant. “We might leave him until to-morrow.”

“No,” said Lean, “I can’t hold that post an hour longer. I’ve got to fall back, and we’ve got to bury old Bill.”

“Of course,” said the adjutant at once. “Your men got intrenching tools?”

Lean shouted back to his little firing line, and two men came slowly, one with a pick, one with a shovel. They stared in the direction of the Rostina sharpshooters. Bullets cracked near their ears. “Dig here,” said Lean gruffly. The men, thus caused to lower their glances to the turf, became hurried and frightened merely because they could not look to see whence the bullets came. The dull beat of the pick striking the earth sounded amid the swift snap of close bullets. Presently the other private began to shovel.

“I suppose,” said the adjutant, slowly, “we’d better search his clothes for . . . things.”

Lean nodded; together in curious abstraction they looked at the body. Then Lean stirred his shoulders, suddenly arousing himself. “Yes,” he said, “we’d better see . . . what he’s got.” He dropped to his knees and approached his hands to the body of the dead officer. But his hands wavered over the buttons of the tunic. The first button was brick-red with drying blood, and he did not seem to dare to touch it.

“Go on,” said the adjutant hoarsely.

Lean stretched his wooden hand, and his fingers fumbled blood-stained buttons. . . . At last he arose with a ghastly face. He had gathered a watch, a whistle, a pipe, a tobacco pouch, a handkerchief, a little case of cards and papers. He looked at the adjutant. There was a silence. The adjutant was feeling that he had been a coward to make Lean do all the grizzly business.

“Well,” said Lean, “that’s all, I think. You have his sword and revolver.”

“Yes,” said the adjutant, his face working. And then he burst out in a sudden strange fury at the two privates. “Why don’t you hurry up with that grave? What are you doing, anyhow? Hurry, do you hear? I never saw such stupid—”

Even as he cried out in this passion, the two men were laboring for their lives. Ever overhead, the bullets were spitting.

The grave was finished. It was not a masterpiece—poor little shallow thing. Lean and the adjutant again looked at each other in a curious silent communication.

Suddenly the adjutant croaked out a weird laugh. It was a terrible laugh which had its origin in that part of the mind which is first moved by the singing of the nerves. “Well,” he said humorously to Lean, “I suppose we had best tumble him in.”

“Yes,” said Lean. The two privates stood waiting bent over on their implements. “I suppose,” said Lean, “it would be better if we laid him in ourselves.”

“Yes,” said the adjutant. Then apparently remembering that he had made Lean search the body, he stooped with great fortitude and took hold of the dead officer’s clothing. Lean joined him. Both were particular that their fingers should not feel the corpse. They tugged away; the corpse lifted, heaved, toppled, flopped into the grave, and the two officers, straightening, looked again at each other—they were always looking at each other. They sighed with relief.

The adjutant said: “I suppose we should . . . we should say something. Do you know the service, Tim?”

“They don’t read the service until the grave is filled in,” said Lean, pressing his lips to an academic expression.

“Don’t they?” said the adjutant, shocked that he had made the mistake. “Oh, well,” he cried suddenly, “let us . . . let us say something while . . . while he can hear us.”

“All right,” said Lean. “Do you know the service?”

“I can’t remember a line of it,” said the adjutant.

Lean was extremely dubious. “I can repeat two lines but—”

“Well, do it,” said the adjutant. “Go as far as you can. That’s better than nothing. And . . . the beasts have got our range exactly.”

Lean looked at his two men. “Attention!” he barked. The privates came to attention with a click, looking much aggrieved. The adjutant lowered his helmet to his knee. Lean, bare-headed, stood over the grave. The Rostina sharpshooters fired briskly.

“O, Father, our friend has sunk in the deep waters of death, but his spirit has leaped toward Thee as the bubble arises from the lips of the drowning. Perceive, we beseech, O, Father, the little flying bubble and—”

Lean, although husky and ashamed, had suffered no hesitation up to this point, but he stopped with a hopeless feeling and looked at the corpse.

The adjutant moved uneasily. “And from Thy superb heights—” he began, and then he, too, came to an end.

“And from Thy superb heights,” said Lean.

The adjutant suddenly remembered a phrase in the back part of the Spitzbergen burial service, and he exploited it with the triumphant manner of a man who has recalled everything and can go on.

“O, God, have mercy—”

“O, God, have mercy—” said Lean.

“‘Mercy,’” repeated the adjutant in a quick failure.

“‘Mercy,’” said Lean. And then he was moved by some violence of feeling, for he turned suddenly upon his two men and tigerishly said: “Throw the dirt in.”

The fire of the Rostina sharpshooters was accurate and continuous.

II

One of the aggrieved privates came forward with his shovel. He lifted his first shovel load of earth and for a moment of inexplicable hesitation it was held poised above this corpse which from its chalk-blue face looked keenly out from the grave. Then the soldier emptied his shovel on—on the feet.

Timothy Lean felt as if tons had been swiftly lifted from off his forehead. He had felt that perhaps the private might empty the shovel on—on the face. It had been emptied on the feet. There was a great point gained there—ha, ha!—the first shovelful had been emptied on the feet. How satisfactory!

The adjutant began to babble. “Well, of course . . . a man we’ve messed with all these years . . . impossible . . . you can’t, you know, leave your intimate friends rotting on the field. . . . Go on, for God’s sake, and shovel, you.”

The man with the shovel suddenly ducked, grabbed his left arm with his right hand and looked at his officer for orders. Lean picked the shovel from the ground. “Go to the rear,” he said to the wounded man. He also addressed the other private. “You get under cover, too. I’ll . . . I’ll finish this business.”

The wounded man scrambled hastily for the top of the ridge without devoting any glances to the direction from whence the bullets came and the other man followed at an equal pace but he was different in that he looked back anxiously three times. This is merely the way—often—of the hit and the unhit.

Timothy Lean filled the shovel, hesitated, and then in a movement which was like a gesture of abhorrence, he flung the dirt into the grave and as it landed it made a sound—plop. Lean suddenly paused and mopped his brow—a tired laborer.

“Perhaps we have been wrong,” said the adjutant. His glance wavered stupidly. “It might have been better if we hadn’t buried him just at this time. Of course, if we advance to-morrow, the body would have been—”

“Damn you,” said Lean. “Shut your mouth.” He was not the senior officer.

He again filled the shovel and flung in the earth. Always the earth made that sound—plop. For a space Lean worked frantically like a man digging himself out of danger.

Soon there was nothing to be seen but the chalk-blue face. Lean filled the shovel. . . . “Good God,” he cried to the adjutant. “Why didn’t you turn him somehow when you put him in? This—” Then Lean began to stutter.

The adjutant understood. He was pale to the lips. “Go on, man,” he cried, beseechingly, almost in a shout. . . . Lean swung back the shovel; it went forward in a pendulum curve. When the earth landed it made a sound—plop.

Originally published in the March 1990 issue of Ainslee's Magazine and reprinted in the posthumous collection Last Words (1902).