What is the best summary of The Red Badge of Courage?

During the Civil War, a Union regiment rests along a riverbank, where it has been camped for weeks. A tall soldier named Jim Conklin spreads a rumor that the army will soon march. Henry Fleming, a recent recruit with this 304th Regiment, worries about his courage. He fears that if he were to see battle, he might run. The narrator reveals that Henry joined the army because he was drawn to the glory of military conflict. Since the time he joined, however, the army has merely been waiting for engagement.

At last the regiment is given orders to march, and the soldiers spend several weary days traveling on foot. Eventually they approach a battlefield and begin to hear the distant roar of conflict. After securing its position, the enemy charges. Henry, boxed in by his fellow soldiers, realizes that he could not run even if he wanted to. He fires mechanically, feeling like a cog in a machine.

The blue (Union) regiment defeats the gray (Confederate) soldiers, and the victors congratulate one another. Henry wakes from a brief nap to find that the enemy is again charging his regiment. Terror overtakes him this time and he leaps up and flees the line. As he scampers across the landscape, he tells himself that made the right decision, that his regiment could not have won, and that the men who remained to fight were fools. He passes a general on horseback and overhears the commander saying that the regiment has held back the enemy charge. Ashamed of his cowardice, Henry tries to convince himself that he was right to preserve his own life to do so. He wanders through a forest glade in which he encounters the decaying corpse of a soldier. Shaken, he hurries away.

After a time, Henry joins a column of wounded soldiers winding down the road. He is deeply envious of these men, thinking that a wound is like “a red badge of courage”—visible proof of valorous behavior. He meets a tattered man who has been shot twice and who speaks proudly of the fact that his regiment did not flee. He repeatedly asks Henry where he is wounded, which makes Henry deeply uncomfortable and compels him to hurry away to a different part of the column. He meets a spectral soldier with a distant, numb look on his face. Henry eventually recognizes the man as a badly wounded Jim Conklin. Henry promises to take care of Jim, but Jim runs from the line into a small grove of bushes where Henry and the tattered man watch him die.

Henry and the tattered soldier wander through the woods. Henry hears the rumble of combat in the distance. The tattered soldier continues to ask Henry about his wound, even as his own health visibly worsens. At last, Henry is unable to bear the tattered man’s questioning and abandons him to die in the forest.

Henry continues to wander until he finds himself close enough to the battlefield to be able to watch some of the fighting. He sees a blue regiment in retreat and attempts to stop the soldiers to find out what has happened. One of the fleeing men hits him on the head with a rifle, opening a bloody gash on Henry’s head. Eventually, another soldier leads Henry to his regiment’s camp, where Henry is reunited with his companions. His friend Wilson, believing that Henry has been shot, cares for him tenderly.

The next day, the regiment proceeds back to the battlefield. Henry fights like a lion. Thinking of Jim Conklin, he vents his rage against the enemy soldiers. His lieutenant says that with ten thousand Henrys, he could win the war in a week. Nevertheless, Henry and Wilson overhear an officer say that the soldiers of the 304th fight like “mule drivers.” Insulted, they long to prove the man wrong. In an ensuing charge, the regiment’s color bearer falls. Henry takes the flag and carries it proudly before the regiment. After the charge fails, the derisive officer tells the regiment’s colonel that his men fight like “mud diggers,” further infuriating Henry. Another soldier tells Henry and Wilson, to their gratification, that the colonel and lieutenant consider them the best fighters in the regiment.

The group is sent into more fighting, and Henry continues to carry the flag. The regiment charges a group of enemy soldiers fortified behind a fence, and, after a pitched battle, wins the fence. Wilson seizes the enemy flag and the regiment takes four prisoners. As he and the others march back to their position, Henry reflects on his experiences in the war. Though he revels in his recent success in battle, he feels deeply ashamed of his behavior the previous day, especially his abandonment of the tattered man. But after a moment, he puts his guilt behind him and realizes that he has come through “the red sickness” of battle. He is now able to look forward to peace, feeling a quiet, steady manhood within himself.

Henry Fleming is a teenager with romantic notions about the glories of war. He enlists in the Union army and quickly discovers sides of himself he never knew existed. The horrors, boredom, and complete injustice of war bring out all of Henry’s worst (and occasionally best) tendencies.

Initially, Henry fears that he will run like a coward when faced with his first battle. He’s been in the army for a while now but hasn’t seen any action yet. Talking with the other men, he tries to get them to admit that they are scared as well. No one wants to say as much; they all seem perfect examples of fearless men, which leaves Henry feeling even worse about his own apprehension. Shortly before his first battle, he sees his first dead body, a gruesome corpse.

Meanwhile we meet two men, Jim Conklin or "the Tall Soldier" whom Henry has known for years, and Wilson or "the Loud Soldier." Wilson, afraid that he will die in battle, gives Henry a packet of letters to deliver to his family after the war. When the fighting finally starts, Henry doesn’t do too badly. However, when a second round of fighting begins after a brief lull, Henry is terrified and heads for the hills. Afterwards, he tries to rationalize his decision (to himself) by claiming it was simply a survival instinct. He oscillates between a feeling of superiority and one of crippling guilt.

As Henry heads back toward the sound of battle, he encounters a group of wounded men leaving the scuffle. Seeing their bloody injuries, Henry wishes that he, too, had a red badge of courage. One of the wounded men, a Tattered Soldier, keeps asking where Henry’s injury is, which of course makes our protagonist uncomfortable and nervous that he will be found out. Henry then bumps into Jim Conklin, who dies a rather horrible death in front of him. Henry runs away, encounters another group of men, gets whacked on the head with a rifle butt by a rather freaked out member of his own army, and amazingly ends up back with his own 304th regiment. To his relief, no one accuses him of running away. It seems that everyone got separated in the confusion of the battle. Seeing his head injury, the men assume a bullet grazed him.

Henry then encounters Wilson, who asks sheepishly for his packet of letters back, making Henry feel superior to him. Henry milks this superiority for all it’s worth to justify his guilt over running from battle. He loudly disses the general’s tactics and blames his strategy, rather than his regiment’s quality of fighting, for the losses suffered that day.

Yet another battle begins, but this time, Henry is ready. He fights wildly and afterwards is praised by his lieutenant for his actions. However, in a lull between battles, he and Wilson overhear a general referring to their regiment as "mule drivers" and preparing to sacrifice them at the front line in the next scuffle. Henry wants more than ever to prove himself. In the next battle, he and Wilson see the Union flag bearer fall. They rush forward, take up the flag, and rally their comrades to fight. Afterwards, the superior officers praise this courageous action. In the novel’s final battle, Henry captures the Confederate flag as well and helps lead his regiment to victory.

When the battle is over, Henry reflects on his actions. He decides to accept his earlier, cowardly actions rather than pretend they never happened. He sees himself as a real man who has survived "the red sickness of battle" (24.33).

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