Crane's famous novel of the Civil War captures one of the paradoxes at the heart of the warrior's experience.  The brute violence of the battlefield seems to reduce men to so many amoral objects, a process memorably described by Simone Weil in her reading of the Iliad.  Yet through their endurance of that violence, men often emerge from the experience of war morally transformed.  The battlefield then becomes the place where man's dignity is, at one and the same time, supremely degraded and supremely exalted.