Marginalia, no.264

I did not see any sign among the fighting men, whether wounded or unwounded, of the very complicated emotions assigned to their kind by some of the realistic modern novelists who have written about battles.

~ Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

Stephen Crane must have been among the “realistic modern novelists” Roosevelt intended: The Red Badge of Courage was published three years before the war with Spain. Roosevelt never mentions him, but Crane traveled as a correspondent with the regiment in Cuba. In a story filed from Siboney on June 24, 1898, Crane recounts the Rough Riders’ first battle with the Spanish. Afterwards, one of his fellow correspondents – mortally wounded – asks Crane to file his dispatches for him. How did this fit a novelist’s idea of “complicated emotions” under fire? “I immediately decided that he was doomed,” says Crane. “No man could be so sublime in detail concerning the trade of journalism and not die.”

Marginalia, no.263

We found all our dead and all the badly wounded. Around one of the latter, the big, hideous land crabs had gathered in a gruesome ring…

~ Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders

Amelia Earhart, some guess, was eaten by crabs. Honey Ryder in Ian Fleming’s Dr. No was lucky enough to escape that fate. Guy Smith wrote novels about an invasion of Britain by hungry crustaceans. Roger Corman directed a 1957 movie (Attack of the Crab Monsters) about run-of-the-mill crabs that had marinated in atomic fallout from Bikini Atoll and turned into giant man-eaters. We dislike this particular idea so much that we call other things that eat away at us by the same name. Cancer is from the Latin, and carcinoma from the Greek, for crab.