I didnt like those intervals between fighting. They gave me too much t — John L. Barkley

"Everybody around me was going crazy about the war. I was under age- eighteen- but with as bad a case of war fever as the next fellow. Worse, probably. Because when America went into the war Id made up my mind that for once I was going to do the same thing everybody else was doing."

"Ever since Id learned to talk- or tried to learn- my stuttering had made a barrier between me and other people. It hit me harder, too, because that morning word had come that one of our neighbor boys had enlisted and Id heard my father say he "guessed the Barkleys were petering out." From Revolutionary days on, whenever America got into trouble thered always been a Barkley in on the fight."

"That afternoon we took Le Charmel. There werent many of us left."

"Pfc. Barkley, who was stationed in an observation post half a kilometer from the German line, on his own initiative repaired a captured enemy machine gun and mounted it in a disabled French tank near his post. Shortly afterward, when the enemy launched a counterattack against our forces, Pfc. Barkley got into the tank, waited under the hostile barrage until the enemy line was abreast of him and then opened fire, completely breaking up the counterattack and killing and wounding a large number of the enemy. Five minutes later an enemy 77-millimeter gun opened fire on the tank point-blank. One shell struck the drive wheel of the tank, but this soldier nevertheless remained in the tank and after the barrage ceased broke up a second enemy counterattack, thereby enabling our forces to gain and hold Hill 25."

"Among the most decorated American soldiers of World War I- in all, he would receive six medals for bravery, each conferred by a different Allied nation- Barkley was also a talented storyteller. In 1930, with the help of a friend who served as an unacknowledged collaborator, and with the assistance of several professional wordsmiths at a New York publishing house, he recounted his wartime adventures, which reached their climax in the action for which he received the Congressional Medal of Honor, in a vivid memoir titled No Hard Feelings! (here reprinted as Scarlet Fields). With its matter-of-fact, even self-deprecating description of heroics no less impressive than those of Alvin York, the legendary Tennesseean later played on screen by Gary Cooper, or Charles Whittlesey, the leader of the famed Lost Battalion, Barkleys book should have been a hit. However, reviews of No Hard Feelings! were small in number and mixed in their appraisal, not because Barkleys memoir was poorly written or insincere, but because its vision of war experience perhaps reached the public too late, at the tail end of a wave of books such as Erich Maria Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Robert Graves Good-Bye to All That (1929), that for a time set the tone for literature about the Great War."

"Early in April we drew extra equipment. At one oclock the next morning we were waked up and ordered to pack. Then we stood around until nine when we were marched up the gangplanks, and they didnt let us up from below decks until two in the afternoon. It was a good thing for the Kaiser he couldnt hear what we had to say about him by that time. When at last we got up on deck the shoreline was just a low cloud on the horizon. It was lucky for us that we didnt know how many of that company would never see America again. As for me I wasnt very much bothered by what was ahead of me. I was only nineteen and Id never really been away from home before. I couldnt think about anything but the distance was getting greater every minute between me and the people in Missouri."