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 I'd made up my mind that for once I was going to do the same thing everybody else was doing."

"Ever since I'd 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 I'd heard my father say he "guessed the Barkleys were petering out." From Revolutionary days on, whenever America got into trouble there'd always been a Barkley in on the fight."

"Early in April we drew extra equipment. At one o'clock 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 didn't let us up from below decks until two in the afternoon. It was a good thing for the Kaiser he couldn't 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 didn't know how many of that company would never see America again. As for me I wasn't very much bothered by what was ahead of me. I was only nineteen and I'd never really been away from home before. I couldn't think about anything but the distance was getting greater every minute between me and the people in Missouri."

"Sometime in May we began to have a feeling that our days of preparation were nearly over. We'd find officers standing around talking to each other in low voices, or looking at maps and papers. There was a feeling of strain in the air. And one day the orders came through. We were to be loaded at once onto trucks and sent back to our companies. It broke me up to say good-by to Jeanne. She was a good kid. And knowing her had meant a lot to me. She didn't make it any easier. She cried and clung to me. I couldn't do a thing to comfort her. She'd said good-by to five French boys, and they'd all been killed. "All!" she kept saying. "All gone!" I did the best I could. I kissed her; I tried to make her understand that I was promising to come back as soon as the war was over. She lifted her head from my shoulder when I said that, and looked back at me. The tears were still running down her cheeks. "Non... non... non! They nevair come back!" she cried. Then she was gone. I never saw her again."

"That afternoon we took Le Charmel. There weren't many of us left."

"I didn't like those intervals between fighting. They gave me too much time to think. And my thoughts were getting pretty black."

"A tall officer mounted a little platform that had been set up to our front. I'd never seen him before, but I knew him at once. It was "Black Jack"- General Pershing. I heard him say something about decorating as brave soldiers as the world has ever known- but that was all I could get. It wasn't that I couldn't hear. I had a ringside seat as far as hearing was concerned. But I couldn't get used to standing up there with a bunch of generals and colonels, while three divisions stood at attention behind me. I hoped they'd make it snappy."

"At last General Pershing finished his speech and climbed down from his platform. He came straight toward Lieutenant Hays. I kept my eyes glued to the front, but I knew what he was doing. He stopped before the lieutenant, plopped his heels, and did something with his hands. I heard him speak to the lieutenant. Then he was standing in front of me. He saluted, and I almost snapped my right arm off in answering. But I did it automatically. My head had about quit functioning. The general stepped up close to me, did something with the front of my blouse- and a pin went straight through the blouse into the flesh on my chest! He shook hands with me and congratulated me, and said something about a "fellow Missourian." Then he knocked his heels together, gave a low, snappy salute, sidestepped to the right, and began decorating the next fellow."

"General Sladen told me then that I could stand at ease, and I was altogether more comfortable physically than I'd been before. But I was still upset in my mind. I kept thinking how awful it would be if there'd been some mistake, and they'd picked out the wrong fellow to decorate. I still didn't know what it was General Pershing had pinned on me, so as soon as I dared I squinted alng my nose. I couldn't see anything but a little blue ribbon with white stars. I knew that the medal beneath it was the Congressional Medal of Honor. There'd been two of those in our family before. The first one had been given to a major-general who was related to my mother's family."

"When the decorating part of the ceremony was over they marched us around and placed us on the reviewing line behind General Pershing. That review was the grandest sight I've ever seen. The First Division went by with its scarlet "One." The Second with its Indian Head. Jesse had been given the D.S.C. and was somewhere in the reviewing line, and i wondered what he thought of that head. Last came our own Third Division, with its blue and white bars. Infantry, line after line, poured past us, machine-guns, engineer and special troops- clicking like a machine. Caterpillar tractors kicking up the dirt. Seventy-fives traveling in a cloud of dust. I looked at General Pershing. It seemed to me he was growing taller and straighter all the time. He'd rare up on his shoes, as he watched, then come down on his heels again. He was a soldier from the ground up! And I didn't blame him for being proud of our outfits that day. When I looked back at the lines of men, marching and marching past us, at the flags and the artillery and the horses, I felt cold chills running over me. I felt stirred up and warlike inside. I was almost sorry the war was over."

"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."

"On the afternoon of October 7, 1918, while serving as a reconnaissance observer far ahead of American lines near Cunel, France, Private John Lewis Barkley climbed into an abandoned French tank and single-handedly held off a German force of perhaps several hundred men as it advanced toward positions held by the American Third Division. Because the tank's crew had removed the vehicle's cannon, Barkley armed himself with a captured German light machine gun, which he pointed through a dangerously wide aperture in the turret. Deafened by the sound of his weapon, which he fired until the gun became super-heated, and surrounded by ricocheting bullets, some of which landed inside the tank, Barkley probably killed more than a hundred enemy soldiers and completely disrupted the Germans' advance. Even an enemy 77mm cannon, which targeted the tank from ust a few hundred yards away, could not drive Private Barkley from his personal fortress. He held off one wave of attackers, then another. Finally, after enemy bullets and stick grenades stopped striking the tank and a detachment of American troops appeared on the scene, he slipped away to rejoin his unit. He told no one what he had done."

"However, several American soldiers witnessed the exploit; one of them even counted (or at least estimated) the number of empty machine-gun cartridges piled up inside the tank- more than 4,000 expended rounds! Weeks later, as Barkley's unit settled into occupation duty in Germany, General John J. Pershing personally awarded the private the Medal of Honor. When summoned before the supreme commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), Barkley, a notorious troublemaker, was certain that he was about to be court-martialed and sent to Leavenworth. He had, after all, mastered the art of smuggling liquor into camp, going AWOL, illictly romancing mademoiselles as well as fräuleins, and engaging in just enough mischief to avoid being promoted to the rank of sergeant. No one was more surprised than this rowdy enlisted man from the Show-Me State when Pershing, a fellow Missourian, pinned the nation's highest medal for valor to his chest."

"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, Barkley's book should have been a hit. However, reviews of No Hard Feelings! were small in number and mixed in their appraisal, not because Barkley's 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 Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), Ernest Hemingway's 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."

"Unlike the authors of these now-familiar narratives, Barkley sometimes relished combat, and he made no apology for having dispatched scores of enemy soldiers. in short, his perspective did not line up with accepted wisdom (at least among artists and intellectuals) about how the soldiers of the Great War were supposed to remember their experience. Like Germany's Ernst Jünger, whose controversial memoir Storm of Steel (1921) shares many similarities with No Hard Feelings!, Barkley was something of a war lover- or, as the dust jacket for the first edition of his memoir put it, one of those "warriors... who fight and like it." Other literary commentators on the Great War- like Richard Aldington, Siegfried Sassoon, William March, and Thomas Boyd- emphasized the powerlessness of soldiers on the modern battlefield, as poison gas, high explosives, and machine guns reduced battle to a senseless lottery. In contrast, while acknowledging lost comrades, Barkley celebrated toughness and aggression. And based on his own experience, he remained convinced that individual effort had made a difference even in this most industrialized and seemingly impersonal of conflicts. His chronicle of battlefield endurance and will come as something of a surprise to readers today- a precursor to Audie Murphy's To Hell and Back (1949), set during a war that if we are to believe the canonical literature offered only impersonal carnage."