"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."