"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."