John Lewis Barkley - Scarlet Fields: The Combat Memoir of a World War I Medal of Honor Hero

MODERN WAR STUDIES

Theodore A. Wilson
General Editor

Raymond Callahan

J. Garry Clifford

Jacob W. Kipp

Allan R. Millett

Carol Reardon

Dennis Showalter

David R. Stone

Series Editors

John Lewis Barkley (1930) by Howard Chandler Christy. (Courtesy of the National World War I Museum Archives, Kansas City, Missouri)

John Lewis Barkley

Introduction and notes by Steven Trout
Afterword by Joan Barkley Wells

Published by the University Press of Kansas in association with the
National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial

2012 by the University Press of Kansas

All rights reserved

Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barkley, John Lewis. [No hard feelings!]

Scarlet fields : the combat memoir of a World War I Medal of Honor hero /
John Lewis Barkley ;

introduction and notes by Steven Trout ; afterword by Joan Barkley Wells.

p. cm. (Modern war studies)

Originally published: New York : Cosmopolitan Book Corp., 1930, with title

No hard feelings!

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7006-1842-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-7006-2019-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-7006-2060-9 (ebook)

1. Barkley, John Lewis. 2. World War, 19141918Personal narratives, American. 3. SoldiersUnited StatesBiography. 4. Medal of HonorBiography. 5. United States. Army. Division, 3rdBiography. 6. World War, 19141918Regimental historiesUnited States. 7. World War, 19141918CampaignsFrance. I. Trout, Steven, 1963 II. National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial. III. Title.

D570.9.B28 2012 940.4'1273092dc23

[B] 2012000697

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication is recycled and contains 30 percent postconsumer waste. It is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

O n 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 tanks crew had removed the vehicles 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 just 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 tankmore than 4,000 expended rounds! Weeks later, as Barkleys unit settled into occupation duty in Germany, General John J. Pershing personally awarded the private the Congressional 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, illicitly romancing mademoiselles as well as fruleins, 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 nations highest medal for valor to his chest.

Among the most decorated American soldiers of World War Iin all, he would receive six medals for bravery, each conferred by a different Allied nationBarkley 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 Tennessean 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 (1929), Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to Arms (1929), and Robert Gravess 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 soldiers of the Great War were supposed to remember their experience. Like Germanys Ernst Jnger, whose controversial memoir Storm of Steel (1921) shares many similarities with No Hard Feelings!, Barkley was something of a war loveror, 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 Warlike Richard Aldington, Siegfried Sassoon, William March, and Thomas Boydemphasized 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 the horrors of combat and mourning 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 initiative will come as something of a surprise to readers todaya precursor to Audie Murphys