Scarlet Fields: The Combat Memoir of a World War I Medal of Honor Hero

The train was packed with men. Men lying as still as if they were already dead. Men shaking with pain. One man raving, jabbering, yelling, in delirium. Everywhere bandages . . . bandages . . . bandages . . . and blood.

Those words describe the moment when Private John Lewis Barkley first grasped the grim reality of the war he had entered. The rest of Barkley’s memoir, first published in 1930 as No Hard Feelings and long out of print, provides a vivid ground-level look at World War I through...