The Saturday Review

The New York Times war correspondent Arthur Ruhl (1876 – 1935) reviewed a book that would later be seen as a classic piece of World War One fiction: Company K
by William March (born William Edward Campbell 1893 – 1954). Awarded both the French Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Cross, March gained an understanding of war and the frailties of human character as a member of the Fifth Marines fighting at Belleau Wood and participating in the big push during the San-Mihiel Offensive:

The outstanding virtues of William March’s work are those of complete absence of sentimentality and routine romanticism, of a dramatic gift constantly heightened and sharpened by eloquence of understatement.

Saturday Review’s Emerson G. Taylor reviewed two World War I books: Baron Fritz by Dante scholar Karl Federn, which he liked, and No Hard Feelings, by Medal of Honor recipient John Lewis Barkley, which he did not:

In this week’s other narrative of soldier’s life, John Lewis Barkley, late Corporal, K Company, 4th United States Infantry, tells the world that he and his gang were exceedingly tough ‘hombres’, that, in the Second Battle of the Marne and in the Meuse Argonne operations, he killed a vast number of bloodthirsty Germans with his trusty rifle, by serving a machine-gun, or with a pistol and a knife, that he was profusely decorated, was always in the fore-front of duty and danger, and spent a furlough in Paris with Marie…Ho-hum.