Scarlet Fields

The Combat Memoir of a World War I Medal of Honor Hero

John Lewis Barkley

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780700620609
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

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 the eyes of a soldier whose exploits rivaled those of Sergeant York. A reconnaissance man and sniper, Barkley served in Company K of the 4th Infantry Regiment, a unit that participated in almost every major American battle. The York-like episode that earned Barkley his Congressional Medal of Honor occurred on October 7, 1918, when he climbed into an abandoned French tank and singlehandedly held off an advancing German force, killing hundreds of enemy soldiers. But Barkley's memoir abounds with other memorable moments and vignettes, all in the words of a soldier who witnessed war's dangers and degradations but was not at all fazed by them. Unlike other writers identified with the "Lost Generation, " he relished combat and made no apology for having dispatched scores of enemy soldiers; yet he was as much an innocent abroad as a killing machine, as witnessed by second thoughts over his sniper's role, or by his determination to protect a youthful German prisoner from American soldiers eager for retribution. This Missouri backwoodsman and sharpshooter was also a bit of a troublemaker who smuggled liquor into camp, avoided promotions like the plague, and had a soft heart for mademoiselles and frauleins alike. In his valuable introduction to this stirring memoir, Steven Trout helps readers to better grasp the historical context and significance of this singular hero's tale from one of our most courageous doughboys. Both haunting and heartfelt, inspiring and entertaining, Scarlet Fields is a long overlooked gem that opens a new window on our nation's experience in World War I and brings back to life a bygone era.

1

Training in Kansas

The old postmaster shook his head. He was sympathetic but firm. “It’s no use, Johnny,” he said. “There’s no place in the army for a fellow who stutters as badly as you do.”

There it was again! It began to look as if I wasn’t even worth killing. The postmaster, who happened to be the recruiting officer in our little Missouri town, had known me all my life. He hadn’t even given me a chance to get off the speech I’d carefully rehearsed.

I gulped down the lump in my throat. Everybody around me was going crazy about the war. I was under age—eighteen—but with as bad a case of war fever as the next fellow. Worse, probably. Because when America went into the war I’d made up my mind that for once I was going to do the same thing everybody else was doing. Ever since I’d learned to talk—or tried to learn—my stuttering had made a barrier between me and other people.

It hit me harder, too, because that morning word had come that one of our neighbor boys had enlisted and I’d heard my father say he “guessed the Barkleys were petering out.” From Revolutionary days on, whenever America got into trouble there’d always been a Barkley in the fight.

I might have expected just what had happened. During the border troubles with Mexico I’d tried to get by a hard-boiled regular-army sergeant who was recruiting in Warrensburg. He’d turned me down cold because of that damned stuttering.

But Holden was my hometown, and the recruiting agent wasn’t hard-boiled. I thought his having known me all my life might make a difference. Also, I hoped having been away to school would give me a chance to make him think my stuttering had improved. That was why I’d practiced up the speech.

And he hadn’t even let me use it. It seemed to me I was up against a stone wall, and I got stubborn about it. My brother Doc and I both registered for the draft, but it was just a formality. He had never entirely recovered from a serious operation. We knew he’d be thrown out on the physical examination. And with two experiences to go by, it was easy to see what would happen to me.

Just the same I wasn’t going to give up until there was nothing else to do. The Draft Board would be strangers. Not old friends like the postmaster, and not hard-boiled sergeants. I might be able to bluff them. And slim as the chance was, still I had a better chance than my brother. So when the summons came for him I kept after my father until I got him to use his influence and have my name substituted for Doc’s.

I was pretty nervous when my turn before the Draft Board came. It started off all right. Physical examination, perfect. Eyesight and hearing, unusually good. But all the time they kept asking me questions that had to be answered. They got me rattled. After a while the words wouldn’t even start to come out.

It was plain from the doctors’ faces what they were thinking. Still I got up nerve enough to ask one of them who looked sympathetic if he thought I’d pass.

“Hell, no!” he said. “They’ll never let you get anywhere.” But he got up and went into the next room, and I could hear him talking to another doctor in there.

That was what saved me.

“God damn it!” the second doctor roared. “We’re not picking orators. We’re picking fighting men!” But even after my notice came to report at Camp Funston I still thought that when I got there and they heard me talk, they’d probably decide it had been a mistake and send me home again.

I didn’t have many good-bys to say. There were my dogs, and my old horse (Charley), and my family, and a girl. She was the first one I’d known who didn’t laugh at my stuttering and she seemed pretty wonderful to me.

I hadn’t any close friends. It’s so much easier to go out to the woods with a gun and a couple of dogs than to try to make friends with people, at the risk of making a fool of yourself instead, every time you open your mouth. I’d spent more days alone in the woods than I ever had at school and a good many nights. Out there it was easy to forget that everybody laughed at me when I tried to talk.

Just before leaving for camp I got really engaged to my girl, with a ring and everything. My family thought she was fine, and I certainly felt grown up and excited about it. It was the most important thing that had ever happened to me. Except getting in the army.

It was the middle of September when we left for Camp Funston, and it was a mixed-up crowd we found on the troop train. There were several free-for-all fights before we got shaken down. I didn’t mind those—I was used to fighting.

I can’t remember when I found out that there’s only one way to make a boy stop laughing at you. That’s to fight him. And since I’d always been undersized, I’d had to learn how to move quick and think fast to keep from being beaten. I saw now that it had been darned good training. Also that I was going to have plenty of use for it long before we got to France.

It was at the end of one of those fights on the train that I met Tom O’Leary. I never got a word out of Tom about what he was doing out there in Kansas. He was four or five years older than I, and he came from Chicago. That’s all he ever told me. But he’d evidently been hoboing in our part of the country when the draft caught up with him, and I always suspected that he’d found Chicago unhealthy for some good and sufficient reason.

Whatever was back of Tom’s being there, he was all right. I’d have liked him anyway, even if it hadn’t been for the special bond between us. We were the only men on the train who didn’t have any decent clothes! Tom couldn’t help it. He didn’t own any except those he had on. But I was the victim of a recruiting sergeant in Holden who thought he had a sense of humor. It certainly shows how green I was.

The sergeant was very kind and thoughtful. He called me in the day before we were to leave and gave me a lot of good advice. Some of it was real, but most of it wasn’t. Among the other things he told me not to take any of my ordinary clothes along. He said it was much better just to wear my farm overalls, since drill would begin at once and it might be days before we’d get uniforms.

I felt like a fool on the train, but after I found Tom it wasn’t quite so bad. He looked worse than I did. The thing we minded most was being left out when the train stopped at a station and a lot of pretty girls crowded around with candy and fruit. They never knew we were there.

But one time it happened that we had all the luck. We’d stopped at a small town, and Tom and I didn’t even wait to be overlooked when the girls started passing out their stuff. Tom was a really good acrobat and we amused ourselves by turning hand-springs on a plot of grass near the station.

We noticed a tall old man with a gray mustache and chin whiskers who’d been watching our stunts. After a while he came over and spoke to us.

“I am a veteran of the War between the States,” he said. “I am glad to meet two real soldiers. I think I know a soldier when I see one.”

We weren’t sure what we were supposed to say to that, but he didn’t wait for us to answer.

“There’s one thing I learned in the hottest battle of my experience,” he went on. “I’d like to pass it along to you. If you’re ever caught under fire, or expect to be, fan out and stay that way.… If you gang together, or if you let the others crowd up on you, the grape-shot will get you for sure!”

We didn’t find any grape-shot in France, but we found plenty of machine-gun bullets, and the old man’s advice was just as good for one as for the other. I never saw a huddled group of our dead who’d paid the price for not fanning out that I didn’t wish they’d been with us that day to hear the old man’s warning.

Camp Funston was a dismal place—and hot that September morning when our train pulled in.¹

Tom and I were assigned to Company G, 356th Infantry, a part of the Eighty-Ninth Division, which was just being built up.² They started us out at once on close order drill and calisthenics, and they gave it to us on a fourteen-hour-a-day schedule. It was pretty rough on new men, but Tom and I were tougher than a good many of them and in better condition.

I don’t know where Tom got his endurance, but it’s easy to see where mine came from. You can’t spend all the time I had in hunting and fishing, in addition to helping with the work on a thousand-acre farm, and not come out of it with pretty good muscles and a lot of endurance.

As a matter of fact I didn’t mind the drilling half as much as I did the monotony. It was a long time before we were really equipped, and it’s hard to feel like a soldier unless you’re fitted out like one.

We had other troubles too. The division that had trained before us had been gone long enough for the weeds to grow chest-high on the drill grounds, and the weeds were full of dust and redbugs.³ But we drilled in them just the same until we’d knocked the weeds down and carried the redbugs off in our skins. That’s something that wouldn’t have happened if our officers hadn’t been almost as inexperienced as we were.

The worst trouble of all was the sickness that broke out in camp. Measles, mumps, chickenpox, and a little of everything else. It got so that as soon as they hauled down one quarantine flag they ran up another one in its place.

But all along we were really learning the game of soldiering. That goes for officers and non-commissioned officers as well as for the men. We were all new together, except for a few old regulars about the camp, and we took them for models. We began to wear our clothes differently. It takes time to get the knack of wearing a uniform and making it look as if it belonged to you. Our talk was changing too. It was getting more like the regulars’ talk.

Tom and I were “spoony” soldiers. That is, we were proud of looking like soldiers, and we’d have got on pretty well if we hadn’t been too fond of excitement. When the monotony began to get on our nerves we had to think up some devilment to break it.

Once I got caught throwing out all the shoes I could find in my bunkhouse. They gave me an extra week’s kitchen police duty, which I didn’t mind; it meant enough to eat for the first time in several weeks. But I tried to help out some of the other boys by stealing things for them from the kitchen and got caught at that too. So they sent me back to drilling again.

All this time Tom and I stuck close together. He was about my size and build. He was quiet and soft-spoken enough when things suited him, but when they didn’t … I’ll bet he could have licked a cage full of wildcats.

The captain of our company was a parade-ground soldier. He hadn’t much use for the runts—that’s what he called the smaller men. Tom and I were runts and troublesome to boot, so naturally the captain didn’t have many kind words for us. But the top sergeant was different. He was an old regular by the name of Meyerly. He called us “hell-raisers,” always kept an eye on us, and let it go at that.

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas that I woke up one morning feeling pretty queer. Before I knew what was happening to me I’d been dumped into a pest camp with a nice case of measles. My tentmate had mumps, so I took that on too.

There were so many of us sick that we got mighty little attention. And the lieutenant who had charge of our particular part of the camp didn’t seem to think it made much difference whether we had fire or bedclothes or food.

Finally a major doctor came around, with the Lieutenant and a nurse, to look us over. Sick as I was, I could see that he was excited.

And when they went on to the next tent, and found one of the boys in there dead, he went wild. It was hard to believe he was the same soft-voiced, gentle man who’d just finished examining me.

A month in the guardhouse wouldn’t have been half as bad as the tongue-lashing that lieutenant got.

Shortly after the doctor’s visit an ambulance came and took us all to the hospital at Fort Riley. We were made comfortable there, but by that time I was too sick to care.

It was just the time when influenza was sweeping the camp, and the men were dying like flies.⁴ I knew that too. The hospital was so crowded that the bunks were only a few inches apart, and there was a Mexican in the one next to mine. He was pretty sick, but he never complained, and I got to like him.

I woke up one night thinking someone was trying to pull me out of bed. It was the Mexican. He was hanging over the edge of his own bunk and he had my left wrist in a death grip. His nose had been bleeding, and his bed was in a mess. I called the orderly, and they took him away.

I was worse after that. I woke up another time to find them putting a screen around my bed. Any soldier will tell you what that means.

However, I fooled the doctors and myself. By the middle of January I was back in camp again, so weak that I was marked quarters and did not have to go on duty. When my strength began to come back Tom took me in hand to help me catch up on drill, but we didn’t get far with that. A call came from headquarters for a detail of men to go from each company to a scout and sniper school at Fort Riley.

I was surprised when I found my name among the eight selected from our company. I knew they were picking mostly college men—football players or athletes of some kind. It came out later that Meyerly had asked them to try me out.

I was the last of our bunch to go befo...