Through the Wheat: A Novel, by Thomas Boyd

In Through the Wheat: A Novel, by Thomas Boyd (1923) William Hicks enrolls in the army for an adventure on the western front in France.  The novel begins as what one might describe as a typical wartime platoon story: the platoon is populated with men from various parts of America.  The commanding office is a former English professor from Texas.  Hicks becomes good friends with a braggart of a Mississippi boy named Pugh.  They have names and backgrounds and personalities.  At first there is mainly a lot of inaction, waiting, which upsets the soldiers, who have come to France to fight the Germans.  As the story progresses from one battle to the next, the names and personalities fall away, either because solders are killed or wounded or because in the end the brutality of the battles makes men forget who they are and who their fellow soldiers are.  In the end, at least for Hicks, they stop caring about whether they are living or dead.

This novel doesn’t have great pretensions.  It’s not sentimental.  It doesn’t claim to be about more that its one subject: war, the first world war, and the terrific battles in France. It focuses tightly on Hicks and his experiences.  Its descriptions of battle are vivid and intense, but the language is not lush.  It’s spare and precise and provides a specific sense of geographical place even for readers who don’t know where the place is.  Hicks, who seems likable enough in the beginning, gradually descends to a state of near madness.  Even his comrades in battle recognize his madness.  Several scenes describing gas attacks make clear how terrible such attacks were.

Boyd gives only basic information about the war.  We learn about the battles the soldiers engage in from road signs or overheard comments from fellow soldiers or officers.  He gives us no sense of battle strategy, of the goals of the war.  He simply tells the story from the level of the men in the trenches—the chaos and disorder, the uncertainty, the bombardment of the allied soldiers, the machine gun fire, the unexpected bullets that come out of nowhere, the forfeiture of individual will to the commands that send them into battle. 

The title comes from the wheat fields through which Hicks and his platoon move towards the German front line. This is one of the best novels about war and battles I’ve encountered.