THE ANATOMY OF WAR
Through the Wheat. By Thomas Boyd. 12mo. 266 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.75.
MR THOMAS BOYD'S Through the Wheat is much less brilliant than Three Soldiers, but I believe that it is nearly as important. Mr Dos Passos rendered one thing admirably: the nightmare oppression of the army, the ruin by war of certain characters which might under normal conditions have proved decent and useful. But Mr Boyd's theme is something different: the adventures of the man who does not break down. His Sergeant Hicks is a hero: he endures, he accepts authority, he fights boldly. But he is a hero tout autrement intéressant than that other hero Sergeant Empey. His endurance is half helpless exhaustion, his obedience is deeply tinctured with bitterness, and his bravery becomes finally an utter numbness beyond horror and beyond pain. This is probably the only candid account on record of what it meant to be a hero in the Marines, and a valuable document on the ordinary human virtues in reaction to the conditions of modern warfare.
Yet in tone Through the Wheat resembles Three Soldiers and most other sincere pictures of modern war. It is a tone which, I should think, if persisted in, should ultimately discourage humanity with war altogether. One finds it first in its characteristic coolness after the Napoleonic wars. Not that there had ever been lacking in European literature a realistic attitude toward war: Homer describes its ignominies as well as its glories; Aristophanes never tired of making fun of it, and Pindar writes, "Γλυκύ άπείροιοι πόλεμος," (war is sweet to those who have never tried it); The Roman Empire, to be sure, dignified its conquests with a noble ideal (parcere subjectis et debellare superbos); but by the chaos of the Middle Ages common sense was revolted again and great men from Dante to Kant devoted much thought to European peace: the religious wars provoked the satire of Erasmus and Grotius' foundations of international law, and as comment on the War of the Spanish Succession you had Swift's pamphlet on The Conduct of the Allies and Southey's poem about little Peterkin finding the skull from the
