SOURCE: A review of Through the Wheat, in Kliatt, Vol. 13, No. 6, Fall, 1979, p. 5.

In the following review, the critic recommends Through the Wheat to young readers because of the book's unsentimental presentation of the experience of war.

[In Through the Wheat] we follow Private William Hicks's days in the trench warfare of World War I, along a slow hard-fought front in which each field, each wood is taken with enormous losses of men. From Hicks's viewpoint, the strategy and the purpose of the war are not visible; the war is made up of exhaustion, monotony, hunger, hot coffee, dirt, interrupted by sudden attacks and deaths. Over everything hangs the stench of the decaying dead and surrounding them are fields of yellow unharvested wheat.

There is no story line but there are episodes, of fetching water and rations, of marching and getting lost, of burying the dead. There is...