What the "Boys" Did Over There By "Themselves" — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Editor's Deliberate Hand

The preface by Henry L. Fox is unusually candid about the book's construction. Fox writes that the stories were collected from soldiers and officers of the Allied Forces, and that whenever possible the narrators wrote their own accounts. He admits that the result may lack polish, but he trusts that readers prefer "the truth unabridged" over a story "garbled by editorial tinkering." This editorial stance is visible in the excerpts: the prose is uneven, with abrupt shifts in tone and detail. For instance, Oxton's narrative moves from the bureaucratic chaos of equipment issue to the sensory shock of Boulogne's "peculiar odor" on the march to camp. The editor's presence is felt mainly in the selection and arrangement of stories, not in smoothing their rough surfaces.

The Weight of Kit and Mud

Across the excerpts, the physical experience of war is dominated not by enemy fire but by the environment and logistics. Oxton describes digging a shallow hole to sleep in, noting that because of his height he had to make his "at least six feet in length." He envies the short bugler who needed a much smaller hole. The same narrator recalls that army blankets were "generally conspicuous by their absence," and that tents seemed to have been "just thrown up," offering no shelter from the damp ground. These details—the mud, the cold, the ill-fitting gear—recur in the table of contents titles such as "Life in the Trenches" and "Hospital Experience." The catalog subject "Personal narratives" is thus filled with the mundane, repetitive labor of staying alive and mobile in a war that was as much about endurance as about fighting.

Voice and Authenticity in the Narratives

The excerpts preserve the individual voices of the soldiers, often with colloquial phrasing and dark humor. Oxton refers to heavy artillery shells as "heavies" and notes that they "became far too familiar with us." He describes the work of repairing shelters after a "Jack Johnson"—a slang term for a large German shell—had obliterated them. The dedication page addresses "The Boys" who died, and the editor's preface thanks specific veterans by name and service number, lending an air of documentary specificity. Yet the book's claim to authenticity is complicated by the fact that Fox edited the collection; the extent of his intervention is unclear. The excerpts show no obvious rewriting, but the very act of selecting and ordering these twenty-nine stories imposes a narrative arc that the individual soldiers may not have intended.

Readers approaching this collection should expect not a continuous history but a series of discrete, often fragmentary memories. The book rewards attention to the small details—the feel of a wet greatcoat, the sound of a bugler at dawn—that accumulate into a portrait of war as a physical and bureaucratic ordeal. Because the excerpts are incomplete, it is impossible to judge how representative they are of the whole, but the editor's stated principles and the surviving narratives suggest a work that values immediacy over coherence.