[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, however, a kind of progression, for in the end numbness settles on Hicks; he is moving but not alive. The author is not making an ideological point about World War I, and perhaps not even about war, but he presents, in detail, the sensations of being in a war.

It is very effective; for young people, the details are an antidote to abstract ideas of what war is like.

A postscript by the editor of this series tells us that Boyd fought in World War I and died in 1935, aged 36. It also quotes a long appreciative review by F. Scott Fitzgerald, written when the novel appeared in 1923.

Additional coverage of Boyd's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 111, 183; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 9; Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Vol. 16.