"Brings home, as do few war stories, one of the hundreds of thousands of little episodes which make up this war. . . . It might be held up alongside Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage."--New York Times
"Will be part of the abiding literature of this war."--The New Republic
"Terse, faithful, moving."--The New Yorker
"Hersey has produced one of the good pieces of writing which must emerge from this war."--The Saturday Review of Literature
"Hersey is skillful in communicating what he saw and felt, and his skill gains strength from the fact that he describes not a brilliant action, but an obscure one which was successful in a qualified and unspectacular way, gaining its ends only after some things had first gone wrong. His story is successfully, in fact, what it claims to be: a reality of war, seen at the closest of quarters."--Manchester Guardian