A Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of Autobiography

By Guy Chapman

When A Passionate Prodigality was first published in 1933 it was hailed as one of the finest English works to have come out of the First World War. Today this memoir reads with a graphic immediacy, not merely in the descriptions of the filth and shock and carnage that characterized the struggle, but in its evocation of men at war – ‘certain soldiers who have now become a small quantity of Christian dust’.

Stylish, honest and eloquent, A Passionate Prodigality is less a book than a living voice, demonstrating an important if little remembered truth: ‘The poetry is not in the pity. To hell with your generalized pity. What the survivor remembers is not the fears he knew, the pains, but the faces and a few words of the men who were with him at the front.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
• Release date: May 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526750129

Guy Chapman

Guy Chapman was born in London in 1889 and educated at Oxford, where he trained to be a lawyer. When war was declared he joined the Royal Fusiliers and served on the Western Front, surviving a mustard gas attack; Chapman also served in World War II. Following the First World War, he worked as an editor for several publishing houses - it was through this career that he met his wife, writer Storm Jameson, whom he married in 1926. Chapman's chief literary works from the 1930s onwards analysed French political system and modern French history, and his time in war; in addition to writing seven books during his life, Chapman also served as Professor of Modern History at University of Leeds (1945-53), and later a visiting Professor at University of Pittsburgh (1948-9). Chapman died in 1972.

Reviews for A Passionate Prodigality

[steelwhisper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Chapman wrote a very matter-of-fact, very laconic account of his service during the Great War.

This book is often used by some WWI-hobbyists to prove that things weren't half-bad, that a lot was boredom, or marching to-and-fro, that the pacifists and oxbridge-veterans-turned-pacifists along with the liberals and lefties of the 1960s have it quite wrong.

I can't say I am convinced. No, not at all.

Chapman has a writing style as dry and stiff-lipped as tinder. If one is willing to overlook certain extremely distantly written passages for what they are, then yes, one might arrive at such ideas. However, I've read a few too many of these dry, distanced memoirs by now, and I've also read up on the effects of PTSD and PITS not to recognise what I am reading there. The horror makes it through quite intact when you know where to look:

"...my eye caught something white and shining. I stooped. It was the last five joints of a spine. There was nothing else, no body, no flesh..."

"...This area was strewn with dead. The dead had haversacks. The haversacks had socks...The allowance was two pairs per man...we acquired some thousands pairs of unauthorized socks..."

"...One private ran across No-Man's-Land with an apron full of bombs, drew the pin of one, slung the whole lot into the trench and jumped in on top of them..."

"...the privates were nearly all children, tired, hardly able to drag their laden shoulders after their aching legs. Here and there an exhausted boy trudged along with tears coursing down his face..."

"...and there is a 'still' of the grey puzzled face of a boy, in the arms of two pals, who has been shot through the testicles, the scrotum swollen to the size of a polo ball..."

Chapman's voice is so far detached that it sounds as if he is retelling a tale he read in a book in his early childhood, yet what he tells is quite often so gruesome, you--the reader--groan, and the very fact of this detachment alone makes this quite the reverse of what some people wish to make out of it, for he also peppers his account with at times quite vicious attacks on the upper echelons and their stupidity. Chapman was in a perfect position to observe exactly this, as he served for a long time as adjutant and intermediary between the NCOs and the general staff--not quite here and not quite there. As a consequence he could directly observe the blunders and arrogances committed and he had no compunction mentioning these in the very same acerbic, dry tone.

This is one of the more important accounts of this war.