Her Privates We

By Frederic Manning

First published privately in 1929 as The Middle Parts of Fortune, Her Privates We is the novel of the Battle of the Somme told from the perspective of Bourne, an ordinary private. A raw and shockingly honest portrait of men engaged in war, 'that peculiarly human activity', the original edition was subject to 'prunings and excisions' because the bluntness of language was thought to make the book unfit for public distribution. This edition restores them.

An undisputed classic of war writing and a lasting tribute to all who participated in the war, Her Privates We was originally published as written by 'Private 19022'. Championed by Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot and TE Lawrence, it has become recognised as a classic in the seventy years since its first publication. Now republished, with an introduction by William Boyd, it will again amaze a new generation of readers with its depiction of the horror, the ordinariness and the humanity of war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Release date: Sep 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847657640

Frederic Manning

Frederic Manning was born in Sydney, Australia in 1882. He moved to England in 1903 where he pursued a literary career, reviewing and writing poetry. He enlisted in 1915 in the Shropshire Light Infantry and went to France in 1916 as 'Private 19022.' The Shropshires saw heavy fighting on the Somme and Manning's four months there provided the background to Her Privates We. He died in 1935.

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Frederic Manning was born in Sydney, Australia in 1882. He moved to England in 1903 where he pursued a literary career, reviewing and writing poetry. He enlisted in 1915 in the Shropshire Light Infantry and went to France in August 1916 as ‘Private 19022’. The Shropshires saw heavy fighting on the Somme and Manning’s four months there provided the background for Her Privates We. He died in 1935.

Published in a limited edition in 1929 under the title The Middle Parts of Fortune, his novel appeared in an expurgated edition in 1930 as Her Privates We, credited pseudonymously to ‘Private 19022’.

This unexpurgated and unabridged edition is published with an introduction by William Boyd who considers Her Privates We to be ‘the finest novel to have come out of the First World War’.

‘The finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read. I read it over once each year to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them’ Ernest Hemingway

Her Privates We

FREDERIC MANNING

with an Introduction by William Boyd

On fortune’s cap we are not the very button. …

Then you live about her waist, or in the middle

of her favours? … ’Faith, her privates we.

SHAKESPEARE

A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

The right of Frederic Manning to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Introduction copyright © 1999 William Boyd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published in a limited edition in 1929 as

The Middle Parts of Fortune

Published in an expurgated version in 1930 as Her Privates We

First published in this edition in 2013 by Serpent’s Tail First published in this unexpurgated version in 1999 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3A Exmouth House

Pine Street

London EC1R 0JH

www.serpentstail.com

ISBN 978 1 84668 787 7

eISBN 978 1 84765 764 0

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Peter Davies

who made me write it

Author’s Prefatory Note

While the following pages are a record of experience on the Somme and Ancre fronts, with an interval behind the lines, during the latter half of the year 1916; and the events described in it actually happened; the characters are fictitious. It is true that in recording the conversations of the men I seemed at times to hear the voices of ghosts. Their judgments were necessarily partial and prejudiced; but prejudices and partialities provide most of the driving power of life. It is better to allow them to cancel each other, than attempt to strike an average between them. Averages are too colourless, indeed too abstract in every way, to represent concrete experience. I have drawn no portraits; and my concern has been mainly with the anonymous ranks, whose opinion, often mere surmise and ill-informed, but real and true for them, I have tried to represent faithfully.

War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime. That raises a moral question, the kind of problem with which the present age is disinclined to deal. Perhaps some future attempt to provide a solution for it may prove to be even more astonishing than the last.

[1929]

Introduction by William Boyd

Two brief quotations will serve as the best introduction to this unique and extraordinary novel, the finest novel, in my opinion, to have come out of the First World War. The scene takes place in the reserve lines in the Somme valley in northern France during the late summer of 1916. A corporal is dressing-down the men in his section.

‘ You shut your blasted mouth, see! said the exasperated Corporal Hamley, stooping as he entered the tent, the lift of his head, with chin thrust forward as he stooped, giving him a more desperately aggressive appearance. An’ you let me ’ear you talkin’ on parade again with an officer present and you’ll be on the bloody mat quick. See? You miserable begger, you! A bloody cow like you’s sufficient to demoralize a whole muckin’ Army Corps. Got it? Get those buzzers out, and do some bloody work for a change.’

Nothing too unusual here: standard NCO aggression, an attempt to render the colloquial nature of the speech by dropping the odd consonant, perhaps a hint of a more refined sensibility present in the way Corporal Hamley’s entry into the tent is so precisely described. But now here is the same passage as it was originally written and as it was originally meant to be read.

‘ You shut your blasted mouth, see! said the exasperated Corporal Hamley, stooping as he entered the tent, the lift of his head, with chin thrust forward as he stooped, giving him a more desperately aggressive appearance, An’ you let me ’ear you talkin’ on parade again with an officer present and you’ll be on the bloody mat, quick. See? You miserable bugger you! A bloody cunt like you’s sufficient to demoralise a whole fuckin’ Army Corps. Got it? Get those buzzers out, and do some bloody work, for a change.’

It is remarkable the change wrought by the good old Anglo-Saxon demotic of ‘bugger’, ‘cunt’ and ‘fuckin". What was familiar, stereotypical, almost parodic, becomes suddenly real – the whole situation charged and violent. And in its wider context – the First World War – a whole new resonance emerges. Those monochrome images we know so well – Tommies puffing on their fags, troops marching through French villages, the lunar landscape of no man’s land – suddenly have a different import. Suddenly, a veil is stripped away. These are real men, real soldiers – and all soldiers swear, vilely, constantly. This is a world where corporals call their men ‘cunts’.

Her Privates We was not the title chosen for the first, unexpurgated edition of this novel, which was privately printed and issued in an impression of some 600 copies, and is what you will read here. Frederic Manning called this version of his book The Middle Parts of Fortune, changing the title for the later, bowdlerised, public version. And, even though we have had the uncensored novel for some three decades now, the book’s fame and reputation have always been associated with the second title. Both titles, in fact, come from Hamlet (Act II, scene 2) when Hamlet indulges in a bit of saucy badinage with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. When Hamlet asks how the ‘good lads’ are Guildenstern replies: ‘Happy in that we are not over-happy / On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.’

HAMLET: Nor the soles of her shoe?

ROSENCRANTZ: Neither, my lord.

HAMLET: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favour.

GUILDENSTERN: Faith, her privates we.

HAMLET: In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true, she is a strumpet. What’s the news?

I take the allusion in several ways. First, I think Manning acknowledges that the very coarseness of the book is its strongest and most shocking asset. Especially in 1930, when it was published, even the cleaned-up version would have seemed relentlessly profane. Secondly, it draws attention to the role of luck and blind chance in men’s lives, particularly in a war. Fortune, as Evelyn Waugh once memorably said, is the most capricious of deities. And third, it advertises the book’s intellectual seriousness. For although this is a novel about private soldiers, those at the bottom end of the army’s food chain, the authorial brain informing it is rigorously intelligent and clear-eyed. And, as if to ram that point home, every chapter has a Shakespearean epigraph.

Even when the book was first published, credited pseudonymously to one ‘Private 19022’, it would be apparent to any reader that the central character, Bourne, is different from the ordinary soldiers around him. The tone of voice, the intellectual nature of the book’s reflection and analysis, the sardonic sensibility, all spoke of a different category of author than a mere private soldier. And when the identity of the author was eventually revealed there was even more of a surprise – but more of that later.

Her Privates We has little to do with actual combat – most of its action takes place behind the lines, in reserve or in billets as the battalion trains, does fatigues and waits for its turn in the front-line trenches. Bourne is a thoughtful and ruminative man, taciturn, an almost lugubrious presence – an older man, too, educated, but with no desire to exploit the privileges that this education, and what was then called ‘breeding’, would have provided for him in the army. He is friendly with the NCOs – happy to go drinking with the sergeants, and, because he can speak French, is used by the men as an interpreter and provider of services, with the local population.

Here again, despite the classically turned prose of the novel, its modernity emerges. While they wait to go into battle, the men’s interests are focused on food, drink, sex and idleness – probably in that order. Bourne observes all this and bears calm and cool witness. The men tolerate rather than respect their officers, they show no military zeal or patriotic fervour, they have no faith in their leaders and no real interest in the war: ‘… they were now mere derelicts in a wrecked and dilapidated world, with sore and angry nerves sharpening their tempers, or shutting them up in a morose or sullen humour from which it was difficult to move them.’ Time and again Bourne’s observations undermine the stereotype of the First World War and in so doing paint a picture of men at war that is – after decades of mythmaking and romance – both bitterly fresh and timeless.

When Her Privates We was published in 1930 it became an almost immediate success, some 15,000 copies selling in the first three months as newspaper columnists vied with each other trying to guess the identity of ‘Private 19022’. Manning’s cover was blown relatively quickly. One of the first to guess the true identity of the author was T. E. Lawrence who claimed that within six weeks of the book’s publication he had read it three times.

Lawrence recognised Manning as the author because he was a great admirer of Manning’s book Scenes and Portraits (published in 1909). When Manning’s identity was revealed to the world at large it came as something of a shock. Frederic Manning was a minor figure in Edwardian literary circles, a Greek scholar, a poet, a belle-lettrist, friend of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot – he seemed a million miles away from the foulmouthed soldiers in his novel, scrounging for booze and bitching about the war.

Manning was in fact an Australian, born in 1882 to a prosperous family in Sydney. His father was mayor or Sydney, later knighted, and his brother became Attorney General. Manning, a neurasthenic young man of perpetually failing health, came to England in 1903, determined to make a career in literature. And his efforts followed the predictable path of those blessed with a modest talent, a private income and low ambition: reviews and poems printed in periodicals, a turgid epic poem called The Vigil of Brunhilde, and then finally the critical success of Scenes and Portraits, a series of imaginative dialogues between historical figures which displays a refined and ironic intellectual preciosity but which now reads as hopelessly dated. However, in 1909, the reclâme of the book finally permitted Manning full access into Edwardian literary circles and it was at this time that he and Ezra Pound became friends.

What little information there is on the early life of Frederic Manning makes it hard to believe that one day he would write Her Privates We. Before the war Manning published regular reviews for the Spectator and other periodicals, and the occasional poem appeared in little magazines. He lived in a vicarage in the countryside and, when he could afford it, travelled in Europe. Nothing about his life distinguishes him from many other somewhat effete and vaguely talented litterateurs that then abounded. There seems also to have been no grand romantic passion in his life – with either sex – and even his friendships, with the painter William Rothenstein, with Pound, appear oddly formal and distanced.

When war broke out in 1914 Manning did not volunteer immediately because he thought he would fail the army medical. He continued to scratch a living from his pen but eventually in October 1915 he enlisted in the Shropshire Light Infantry and reported for training at Pembroke Dock in South Wales.

Manning was now ‘Private 19022’. Quite why he had not attempted to apply for a commission is not clear – it is possible he had, but had been rejected (I am indebted for much of this information to Jonathan Marwil’s Frederic Manning: An Unfinished Life). However, after some weeks of basic training he was selected and sent to Oxford to train as an Officer Cadet. Manning’s role as a tyro officer did not last long – he was returned to his unit in June 1916 for drunkenness.

So Manning went to France in August 1916 as a private, an elderly private too, at the age of thirty-four – there were boys of sixteen at the battle of the Somme. He was joining the secondary stages of the Somme battle that had begun with the catastrophic slaughter of 60,000 killed and wounded on the first day – July 1st – and that would fizzle out in the freezing mud and snow as winter closed in at the year’s end. In August the Shropshires soon saw heavy fighting around Guillemot, in the southern section of the Somme battle front, and later, towards the end of the year, on the Ancre front at Serre. Manning’s war as a private soldier lasted just over four months. He returned to London at Christmas 1916, again to attempt officer training.

Those four months on the Somme front provide the background for Her Privates We. Bourne’s war, in the novel, is very close to Manning’s both geographically and in terms of the experience undergone. Just as Bourne was transferred to signals, and thus to comparative safety, so too was Manning. And just as Bourne was constantly urged to apply for a commission, so too, one must suppose, was Manning. In any event, when complied with, the new experience was not a happy one. Manning duly became a lieutenant in the Royal Irish Regiment but his drinking problems became more serious (in the novel, Bourne is an intermittent but redoubtably heavy drinker). In August 1917, in Dublin, Manning was summoned before a court martial and severely reprimanded. In October 1917 he was in hospital, suffering from delirium tremens. Shortly after, he offered to resign his commission and was accepted. But Manning carried on drinking and was described by his battalion medical officer after one binge as being in ‘a stupor, quite unfit for any duty, evidently the result of a drinking bout’. Manning’s own account was blunt and factual: ‘For some time … I had been suffering from continual insomnia and nervous exhaustion. I was in an extremely weak condition of health generally, and in those circumstances had recourse to stimulants.’ Manning’s self-diagnosis is more easy to understand in this, the day and age of posttraumatic stress disorder, but in 1918 he met with little sympathy: his military career was over.

After the war Manning took up his old life as a jobbing man-of-letters again – literary journalism and hack work in the shape of a biography of a famous naval architect. He moved in the same obscure literary and intellectual circles as before, returning to Australia in 1925 for a visit. But there is a sense of the decade of the 1920s being one long slow slide of apathy and disillusion. He published a small book on Epicurus and wrote reviews for T. S. Eliot at the Criterion. Manning, a lifelong chain smoker, was still drinking heavily and, inevitably, health problems returned. He had thirteen teeth extracted. Photographs at the time show a gaunt, seamed face, prematurely aged. It was only when the publisher Peter Davies urged him to write his war memoirs that some form of energy returned and Her Privates We was composed in a few galvanised weeks. Manning had never written so easily, before or since.

But the success and fame of the novel, as well as temporary prosperity, brought little contentment. Manning’s health was failing and it seems he was by now suffering from emphysema. He travelled to Australia again in 1932 and passed sixteen isolated months there. Manning returned to England but spent most of his time in and out of rest homes and hospitals. He now needed oxygen to help him breathe. Any cold or attack of flu brought with it deadly risks. Early in 1935 Manning contracted pnuemonia which, coupled with his chronic emphysema, proved swiftly fatal: he died on the 22nd February. He was fifty-two years old.

At the centre of Frederick Manning’s short and disappointed life stands the monument of Her Privates We. It was a book that Ernest Hemingway read each year, ‘to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them’. Hemingway has got to the heart of the book’s dogged and lasting appeal. There are many superb memoirs and testimonials about the First World War that have stood the test of time and become classics. Owen, Sassoon, Blunden and Graves are permanent members of the poetry canon. It is perhaps somewhat strange that apart from Her Privates We, there are no English novels that came out of the Great War with a similar status. Yet it is precisely because Her Privates We is a novel that its reputation and its import are so remarkable and so affecting. Fiction adds a different dimension that the purely documentary and historical cannot aspire to. As Hemingway said on another occasion: ‘I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be.’ This is what the novel does and this explains the enduring power behind Her Privates We. Something in Manning’s persona made him wish to write a novel rather than a memoir. Perhaps fiction gave him that freedom to reinvent himself as Bourne, made him truer than he would be, and perhaps fiction gave him that freedom to be honest in a way that more decorous autobiography would not permit. For, finally, it is the unremitting honesty of Her Privates We that stays in the mind; its refusal to idealise the serving soldier and military life; the absolute determination to present the war in all its boredom, misery and uncertainty; its refusal to glorify or romanticise; the candour that makes a soldier say about the civilians back home, ‘They don’t give a fuck what ’appens to us ’uns.’ We know now that all this was true – but we needed Frederic Manning to bear fictional witness for us, to make it truer.

If we only had the expurgated edition of Her Privates We it would still remain a great and original novel. It may seem a somewhat large claim to make, but the restoration of these stark curses, oaths and swear words in the unexpurgated version have the curious effect of making World War I seem somehow modern and contemporary – of making it closer to us, removing the decades that lie between our time and the summer of 1916. After all, it was not that long ago. My grandfather and my great-uncle both survived the First World War: one was wounded at Paschendaele, the other at the Somme, in August, at about the time Manning arrived there. These famous names still resound awfully, even now – Paschendaele, the Somme – names with their great freight of history and of potent abstract nouns – courage, duty, sacrifice, heroism. But funnily enough, it is the thought of my grandfather and my great-uncle swearing – ‘fucking’ and ‘cunting’ with the rest of the poor benighted infantry – that makes them real to me. I understand their ordinariness and humanity. Therefore I understand all the better what they endured.

London, 1999

I

‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death … and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’

SHAKESPEARE

THE darkness was increasing rapidly, as the whole sky had clouded, and threatened thunder. There was still some desultory shelling. When the relief had taken over from them, they set off to return to their original line as best they could. Bourne, who was beaten to the wide, gradually dropped behind, and in trying to keep the others in sight missed his footing and fell into a shellhole. By the time he had picked himself up again the rest of the party had vanished; and, uncertain of his direction, he stumbled on alone. He neither hurried nor slackened his pace; he was light-headed, almost exalted, and driven only by the desire to find an end. Somewhere, eventually, he would sleep. He almost fell into the wrecked trench, and after a moment’s hesitation turned left, caring little where it led him. The world seemed extraordinarily empty of men, though he knew the ground was alive with them. He was breathing with difficulty, his mouth and throat seemed to be cracking with dryness, and his water-bottle was empty. Coming to a dug-out, he groped his way down, feeling for the steps with his feet; a piece of Wilson canvas, hung across the passage but twisted aside, rasped his cheek; and a few steps lower his face was enveloped suddenly in the musty folds of a blanket. The dug-out was empty. For the moment he collapsed there, indifferent to everything. Then with shaking hands he felt for his cigarettes, and putting one between his lips struck a match. The light revealed a candle-end stuck by its own grease to the oval lid of a tobacco-tin, and he lit it; it was scarcely thicker than a shilling, but it would last his time. He would finish his cigarette, and then move on to find his company.

There was a kind of bank or seat excavated in the wall of the dug-out, and he noticed first the tattered remains of a blanket lying on it, and then, gleaming faintly in its folds a small metal disk reflecting the light. It was the cap on the cork of a water-bottle. Sprawling sideways he reached it, the feel of the bottle told him it was full, and uncorking it he put it to his lips and took a great gulp before discovering that he was swallowing neat whiskey. The fiery spirit almost choked him for the moment, in his surprise he even spat some of it out; then recovering, he drank again, discreetly but sufficiently, and was meditating a more prolonged appreciation when he heard men groping their way down the steps. He recorked the bottle, hid it quickly under the blanket, and removed himself to what might seem an innocent distance from temptation.

Three Scotsmen came in; they were almost as spent and broken as he was, that he knew by their uneven voices; but they put up a show of indifference, and were able to tell him that some of his mob were on the left, in a dug-out about fifty yards away. They, too, had lost their way, and asked him questions in their turn; but he could not help them, and they developed among themselves an incoherent debate, on the question of what was the best thing for them to do in the circumstances. Their dialect only allowed him to follow their arguments imperfectly, but under the talk it was easy enough to see the irresolution of weary men seeking in their difficulties some reasonable pretext for doing nothing. It touched his own conscience, and throwing away the butt of his cigarette he decided to go. The candle was flickering feebly on the verge of extinction, and presently the dug-out would be in darkness again. Prudence stifled in him an impulse to tell them of the whiskey; perhaps they would find it for themselves; it was a matter which might be left for providence or chance to decide. He was moving towards the stairs, when a voice, muffled by the blanket, came from outside.

‘Who are down there?’

There was no mistaking the note of authority and Bourne answered promptly. There was a pause, and then the blanket was waved aside, and an officer entered. He was Mr Clinton, with whom Bourne had fired his course at Tregelly.

‘Hullo, Bourne,’ he began, and then seeing the other men he turned and questioned them in his soft kindly voice. His face had the greenish pallor of crude beeswax, his eyes were red and tired, his hands were as nervous as theirs, and his voice had the same note of over-excitement, but he listened to them without a sign of impatience.

‘Well, I don’t want to hurry you men off,’ he said at last, ‘but your battalion will be moving out before we do. The best thing you can do is to cut along to it. They’re only about a hundred yards further down the trench. You don’t want to straggle back to camp by yourselves; it doesn’t look well either. So you had better get moving right away. What you really want is twelve hours solid sleep, and I am only telling you the shortest road to it.’

They accepted his view of the matter quietly, they were willing enough; but, like all tired men in similar conditions, they were glad to have their action determined for them; so they thanked him and wished him good-night, if not cheerfully, at least with the air of being reasonable men, who appreciated his kindliness. Bourne made as though to follow them out, but Mr Clinton stopped him.

‘Wait a minute, Bourne, and we shall go together,’ he said as the last Scotsman groped his way up the steeply pitched stairs. ‘It is indecent to follow a kilted Highlander too closely out of a dug-out. Besides I left something here.’

He looked about him, went straight to the blanket, and took up the water-bottle. It must have seemed lighter than he expected, for he shook it a little suspiciously before uncorking it. He took a long steady drink and paused.

‘I left this bottle full of whiskey,’ he said, ‘but those bloody Jocks must have smelt it. You know, Bourne, I don’t go over with a skinful, as some of them do; but, by God, when I come back I want it. Here, take a pull yourself; you look as though you could do with one.’

Bourne took the bottle without any hesitation; his case was much the same. One had lived instantaneously during that timeless interval, for in the shock and violence of the attack, the perilous instant, on which he stood perched so precariously, was all that the half-stunned consciousness of man could grasp; and, if he lost his grip on it, he fell back among the grotesque terrors and nightmare creatures of his own mind. Afterwards, when the strain had been finally released, in the physical exhaustion which followed, there was a collapse, in which one’s emotional nature was no longer under control.

‘We’re in the next dug-out, those who are left of us,’ Mr Clinton continued. ‘I am glad you came through all right, Bourne. You were in the last show, weren’t you? It seems to me the old Hun has brought up a lot more stuff, and doesn’t mean to shift, if he can help it. Anyway we should get a spell out of the line now. I don’t believe there are more than a hundred of us left.’

A quickening in his speech showed that the whiskey was beginning to play on frayed nerves: it had steadied Bourne for the time being. The flame of the candle gave one leap and went out. Mr Clinton switched on his torch, and shoved the water-bottle into the pocket of his raincoat.

‘Come on,’ he said, making for the steps, ‘you and I are two of the lucky ones, Bourne; we’ve come through without a scratch; and if our luck holds we’ll keep moving out of one bloody misery into another, until we break, see, until we break.’

Bourne felt a kind of suffocation in his throat: there was nothing weak or complaining in Mr Clinton’s voice, it was full of angry soreness. He switched off the light as he came to the Wilson canvas.

‘Don’t talk so bloody wet,’ Bourne said to him through the darkness. ‘You’ll never break.’

The officer gave no sign of having heard the sympathetic but indecorous rebuke. They moved along the battered trench silently. The sky flickered with the flash of guns, and an occasional star-shell flooded their path with light. As one fell slowly, Bourne saw a dead man in field grey propped up in a corner of a traverse; probably he had surrendered, wounded, and reached the trench only to die there. He looked indifferently at this piece of wreckage. The grey face was senseless and empty. As they turned the corner they were challenged by a sentry over the dug-out.

‘Good night, Bourne,’ said Mr Clinton quietly.

‘Good night, sir,’ said Bourne, saluting; and he exchanged a few words with the sentry.

‘Wish to Christ they’d get a move on,’ said the sentry, as Bourne turned to go down.

The dug-out was full of men, and all the drawn, pitiless faces turned to see who it was as he entered, and after that flicker of interest relapsed into apathy and stupor again. The air was thick with smoke and the reek of guttering candles. He saw Shem lift a hand to attract his attention, and he managed to squeeze in beside him. They didn’t speak after each had asked the other if he were all right; some kind of oppression weighed on them all, they sat like men condemned to death.

‘Wonder if they’ll keep us up in support?’ whispered Shem.

Probably that was the question they were all asking, as they sat there in their bitter resignation, with brooding enigmatic faces, hopeless, but undefeated; even the faces of boys seeming curiously old; and then it changed suddenly: there were quick hurried movements, belts were buckled, rifles taken up, and stooping, they crawled up into the air. Shem and Bourne were among the first out. They moved off at once. Shells travelled overhead; they heard one or two bump fairly close, but they saw nothing except the sides of the trench, whitish with chalk in places, and the steel helmet and lifting swaying shoulders of the man in front, or the frantic uplifted arms of shattered trees, and the sky with the clouds broken in places, through which opened the inaccessible peace of the stars. They seemed to hurry, as though the sense of escape filled them. The walls of the communication trench became gradually lower, the track sloping upward to the surface of the ground, and at last they emerged, the officer standing aside, to watch what was left of his men file out, and form up in two ranks before him. There was little light, but under the brims of the helmets one could see living eyes moving restlessly in blank faces. His face, too, was a blank from weariness, but he stood erect, an ash-stick under his arm, as the dun-coloured shadows shuffled into some sort of order. The words of command that came from him were no more than whispers, his voice

Reviews for Her Privates We

[therebelprince · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't know if this is my kind of book, since I find war novels and memoirs unsettling, but the excerpts and chapters I read convinced me that Manning - a delicate, largely English figure who shared some familial relationship with Australia - wrote the fantastic WWI novel that many critics of the time felt this to be.

For me, the most affecting moment is when the narrator recalls a loss of spirit halfway through the deployment, once the men have seen real action, and realised that the Germans on the other side know as little about the complex politics and motivations of the war than they do. Wow.

[timbazzett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One might think that a book about WWI would offer little that a reader today could relate to. Not true. I found much in Her Privates We with which to identify. In his modern intro to the book first published in 1929, William Boyd notes that the unexpurgated version, with its vivid and vulgar language typical to the talk of rank and file soldiers, makes the book curiously contemporary, and he's right. The usual Anglo-saxon crudities used by the British soldiers in the book are the same ones still used by soldiers in any army in the world. Hemingway remarked that Her Privates We was one of the best books he'd ever read about men at war, and that he read it often. I have to agree with Boyd and Hemingway. There is something so very real, so 'now' about the story Manning tells, about his main character, Bourne, and the other soldiers he befriends and observes throughout the narrative. There was one particular anecdote, one in which Bourne and another soldier had to escort a couple of large stupid Lancashire men to a military prison which reminded me almost immediately of the plot of a popular novel (and film) of the 70s Vietnam era, Darryl Ponicsan's The Last Detail. I wondered idly as I read this section whether Ponicsan had ever read Manning's book. Another passage which struck me deeply, was a passing comment Bourne made about friendship versus the comradeship the military life often forces upon you. "I have one or two particular chums, of course; and in some ways, you know, good comradeship takes the place of friendship. It is different; it has its own loyalties and affections; and I am not so sure that it does not rise on occasion to an intensity of feeling which friendship never touches."And that is exactly what the phrase "old army buddies" is all about. It can't be explained to someone who has never served, but friendships made outside the military rarely rise to that level, to that lasting feeling of "comradeship." There were many such passages here - truisms and even casual conversations between chums that I understood easily. My own experiences in the US Army in the 60s, then 70s and 80s, were the same. I had my own Bournes, Martlows and Shems, and the end of the story, as heartbreaking as it is, seemed inevitable. That's how real and immediate this book still is. So I understand why Hemingway, Arnold Bennett, T.E. Lawrence and others marked this book for greatness. It is deserving of its status as a classic of war literature. Terrific stuff. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

[schmerguls · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

1107 Her Privates We, by Private 19022 (Frederic Manning) (read 21 Mar 1971) This book drips with authenticity, even though it is told as a fiction. I should say, rather, that it actually happened in the latter half of 1916 but the names are fictitious. Only a little of the book actually deals with front line life, but it all deals with Britons in France, and one feels the book tells how it really was: and gives one a little insight into how men thought and were able to endure. I thank God I was never put to the test of something like 1916 in France. This book is fantastic. Only one experiencing it could have written this book.

[roblong_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very good, a book that leaves an intense memory of atmosphere, place and the grimy, utterly unromantic business of war. Ideally to be read in conjunction with All Quiet on the Western Front: two sides of a conflict suffering precisely the same needless misery.

[picardyrose · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Really a memoir in disguise, it's the clearest fiction of the war, and beautifully written. The orginal, published in the '20s (I think) was bowdlerized; this is a restoration.