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Her Privates We, by Frederic Manning
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“The finest and noblest book of men at war” Ernest Hemingway
The classic novel of the Great War, set during the battle of the Somme.
Her Privates We follows the story of Private Bourne, an ordinary soldier dealing with extraordinary circumstances.
As well as conveying the camaraderie and heroism of the trenches, the novel explores the terror and monotony of being a soldier. A cloud of fatalism hangs over the narrative, which is brightened up through friendships, a shared, grim sense of humour and colourful conversations between the privates.
Bourne and his comrades must fight their demons within, as well as the enemy across No Man's Land. Men die, but still a sense of duty endures.
Her Privates We is as much a triumph of realism as it is of the imagination. Readers of both military history, and literary fiction, will continue to be haunted by its prose and insights.
“The book of books so far as the British army is concerned” T.E Lawrence
“Psychological acuteness marks this book out as both a precious document of the First World War and an imperishable modernist masterpiece.” David Evans (Independent)
Frederic Manning was an Australian born poet and novelist who moved to England at the age of 21. Much of his writing was inspired by his experiences in the infantry during the Great War. Her Privates We remains his most enduring work on the subject.
Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher.
- Sales Rank: #298453 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-11-30
- Released on: 2013-11-30
- Format: Kindle eBook
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A vivid insight into the real life of a soldier
By Mike Robbins
Frederic Manning is an oddly elusive figure. Born in Australia in 1882, he migrated to England as a teenager. A friend, at various times, of Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and T. E. Lawrence, he was regarded by many contemporaries as a fine writer, and his literary ambition was considerable. But he was affected throughout his life by a weak chest. Also, he drank. In the end he was really only ever known for one book, and little else that he wrote is much read today.
That one masterwork was published in 1929 under the title The Middle Parts of Fortune; soon afterwards, an expurgated version was brought out as Her Privates We. Today it can be found as either. Both titles are taken from the same dialogue in Hamlet:
Guildenstern: 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 favours?
Guildenstern: Faith, her privates we.
Hamlet: In the secret parts of fortune? O, most true; she is a strumpet.
This quote explains itself, for Her Privates We is about the ordinary serving solder, tossed about by the fortunes of war.
The book concerns Bourne, a private soldier; although not in the first person, it is written from his point of view, and we mostly see no other. It is set in the second part of 1916, after the Somme offensive. The book opens with Bourne groping along, dugout by duckboard, away from the trenches as his unit is withdrawn; it finishes with the unit’s return. In between, they are marched from one place to another behind the lines, supposedly resting. The book is thus set mostly not in the trenches, but it does begin and end there. In any case, the fact that it is mostly not set in the front line does not decrease its value, as troops spent much of their time behind the lines.
The book’s first chapters are not always easy to read. Some of the early passages are wordy and philosophical. It begins well, as Bourne and his unit withdraw from the front line, but then runs into the sand as Bourne, awake while his fellows sleep, smokes and ruminates on the nature of their presence there. It doesn’t add much. If the whole of the book were like this, it would be a self-indulgent bore.
But it’s well worth persisting because, after that awkward beginning, it becomes a vivid portrayal of a soldier’s life. The book has a number of insights for modern readers curious about the war, including the attitudes of the solders themselves to it. A century on, we have a picture of wildly patriotic young men flooding to the colours, but reading Bourne, one wonders whether this was the whole truth. Almost nowhere in Her Privates We does anyone express support for the war; they just accept it as a fact. They are angry with a deserter, because he left them to fight without him; but his betrayal of the Crown concerns them little. More important are the commonplace stupidities of authority. A major training exercise, planned to perfection, is brought to a halt by the fury of a peasant woman because the troops are trampling her clover, and she will have no feed for the winter. On another occasion the unit is sent up the line as a work detail, but because someone has recorded their fighting strength as their pay strength, everyone must go, including the cooks, and there is nothing to eat in the morning. War and authority are quite random:
“There’s a man dead outside, sergeant,” he said, dully.
“Are you sure he’s dead?”
“Yes, sergeant; most of the head’s gone.”
The book is packed with petty incident in the life of a soldier. The men pick the lice off their bellies, avoid guard duty, and try to have “a bon time” at estaminets where the beer is poor. There is detail here that never made the history books. Planes communicate with troops on the ground using klaxons. When the weather turns cold the men are issues with fleece-lined leather jerkins and, as a result, the lice multiply. As Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia: “In war all soldieries are lousy, at the least when it is warm enough. The men that fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae – every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.”
The narrative is punctuated with darker events. The deserter is returned, perhaps to be shot; a popular officer dies on a work detail; a pointless parade leads to the death of several men when it is shelled. There is also an underlying, ugly, theme: class. In Her Privates We, the soldiers are reminded constantly that they are inferior. Bourne’s boot is split at the heel by a cart he is towing, and he is lucky to be issued with boots that are of a higher grade, being for officers. In the estaminets, the best booze is labelled “For Officers Only”. Towards the end of the book, Bourne and his fellows come across a Forces canteen with “hams, cheeses, bottled fruits, olives, sardines, everything to make the place a vision of paradise for hungry men.” Entering, he is refused service by a man who “turned away superciliously, saying that they only served officers.” Another attendant is friendlier and tells him he can get cocoa and biscuits at a shed in the yard. Bourne is incensed, knowing that the goods in the shop have been paid for by public subscription and were intended for them all.
But the class distinctions have more subtle dangers. Bourne is pressed to apply for a commission, because it is obvious that he is not from the same background as the others. Reluctantly, he does so. Meanwhile, in the trenches, thinking he has seen a sniper, he reports to an officer. The meeting is a tense one, for they are of different rank but the same class, and the officer therefore treats him coldly. Anyone brought up in the multi-layered jungle of the British class system will recognise this; someone who appears to have “slipped”, or to be playing an unexpected role, is treated with suspicion – the officer is not quite sure what to make of him, and responds with dislike. The tension between them ends with Bourne being sent on the patrol that ends the book. Yet at the same time, Bourne’s descriptions of the soldiers he serves with suggest that he himself had a wide, and class-free, sympathy with one’s fellows; his immediate companions include an urban Jewish soldier and a rural gamekeeper’s son, and the narrator appears at ease with, and attached to, both.
How much of this account reflects Manning’s real experience? One suspects, quite a lot. Bourne, the lead character, is a little different from the others; he is better educated, there is a hint that he is not 100% English (as mentioned above, he was born in Australia – though this distinction would not have been so important then). He is also under pressure to try for a commission, having turned one down on enlistment. Also, the period in which the book is set seems to cover the last few months of 1916, after the worst of the Somme offensive.
This does match Manning’s own life – up to a point. Already 32 in 1914 and in poorish health, he made several attempts to enlist before finally being accepted as a footsoldier in the King’s Shropshire Regiment. In Her Privates We, Bourne maintains to a superior that he turned down a commission on enlisting as he felt he did not know enough of men to command them. In real life, Manning, an aesthete, may indeed not have known enough of working men to have led them. However, he did not turn down a commission. John Francis Swain, who included a concise and informative biography of Manning in a 2001 doctoral thesis, reports that he was accepted for one – but was caught drunk during officer training, and was returned to his regiment as a private. He joined it on the Somme in August 1916. He had missed the bloody start to the battle but he did fight. At the end of 1916 he was again sent for officer training and this time was commissioned, into the Royal Irish Regiment. His time in France therefore corresponds to the book. Her Privates We is based, then, on just three or four months in France.
Frederic Manning never returned to the field. As John Francis Swain records, he did not settle to life as an officer, and took again to drink. Early in 1918, he was allowed to resign his commission on health grounds. Although he did try to pick up the threads of his life after the war, he never really recovered from his chest problems, and died in 1935 at the age of just 52. For all his ambitions and distinguished literary friendships, he would quite likely have left us little had it not been for his brief, undistinguished part in the war. But because of that, he has left us with a book that probably tells us as much about the real life of the soldier on the Western Front as any book ever written.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
I expected more of the book based on its references
By OD
I normally read history based books to try to understand what moved leaders and those that had to bear the consequencies. Her Privates We did not help me a lot in this quest of mine. I know what took me to bear arms, to kill adversaries in combat and to be wounded at that combat which ended my military career at the age of 22. I can identify with a few points of the narration, mainly the description of the idle times we spend or waste until combat comes, the mediocrity of army bureaucracy, the bending of the envelope in idle times just to send boredom away and the waste that marks war times when the best are normally the first to go down. I expected more of the book based on its references. The story is well told, but not exciting and with a forecastable end.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
excellent story
By Arash
A bit hard to read at times because of the flowery language, long sentences and a lot of old English slang. Some paragraphs are completely in French. Over all a very absorbing read with excellent characters.
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