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 recognized 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 foul-mouthed 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 of 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 display a refined and ironic intellectual preciosity but which now read as hopelessly dated. However, in 1909, the réclame 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 littérateurs 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 Rothen-stein, 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—1 July — 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 Guillemont, 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 factuaclass="underline" “From 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 post-traumatic 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 galvanized weeks. Manning had never written so easily, before or since.