REVIEW OF HER PRIVATES WE

TOM'S REVIEW

Her Privates We 

by Frederic Manning

Frederic Manning was a professional poet most of his life and a volunteer soldier in His Majesty’s infantry from October 1915 to February 1918. In 1928, a literary colleague, citing the large public appetite for books about the Great War, urged him to write a novel about his wartime experience. The result was Her Privates We, a title (and the best pun I can remember) taken from dialogue in Hamlet that is the book’s epigram:

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.

Each chapter then begins with a passage from Shakespeare, not the pithy aphorisms found in Bartlett’s Book of Quotations but obscure lines with difficult syntax that force the reader to study each word and still wonder at the precise meaning. The passages form perfect companion pieces to a literate memoir that describes war with lyrical dispassion. There is no plot, only an unfolding of events. There is abundant absurdity, but it is the opposite of funny. Death is not the least bit heroic, and there is no glory. 

Reading this book is often a slog, just like the war it describes. The narration can be pedestrian for pages on end, but then Manning will produce something that zeroes in on what makes the soldier’s life unique. Two examples stand out for me. The first appears midway through the book when the main character Bourne is home on leave and is asked if he has a friend among the men. He replies, “In some ways, 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. It may be less in itself, I don’t know, but its opportunity is greater. Friendship implies rather more stable conditions, don’t you think? You have time to choose.” The second appears in the prefatory remarks that Manning wrote after he had finished the novel and should be inscribed on every war memorial everywhere. “War is waged by men; not by beasts or by gods. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.” 

Perhaps the biggest revelation of Her Privates We, though, is the dialogue. Soldiers in 1914 sound just like men in 2014. They make liberal use of the F-word, the C-word and slang that is still alive. There is a school of literature that says an author should never attempt accented vernacular, but Manning has done it in a way that, if not exactly accurate, pinpoints his characters by class, region and temperament. 

Frederic Manning’s lone novel received an initial printing of 500 copies and was credited to “Private 19022.” Manning was not identified as the author until a second printing in 1943, eight years after his death from a respiratory ailment when he was just 52. The novel garnered high praise from Ezra Pound, T.E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway, all of whom, it is presumed, read the first printing. Hemingway called it 'The finest and noblest book of men in war.' Make that finest, noblest and truest. 

Five stars