Her Privates, We by Frederic Manning

First published: 1929, in Great Britain as The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916 (U.S. edition, 1930)

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: 1916

Locale: Somme and Ancre in northern France

Principal Characters:

• Bourne, a private in the Westshire regiment
• Shem, a Jewish private
• Charlie Martlow, a young private

The Novel

Set on the western front during a period of several weeks in the middle of World War I, the plot of Her Privates, We involves much frenzied and destructive action, yet little happens in the sense of purposeful change. Bourne, a private in the Westshire regiment, is first seen lost in the trenches after an attack, on which he reflects while drinking some whiskey he has discovered. Its owner, a junior officer named Clinton, arrives to claim it; later, Clinton is blown to bits during a working-party up the line at night, his last words being that he knew that he would “get it” there. Meanwhile, Bourne and his buddies, Shem and young Charlie Martlow, who met by chance after a battle and stuck together, engage in survival tricks which include getting sufficient water for washing, purchasing food and drink from the French, and coping with the absurdities of military life. Bourne deals with a wide variety of situations and people. Against his wishes, he is assigned to work in the orderly room as a typist (though he does not type), and there he observes petty meanness and devious manipulations: He is glad to be ordered back to infantry duty. While on parade, several troops are killed by what is at first thought to have been a German bomb; then suspicion grows that it was a British shell. When a corporal tells a Frenchwoman who has offered accommodation that it is “cushy,” she is outraged and knocks him down. Recognizing that she has mistaken that Hindustani word (meaning comfortable) for “couchez,” Bourne manages to appease her. At the request of a French girl, he writes in English to a young English soldier with whom she has fallen in love. Bourne, Shem, and Martlow are sent to a signals section. Since the orders for their transfer have not been processed, they hide in a loft to avoid what they regard as useless training for an attack. Bourne, who is particularly generous about sharing the food parcels he receives, is furious when the merchant at the Expeditionary Force Canteen, which has been funded by public donations, refuses to sell him food because he serves officers only. After a tense period of waiting, during which they endure the ordeal of being shelled, the Westshires go over the top of their trenches, get through the barbed wire, and engage the Germans in close combat. Early in the attack, Shem is wounded in the foot and crawls back to the British trenches, but Martlow has the back of his head blown off, his blood oozing onto Bourne, who has rushed to him. Maddened by Martlow’s death, Bourne kills several Germans. After the attack diminishes, he receives a lance corporal’s stripe as a prelude to being made an officer, a promotion he had repeatedly declined. Before his departure, he is pressured into participating in a night raid. The raiders destroy a German machine-gun post but, when almost safely back, Bourne is fatally shot in the chest and is dead by the time he has been carried back to the British trenches.

The Characters

Although Her Privates, We is not written in the first person, Bourne’s activities and consciousness dominate the point of view. Like the author, Bourne is Australian, or so one infers from several pro-Australian comments he makes, as well as this reflection: “He felt curiously isolated even from them [the Westshires]. He was not of their county, he was not even of their country, or their religion, and he was only partially of their race.” This difference helps to give him a detached perspective on those around him, though he is throughout a sympathetic observer, aroused to anger only by meanness, malice, and the dodging of responsibility. He shares the frontline soldiers’ scorn for those “parasites behind them pinching the stores.” His attitude toward senior officers who are safely insulated from the horrors of the trenches is seen in the sardonic reflection: “Presently arrived magnificent people on horseback, glancing superciliously at the less fortunate members of their species whom necessity compelled to walk.” Because of his education and ability to influence others, he is identified as one who should become an officer, a move he repeatedly rejects because before enlisting he had no experience in dealing with men and after serving in the ranks he believes that he belongs with them. He comes to agree with the assessment of him as a man who

looked at a question upside down and inside out, and then did exactly what the average man would do in similar circumstances.... He experienced a quite futile anxiety as to whether he were doing the right thing, while he was doing the only possible thing at that particular moment; and it troubled him much more in the interval before action.

Bourne’s nature thus contains some attributes of Hamlet and of Everyman.

Shem is a shadowy figure. Bourne describes him as a cynic and a materialist who nevertheless gave up a safe job in the Army Pay Office in England for the trenches in France. Martlow jokingly refers to Shem’s Jewish “prudence” in not offering to pay for the drinks, while acknowledging that if the others are broke Shem will pick up the bill.

Martlow, the son of a gamekeeper, is a down-to-earth lad, who stubbornly holds onto his resentments, yet “is full of generous impulses.” Martlow casually sat beside Shem and Bourne after a battle, by which chance encounter their comradeship was formed. They were three people with nothing in common: nothing, that is, except that necessity which bound them together. Elsewhere, Bourne observes that comradeship may involve an intensity that friendship never touches: “At one moment a particular man may be nothing at all to you, and the next minute you will go through hell for him.... The man doesn’t matter so much, it’s a kind of impersonal emotion, a kind of enthusiasm, in the old sense of the world.... We help each other [because] we are all in it up to the neck together, and we know it.”

Around these three characters, Frederic Manning provides a full range of other privates, noncommissioned officers, junior officers, and even a captured deserter. Civilians, including several women, necessarily are in secondary roles, but they are usually presented in memorable vignettes.

Critical Context

Manning, born in Sydney, Australia, in 1882, had settled in London and published books of poems and essays before World War I broke out in 1914. He promptly enlisted in the British army and survived the kind of trench warfare depicted in his novel, the work for which he is remembered. He died in London in 1935. Eleven years later, his authorship of Her Privates, We was made public.

Her Privates, We was one of the wave of novels about World War I that appeared about ten years after it ended. It bore no author’s name, only the serial number of a private in the British army, and its unexpurgated first edition as The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916 was privately printed in small numbers, facts which helped to make it something of an underground classic. It soon drew favorable comments from writers of such diverse tastes as Arnold Bennett and Ezra Pound. Ernest Hemingway called it “the finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read. I read it over once a year to remember how things really were.” T. E. Lawrence declared, “No praise could be too sheer for this book.... Its virtues will be recognized more and more as time goes on.”

Bibliography

Dutton, Geoffrey, ed. The Literature of Australia, 1976 (revised edition).

Jones, Joseph, and Johanna Jones. Australian Fiction, 1983.

Kramer, Leonie, ed. The Oxford History of Australian Literature, 1981.

Murray-Smith, Stephen. “The Manning Revival,” in Australian Book Review. October, 1964, p. 229.

Ramson, W. S., ed. The Australian Experience: Critical Essays on Australian Novels, 1974.