Her Privates We
( Manning, Frederic) Private 19022 G.P. Putnam & Son, 1930. very good condition hard cover dust jacket gently but cellophane, cvoer, may be original but withe way protected the grim soldier followed by skeleton on cover read clean pages No Jacket. with vintage bookplate at front and owner label at rear 1st Edition. First American Edition. . Outside and inside is clean. The coarse tan cloth showing no wear at edges or corners, . Back inside cover has split at seam but is intact. From review It begins "Her Privates We is not propaganda -- pacifist or militarist. It draws no dividing lines. . . . The author . . . who was already distinguished for work in another field of literature, served as a private in the ranks of the battalion whose doings he has chronicled. Preferring to be heard as a representative voice from the anonymous ranks, rather than as an individual, he has chosen to mask his identity under the regimental number, 19022, which was his at the time of the story."

Manning continued to write.Sent to France in 1916, Manning experienced action with the 7th Battalion at the Somme, was promoted to lance-corporal and soaked up the experience of life in the trenches. In 1917 he published a collection of poems under the title Ediola. This was a mixture of verse predominantly in his former style alongside war poems heavily influenced by the imagism of Pound, which deal introspectively with personal aims and ideals tempered in the crucible of battle.

Poetry did not pay, and so in 1923 Manning took a commission from his publisher John Murray to write The Life of Sir William White, which was a thorough, dull biography of the man who, as Director of Naval Construction, led the build-up of the Royal Navy in the last years of the nineteenth century. At this time he was friendly with T. E. Lawrence, then serving in the RAF at Cranwell, some twenty miles (a motorcycle ride) from where Manning was living. In 1926 he contributed the introduction to an edition of Epicurus's Morals: Collected and faithfully Englished by Walter Charleton, originally published in 1656, published in a limited edition by Peter Davies.



As the 1920s progressed and confidence started to return, the artistic community was increasingly looking back at the war. The demand for written material started to grow. The big catalyst was the play Journey's End written by R. C. Sherriff which first appeared in 1928. Davies urged Manning to use his undoubted talent in conjunction with his intense wartime experiences to write a novel. In an effort to capture the moment, Manning had to work rapidly, with little opportunity for second drafts and revisions. The result was The Middle Parts of Fortune, published anonymously by Peter Davies in a limited numbered edition of about 500 in 1929, copies of which are now rare collectors’ items. The book is an account in the vernacular of the lives of ordinary soldiers. The central character named Bourne is the filter through which Manning’s own experiences are transposed into the lives of a group of men whose own personal qualities interact in response to conflict and comradeship. Bourne is an enigmatic, detached character (a self-portrait of the author) who does not survive to the end, but leaves each of the protagonists alone with their own detachment, privy to their own thoughts.334 pages.