Frederic Manning
Manning was born in 1882 in Sydney, Australia, and whose father was a one-time mayor. Educated privately, he was thereafter sent to England to complete his studies.
In the immediate pre-war years Manning established a reputation as a minor poet and critic among a small circle of intimates.
With the outbreak of war in August 1914 Manning enlisted as a Private with the 7th Battalion King's Shropshire Light Infantry, serving in the trenches in France among some of the more bloody battles of the war.
In 1929 Manning anonymously published in a private edition his novelised memoirs of the war, The Middle Parts of Fortune, in two volumes. In place of his name he simply listed his army serial number.
The following year, 1930, an expurgated edition of the book was commercially published as Her Privates We - without the strong language deemed likely to offend a wider readership.
Manning wrote no more fiction, retiring instead into scholarly seclusion. He died in London in 1935; it was a further eleven years before he was finally identified as the author of the war classic hailed by Hemingway as "the finest and noblest book of men in war I have ever read".
T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) observed that "no praise could be too sheer for this book ... it justifies every heat of praise. Its virtues will be recognised more and more as time goes on."
“Death, of course, like chastity, admits of no degree; a man is dead or not dead, and a man is just as dead by one means as by another; but it is infinitely more horrible and revolting to see a man shattered and eviscerated, than to see him shot. And one sees such things; and one suffers vicariously, with the inalienable sympathy of man for man. One forgets quickly. The mind is averted as well as the eyes. It reassures itself after that first despairing cry: "It is I!""No, it is not I. I shall not be like that."And one moves on, leaving the mauled and bloody thing behind: gambling, in fact, on that implicit assurance each one of us has of his own immortality. One forgets, but he will remember again later, if only in his sleep.”
“We are here in a wood of little beeches: And the leaves are like black lace Against a sky of nacre. One bough of clear promise Across the moon. It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me. He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh, Stilling it in an eternal peace, Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite hands Toward him, And is eased of its hunger. And I know that this passes: This implacable fury and torment of men, As a thing insensate and vain: And the stillness hath said unto me, Over the tumult of sounds and shaken flame, Out of the terrible beauty of wrath, I alone am eternal. One bough of clear promise Across the moon”
“Yea, she hath passed hereby, and blessed the sheaves,And the great garths, and stacks, and quiet farms,And all the tawny, and the crimson leaves.Yea, she hath passed with poppies in her arms,Under the star of dusk, through stealing mist,And blessed the earth, and gone, while no man wist.With slow, reluctant feet, and weary eyes,And eye-lids heavy with the coming sleep,With small breasts lifted up in stress of sighs,She passed, as shadows pass, among the sheep;While the earth dreamed, and only I was wareOf that faint fragrance blown from her soft hair.The land lay steeped in peace of silent dreams;There was no sound amid the sacred boughs.Nor any mournful music in her streams:Only I saw the shadow on her brows,Only I knew her for the yearly slain,And wept, and weep until she come again.”