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Her Privates We

Frederic Manning
Contents (21)
  1. Her Privates We
  2. Author’s Prefatory Note
  3. Introduction by William Boyd
  4. I
  5. II
  6. III
  7. IV
  8. V
  9. VI
  10. VII
  11. VIII
  12. IX
  13. X
  14. XI
  15. XII
  16. XIII
  17. XIV
  18. XV
  19. XVI
  20. XVII
  21. XVIII

Frederic Manning was born in Sydney, Australia in 1882. He moved to England in 1903 where he pursued a literary career, reviewing and writing poetry. He enlisted in 1915 in the Shropshire Light Infantry and went to France in August 1916 as ‘Private 19022’. The Shropshires saw heavy fighting on the Somme and Manning’s four months there provided the background for Her Privates We. He died in 1935.

Published in a limited edition in 1929 under the title The Middle Parts of Fortune, his novel appeared in an expurgated edition in 1930 as Her Privates We, credited pseudonymously to ‘Private 19022’.

This unexpurgated and unabridged edition is published with an introduction by William Boyd who considers Her Privates We to be ‘the finest novel to have come out of the First World War’.

‘The finest and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read. I read it over once each year to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them’ Ernest Hemingway

Her Privates We

FREDERIC MANNING

with an Introduction by William Boyd

On fortune’s cap we are not the very button. …
Then you live about her waist, or in the middle
of her favours? … ’Faith, her privates we.

SHAKESPEARE

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A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

The right of Frederic Manning to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Introduction copyright © 1999 William Boyd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published in a limited edition in 1929 as
The Middle Parts of Fortune

Published in an expurgated version in 1930 as Her Privates We

First published in this edition in 2013 by Serpent’s Tail First published in this unexpurgated version in 1999 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
www.serpentstail.com

ISBN 978 1 84668 787 7
eISBN 978 1 84765 764 0

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Peter Davies
who made me write it

Author’s Prefatory Note

While the following pages are a record of experience on the Somme and Ancre fronts, with an interval behind the lines, during the latter half of the year 1916; and the events described in it actually happened; the characters are fictitious. It is true that in recording the conversations of the men I seemed at times to hear the voices of ghosts. Their judgments were necessarily partial and prejudiced; but prejudices and partialities provide most of the driving power of life. It is better to allow them to cancel each other, than attempt to strike an average between them. Averages are too colourless, indeed too abstract in every way, to represent concrete experience. I have drawn no portraits; and my concern has been mainly with the anonymous ranks, whose opinion, often mere surmise and ill-informed, but real and true for them, I have tried to represent faithfully.