HAMLET: Nor the soles of her shoe?

ROSENCRANTZ: Neither, my lord.

HAMLET: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favour.

GUILDENSTERN: Faith, her privates we.

HAMLET: In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true, she is a strumpet. What’s the news?

I take the allusion in several ways. First, I think Manning acknowledges that the very coarseness of the book is its strongest and most shocking asset. Especially in 1930, when it was published, even the cleaned-up version would have seemed relentlessly profane. Secondly, it draws attention to the role of luck and blind chance in men’s lives, particularly in a war. Fortune, as Evelyn Waugh once memorably said, is the most capricious of deities. And third, it advertises the book’s intellectual seriousness. For although this is a novel about private soldiers, those at the bottom end of the army’s food chain, the authorial brain informing it is rigorously intelligent and clear-eyed. And, as if to ram that point home, every chapter has a Shakespearean epigraph.

Even when the book was first published, credited pseudonymously to one ‘Private 19022’, it would be apparent to any reader that the central character, Bourne, is different from the ordinary soldiers around him. The tone of voice, the intellectual nature of the book’s reflection and analysis, the sardonic sensibility, all spoke of a different category of author than a mere private soldier. And when the identity of the author was eventually revealed there was even more of a surprise – but more of that later.

Her Privates We has little to do with actual combat – most of its action takes place behind the lines, in reserve or in billets as the battalion trains, does fatigues and waits for its turn in the front-line trenches. Bourne is a thoughtful and ruminative man, taciturn, an almost lugubrious presence – an older man, too, educated, but with no desire to exploit the privileges that this education, and what was then called ‘breeding’, would have provided for him in the army. He is friendly with the NCOs – happy to go drinking with the sergeants, and, because he can speak French, is used by the men as an interpreter and provider of services, with the local population.

Here again, despite the classically turned prose of the novel, its modernity emerges. While they wait to go into battle, the men’s interests are focused on food, drink, sex and idleness – probably in that order. Bourne observes all this and bears calm and cool witness. The men tolerate rather than respect their officers, they show no military zeal or patriotic fervour, they have no faith in their leaders and no real interest in the war: ‘… they were now mere derelicts in a wrecked and dilapidated world, with sore and angry nerves sharpening their tempers, or shutting them up in a morose or sullen humour from which it was difficult to move them.’ Time and again Bourne’s observations undermine the stereotype of the First World War and in so doing paint a picture of men at war that is – after decades of mythmaking and romance – both bitterly fresh and timeless.