When Her Privates We was published in 1930 it became an almost immediate success, some 15,000 copies selling in the first three months as newspaper columnists vied with each other trying to guess the identity of ‘Private 19022’. Manning’s cover was blown relatively quickly. One of the first to guess the true identity of the author was T. E. Lawrence who claimed that within six weeks of the book’s publication he had read it three times.

Lawrence recognised Manning as the author because he was a great admirer of Manning’s book Scenes and Portraits (published in 1909). When Manning’s identity was revealed to the world at large it came as something of a shock. Frederic Manning was a minor figure in Edwardian literary circles, a Greek scholar, a poet, a belle-lettrist, friend of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot – he seemed a million miles away from the foulmouthed soldiers in his novel, scrounging for booze and bitching about the war.

Manning was in fact an Australian, born in 1882 to a prosperous family in Sydney. His father was mayor or Sydney, later knighted, and his brother became Attorney General. Manning, a neurasthenic young man of perpetually failing health, came to England in 1903, determined to make a career in literature. And his efforts followed the predictable path of those blessed with a modest talent, a private income and low ambition: reviews and poems printed in periodicals, a turgid epic poem called The Vigil of Brunhilde, and then finally the critical success of Scenes and Portraits, a series of imaginative dialogues between historical figures which displays a refined and ironic intellectual preciosity but which now reads as hopelessly dated. However, in 1909, the reclâme of the book finally permitted Manning full access into Edwardian literary circles and it was at this time that he and Ezra Pound became friends.

What little information there is on the early life of Frederic Manning makes it hard to believe that one day he would write Her Privates We. Before the war Manning published regular reviews for the Spectator and other periodicals, and the occasional poem appeared in little magazines. He lived in a vicarage in the countryside and, when he could afford it, travelled in Europe. Nothing about his life distinguishes him from many other somewhat effete and vaguely talented litterateurs that then abounded. There seems also to have been no grand romantic passion in his life – with either sex – and even his friendships, with the painter William Rothenstein, with Pound, appear oddly formal and distanced.

When war broke out in 1914 Manning did not volunteer immediately because he thought he would fail the army medical. He continued to scratch a living from his pen but eventually in October 1915 he enlisted in the Shropshire Light Infantry and reported for training at Pembroke Dock in South Wales.

Manning was now ‘Private 19022’. Quite why he had not attempted to apply for a commission is not clear – it is possible he had, but had been rejected (I am indebted for much of this information to Jonathan Marwil’s Frederic Manning: An Unfinished Life). However, after some weeks of basic training he was selected and sent to Oxford to train as an Officer Cadet. Manning’s role as a tyro officer did not last long – he was returned to his unit in June 1916 for drunkenness.