So Manning went to France in August 1916 as a private, an elderly private too, at the age of thirty-four – there were boys of sixteen at the battle of the Somme. He was joining the secondary stages of the Somme battle that had begun with the catastrophic slaughter of 60,000 killed and wounded on the first day – July 1st – and that would fizzle out in the freezing mud and snow as winter closed in at the year’s end. In August the Shropshires soon saw heavy fighting around Guillemot, in the southern section of the Somme battle front, and later, towards the end of the year, on the Ancre front at Serre. Manning’s war as a private soldier lasted just over four months. He returned to London at Christmas 1916, again to attempt officer training.

Those four months on the Somme front provide the background for Her Privates We. Bourne’s war, in the novel, is very close to Manning’s both geographically and in terms of the experience undergone. Just as Bourne was transferred to signals, and thus to comparative safety, so too was Manning. And just as Bourne was constantly urged to apply for a commission, so too, one must suppose, was Manning. In any event, when complied with, the new experience was not a happy one. Manning duly became a lieutenant in the Royal Irish Regiment but his drinking problems became more serious (in the novel, Bourne is an intermittent but redoubtably heavy drinker). In August 1917, in Dublin, Manning was summoned before a court martial and severely reprimanded. In October 1917 he was in hospital, suffering from delirium tremens. Shortly after, he offered to resign his commission and was accepted. But Manning carried on drinking and was described by his battalion medical officer after one binge as being in ‘a stupor, quite unfit for any duty, evidently the result of a drinking bout’. Manning’s own account was blunt and factual: ‘For some time … I had been suffering from continual insomnia and nervous exhaustion. I was in an extremely weak condition of health generally, and in those circumstances had recourse to stimulants.’ Manning’s self-diagnosis is more easy to understand in this, the day and age of posttraumatic stress disorder, but in 1918 he met with little sympathy: his military career was over.

After the war Manning took up his old life as a jobbing man-of-letters again – literary journalism and hack work in the shape of a biography of a famous naval architect. He moved in the same obscure literary and intellectual circles as before, returning to Australia in 1925 for a visit. But there is a sense of the decade of the 1920s being one long slow slide of apathy and disillusion. He published a small book on Epicurus and wrote reviews for T. S. Eliot at the Criterion. Manning, a lifelong chain smoker, was still drinking heavily and, inevitably, health problems returned. He had thirteen teeth extracted. Photographs at the time show a gaunt, seamed face, prematurely aged. It was only when the publisher Peter Davies urged him to write his war memoirs that some form of energy returned and Her Privates We was composed in a few galvanised weeks. Manning had never written so easily, before or since.