But the success and fame of the novel, as well as temporary prosperity, brought little contentment. Manning’s health was failing and it seems he was by now suffering from emphysema. He travelled to Australia again in 1932 and passed sixteen isolated months there. Manning returned to England but spent most of his time in and out of rest homes and hospitals. He now needed oxygen to help him breathe. Any cold or attack of flu brought with it deadly risks. Early in 1935 Manning contracted pnuemonia which, coupled with his chronic emphysema, proved swiftly fatal: he died on the 22nd February. He was fifty-two years old.

At the centre of Frederick Manning’s short and disappointed life stands the monument of Her Privates We. It was a book that Ernest Hemingway read each year, ‘to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them’. Hemingway has got to the heart of the book’s dogged and lasting appeal. There are many superb memoirs and testimonials about the First World War that have stood the test of time and become classics. Owen, Sassoon, Blunden and Graves are permanent members of the poetry canon. It is perhaps somewhat strange that apart from Her Privates We, there are no English novels that came out of the Great War with a similar status. Yet it is precisely because Her Privates We is a novel that its reputation and its import are so remarkable and so affecting. Fiction adds a different dimension that the purely documentary and historical cannot aspire to. As Hemingway said on another occasion: ‘I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be.’ This is what the novel does and this explains the enduring power behind Her Privates We. Something in Manning’s persona made him wish to write a novel rather than a memoir. Perhaps fiction gave him that freedom to reinvent himself as Bourne, made him truer than he would be, and perhaps fiction gave him that freedom to be honest in a way that more decorous autobiography would not permit. For, finally, it is the unremitting honesty of Her Privates We that stays in the mind; its refusal to idealise the serving soldier and military life; the absolute determination to present the war in all its boredom, misery and uncertainty; its refusal to glorify or romanticise; the candour that makes a soldier say about the civilians back home, ‘They don’t give a fuck what ’appens to us ’uns.’ We know now that all this was true – but we needed Frederic Manning to bear fictional witness for us, to make it truer.

If we only had the expurgated edition of Her Privates We it would still remain a great and original novel. It may seem a somewhat large claim to make, but the restoration of these stark curses, oaths and swear words in the unexpurgated version have the curious effect of making World War I seem somehow modern and contemporary – of making it closer to us, removing the decades that lie between our time and the summer of 1916. After all, it was not that long ago. My grandfather and my great-uncle both survived the First World War: one was wounded at Paschendaele, the other at the Somme, in August, at about the time Manning arrived there. These famous names still resound awfully, even now – Paschendaele, the Somme – names with their great freight of history and of potent abstract nouns – courage, duty, sacrifice, heroism. But funnily enough, it is the thought of my grandfather and my great-uncle swearing – ‘fucking’ and ‘cunting’ with the rest of the poor benighted infantry – that makes them real to me. I understand their ordinariness and humanity. Therefore I understand all the better what they endured.