Frederic Manning was born in Australia in 1882. His ambition to be a writer brought him to London in 1910. He enlisted in the King's Shropshire Light Infantry after an indifferent literary career and was sent to the Somme in 1916. The experience provided inspiration for the novel Her Privates We, or The Middle Parts of Fortune, as it was known when it was privately published in 1929. It is his masterpiece.
The book was published in a censored version in 1930, pseudonymously credited to Private 19022, but his identity was quickly outed and the author immediately became famous. Ernest Hemingway wrote of the novel: “This is the first and noblest book of men in war that I have ever read. I read it once a year to remember how things really are so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them.”
In his prefatory note Manning confirms that the events he depicts actually happened, although the characters are fictitious. He admits, however, that at times he seems to be hearing the voices of ghosts as he writes.
William Boyd, in his introduction to this new unexpurgated edition, quotes a passage from the castrated version of the novel, in which a sergeant addresses a private: “See? You miserable bugger you! A bloody cow like you’s sufficient to demoralise a whole muckin’ Army Corps. Got it? Get those buzzers out and do some bloody work for a change.”
Compare that to this: “See? You miserable bugger you! A bloody cunt like you is sufficient to demoralise a whole fuckin’ Army Corps. Got it? Get the buzzers out and do some bloody work for a change.”
Language has the power to alter intent and significance.
Certainly there is a violence and a truth that is missing from the bowdlerised version. The coarseness and profanity of the language bring us closer to these men and boys in the mud and snow of the trenches.
Although the action of the story takes place among the lower ranks, the narrator, Bourne, is cerebral, authoritative. He is both one of them and apart, and his observations, reflections and sense of bitter irony mark him as extraordinary. The action of the story occurs not on the field of battle, but behind the lines, in the humdrum daily existence of men at war.
Manning chronicles the boredom, the shredded nerves, the brutal reality, the random horror and violence that hover like phantoms at the edges of their days. There is a formal elegance to the writing that powerfully contextualises the mundanity of the everyday: scrounging for cigarettes, drink, sex, whinging, homesickness, the numbing tediousness of time passing. Mostly they care for nothing except survival. Sometimes not even that. The fired-up patriotism they once felt has evaporated.
There is a clear perception of the war's futility, the recognition of governmental cynicism. The hubris and snobbery and stupidity of the officer class (lions led by donkeys), the senseless slaughter (60,000 died on the first day of the Somme). They know they are "mere derelicts in a dilapidated world". This is far from the picture conveyed in the flickering newsreels of the smiling Tommies marching happily to do their bit for king and country.
Intensity born of truth
Manning's novel is incredibly moving and revelatory, and he refrains from drawing conclusions. Rather he asks us to examine our own belief systems about themes such as power, morality and the nature of war in all its complexity. The book honours the dead of a war who could not comprehend why they were fighting and dying. Her Privates We is a work of art as relevant today as it was when first published, possessing an intensity that is born of truth, and the bearing of witness to actual events.
The first World War came to signify an idealism of youth in 1914. There truly was a sense that a better world was imminent, but there followed a disillusionment so profound that it reverberates to this day: the realisation that it had all been in vain and that the status quo was not just still in place but stronger and more powerful than before. In that sense it has perhaps stood as emblematic of the reality of all wars.
The barbarity of war continues. It’s ironic that often the only exposure we have to its horrors is through the medium of fiction, something Manning himself understood. Today, as then, the corporate media cannot be trusted, mouthing as it does the propaganda of its masters. This war “to end all wars” could not have happened without propaganda. The first propaganda industry originated in Britain during the first World War. Its avowed aim was to control the minds of the masses and to prepare them for war.
Those who ran the industry were particularly interested in targeting the mind of the United States and its leading intellectuals. They proposed to influence these intellectuals into advocating the justification for Britain’s war, thus forcing the American public to join the conflict. The propaganda machine succeeded in creating hysteria, and a fanaticism whipped up not just by politicians but by the renowned intellectuals of the day, who instituted a campaign of persuasion which within months had transformed an apathetic populace into anti- German fanatics.
One of these was Edward Bernays (the father of modern public relations), who wrote that the more intelligent members of a society can persuade a population to do whatever they want, and that majority consent can be manufactured through disinformation. Disinformation and lying (about terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, freedom, democracy, etc) are the most insidious weapons used by those who would wage war.
Joseph Goebbels maintained that a people who are in fear are a people who can be controlled. Language itself can be moulded and disguised until it clothes the most nefarious ideas with the acceptable. It is not the job of propaganda, he wrote, to be intelligent. Its aim is to be popular and successful. It should confine itself to a few points and be repeated until it becomes "truth". It is, however, the enemy of truth.
Fanning the flames
In the first World War all forms of information were controlled. Newspapers were under government control, and the press barons of the day were happy to partake in deception. Emotional headlines were favoured, accurate or not, to fan the flames of hatred.
Propaganda would have us believe that the enemy is everywhere, that certain freedoms must be surrendered to protect our freedoms. So legislation must be enacted to allow government to protect us from the enemies of democracy, the “bad guys” who would do us harm and destroy “our way of life”. This justifies surveillance, censorship, rendition and internment.
Thus attention is diverted away from the real tyranny: corporate control and domination and the pursuit of profit at all costs, with the collusion of government. The moral good is invariably cited when the dogs of war are unleashed. Religion is often invoked as a reason for war. Racism, which allows us to dehumanise the “other”, also plays its part; poisoned nationalism and patriotic jingoism, where we see ourselves as special and the enemy as treacherous. “Our dead matter, theirs don’t.” We fight for the safety of our own children, yet we bomb theirs.
War is most often the ruthless elimination of anything or anyone that stands in the way of economic control of resources for immoral profit. Adam Smith understood that those who have the power in society make its policies. In his day it was the merchants and manufacturers. Today that power rests in the hands of an amorphous and secretive elite: the banks, the multinationals, the global financial corporations.
We must begin to awake politically, to think critically, to understand moral and ethical complexities; to become educated about the reality of how we are governed. Knowledge makes us powerful because we can understand what is happening to us and what is happening in our name. Freedom of speech must include the informed and moral duty to question those to whom we cede power so that we can more forcefully reject the propaganda of liars who would have us believe that the deaths of millions of innocents for economic gain is right and just; that the spending of billions on ever more sophisticated weaponry is justified when the majority of people are struggling to live.
War is mythologised by historians, intellectuals and the state; it is romanticised by films and music. We deify the warrior, fetishise the military, extolling the soldier in war yet ignoring him in peacetime, the grotesque brutality of what he has seen too shameful to dwell on.
War is depicted as noble and powerful, bringing meaning and purpose to life; giving us common cause, because it appeals to patriotism, sacrifice, duty, our sense of what is right and wrong. It creates a false unity, as George Orwell noted, and allows us to perceive the world in simplistic terms – “us good, them bad” – suspending critical analysis and reasoned debate.
War is never less than catastrophic; nor is it bound by immediate time. Its tragic reverberations shake the foundations of generations not yet born. The bloodlust of the gods of war can never be sated; they will demand more and more till not a trace of us remains.
Science and technology have brought us to a place where our annihilation is guaranteed in the millisecond it takes the brain to communicate to the finger. For most of recorded time we have been at war: in the 20th century alone, 108 million people died.
Is it really impossible to imagine a world in which conflict and terror have no part? We have enormous power. Einstein, speaking of the horrors of the first World War, wrote: “Wars will stop when men refuse to fight.” Is it a delusion to believe that war is over if we want it? Or is it in man’s nature to forever perpetuate conflict, ultimately leading to his own destruction?
We have assiduously practised the religion of war for so long, as the essayist Arthur Clutton Brock wrote in 1923. Perhaps the only means to overcome it is the religion of peace made young again.
