Changes

|title=Her Privates We

|author=Frederic Manning

|publisher=Serpent's Tail

|date=September 2013

|summary=Frederic Manning's ''Her Privates We'' is a haunting First World War novel. Based upon the author's memories of the Battle of the Somme, the book has a terrifying realism, and its events linger in the reader's mind.

}}

Ernest Hemingway called Frederic Manning's ''Her Privates We'' 'The finest and noblest book of men in war' he had ever read. But Hemingway wasn't a very trustworthy man, so we tend to defer judgement. He is, however, useful for contrast. Hemingway's tales of war (such as ''A Farewell to Arms'' and ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'') usually involve macho misfits and trite love stories, feats of derring-do and filmic dialogue; all the things, in fact, that have no place in Manning's First World War novel. Why is this? Well, by the time Hemingway started driving a Red Cross ambulance on the Italian front (1918), Manning's service was already over. Nevertheless, unlike the illustrious (and self-mythologising) Hemingway, Manning spent his war deep in the trenches of the Somme, mixing it with the proletarian soldiery. As such, ''Her Privates We'' is a brutal novel concerning the 'subterranean, furtive, twilight life' of the average Tommy, a work of startling power, and one that completely eclipses the war novels of the romantic Hemingway.