A soldier’s story
For your Remembrance Day reading, Simon Crump reviews Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (published in an expurgated version in 1930) in The Guardian as “easily the best book I’ve ever read about the first world war.” Crump says he reads a new book about that war every year in order to better understand and remember his grandfather who fought in the battle of the Somme.
The book “is a frank, immediate, unsentimental novel about war, absolutely rammed with swearing,” Crump says, partly attributing the superiority of this book’s account of the war to the fact that Manning himself was in it. “He fought in the trenches. He was alternately bored shitless or scared shitless, an observation which Siegfried Sassoon made rather more elegantly in his Memoirs of an Infantry Man — but with that elegance, Sassoon undermined and trivialised its truth. Manning saw the whole ghastly business with a soldier’s eye, and afterwards with a writer’s eye.”
Even if you aren’t looking for a First World War book, Crump’s review alone is a good Remembrance Day read. The memories of his grandfather after the war and some striking parallels with a young friend, who just recently returned from service with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in Iraq, offer a lot to think about during that moment of silence.
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Click here for the full review in The Guardian
