In addition to its pathos and impact as a partly autofictional novel of the First World War, Frederic Manning's Her Privates We (1929) is an invaluable reference work of historical profanity. No joke: it is the sweariest literature I have encountered from its period and not at the bowdlerized remove of effing and blinding required by its first traditional publication in 1930, acclaimed as it was for its blunt realism at the time. Its rank and file in the trenches of the Somme in 1916 exclaim in amazement, "Well, you can fuck me!" and protest even in the shell-crouched crush of waiting to go over the top, "For Christ's sake walk on your own fuckin' feet an' not on mine!" A shy recruit is catcalled in the baths, "Dost turn thysen to t' wall, lad, so's us 'ns sha'n't see tha dick?' while the the battalion's sergeant is extravagantly apostrophized after an extended order drill, "What's the cunt want to come down 'ere buggerin' us about for, 'aven't we done enough bloody work in th' week?" "Bloody" might as well be a filler word in everyone's speech, officers and enlisted men alike, with "bugger" a close second. "Balls-up" is hardly surprising in context of the Western Front, but it was news to me that an unpopular person could even then be dismissed as a "twat." Fans of tmesis will appreciate evidence of the perennial "abso-bloody-lutely," although I personally enjoyed the macaronic "fuck off 'ome jildy, toot sweet." It is inevitable that there should have been front-line filk of a song as popular as "Keep the Home-Fires Burning," but I'd never heard:
'Oh, they've called them up from Weschurch,
And they've called them up from Wen,
And they'll call up all the women,
When they've fucked up all the men.'
When Bourne, the novel's aimless, thoughtful, sardonically misfit gentleman-ranker of a protagonist makes free to speculate on the absurdity of sticking to the forms of war in the chaos of wartime, his philosophy is dashed by his corporal's cold-water realism: "What's the use of talking about it? If Jerry hadn't taken all his stuff down to the Somme, we'd be shelled to shit in half-an-hour." It's incredible, not just because of the immersive, defamiliarizing and—as noted by this edition's insightful foreword—modernizing effect on the reader who gets slung in with these soldiers for whom "hell" and "damn" have become practically minced oaths, but because it's happening in its own time. It's not the hindsight translation of a writer making sure that the blasphemies of the past will register with the same force as the obscenities of the present. It's as near a record as the author himself could reconstruct of a mindset and a mode of expression he had lived in. Any number of other extremely good, stark, modernist or merely effective war novels from this era content themselves with dashes and circumlocution and the more legally printable grades of bad language. Her Privates We couldn't be more than privately circulated with its intended language intact until the 1970's. Take a number, James Joyce. The novel in no way reads as though it were written to offend rather than testify, but there may be a slight tweak of readerly sensibilities nonetheless when Bourne is teased for lapsing himself into the soldier's ubiquitous slang and responds in his customary role of light comedy, "Oh, you all swear like so many Eton boys . . . Have you ever heard an Aussie swear?" Alas, we do not get the chance—or the meta-joke unless we are in on the pseudonymously published secret that the "Private 19022" who had gone to the Somme with the Shropshire Light Infantry was himself Australian—but when the men are suddenly instructed to wear their greatcoats en banderole, we do hear the no longer shockingly worded, indignantly plaintive outcry from one soldier floundering in a sausage of khaki serge, "'o's the bloody shit 'o invented this way o' doin' up a fuckin' overcoat?"
I like this novel beyond its full-metal-mackintosh vocabulary; like all war stories, it should not be embarked upon without bracing for attrition. In its catalogue of period-typicality, I appreciate the presence of Shem, who is one of Bourne's two closest chums and Jewish and possessed of a marvelous look of melting innocence which can get him out of just about any scrape with an officer—likened to the fish-pools of Heshbon, so it may as well be taken as read that he's hot—and just as Bourne's ribbing about his finances was exceeding my tolerance for even unserious antisemitism, the point of the story turned out to be that Shem who presents himself as a cynic of the bottom line actually chucked the safety of a staff job in England for the hazards of the front line in France and since the canard of Jews as slackers persisted through two world wars, I took the refutation as intended. Schoolboyish Martlow having a sailor's mouth even among soldiers may be more archetypal, but the kid makes the point that hasn't stopped being relevant through all the folk songs I grew up on and the wars of my own lifetime: "They don't care a fuck 'ow us'ns live . . . We're just 'umped an' bumped an' buggered about all over fuckin' France, while them as made the war sit at 'ome waggin' their bloody chins, an' sayin' what they'd 'ave done if they was twenty years younger. Wish to Christ they was, an' us'ns might get some leaf an' go 'ome an' see our own folk once in a while." Estimating the chances of that happening will send you on as bad a bender as Bourne, who inherited from his author, along with his age and education and perhaps his existentialism, the PTSD-fueled boozing into which his habitual, ironical detachment begins to dissociate as the novel approaches its climactic setting of the Battle of the Ancre. Like everything else real, it comes down to what people will do for one another, which is different from what they might do for a principle or an order, or at least one has to keep hoping so. But also a heck of a lot of swearing. "If you don't use any bad language when you're awake, you make up for it in your sleep."
'Oh, they've called them up from Weschurch,
And they've called them up from Wen,
And they'll call up all the women,
When they've fucked up all the men.'
When Bourne, the novel's aimless, thoughtful, sardonically misfit gentleman-ranker of a protagonist makes free to speculate on the absurdity of sticking to the forms of war in the chaos of wartime, his philosophy is dashed by his corporal's cold-water realism: "What's the use of talking about it? If Jerry hadn't taken all his stuff down to the Somme, we'd be shelled to shit in half-an-hour." It's incredible, not just because of the immersive, defamiliarizing and—as noted by this edition's insightful foreword—modernizing effect on the reader who gets slung in with these soldiers for whom "hell" and "damn" have become practically minced oaths, but because it's happening in its own time. It's not the hindsight translation of a writer making sure that the blasphemies of the past will register with the same force as the obscenities of the present. It's as near a record as the author himself could reconstruct of a mindset and a mode of expression he had lived in. Any number of other extremely good, stark, modernist or merely effective war novels from this era content themselves with dashes and circumlocution and the more legally printable grades of bad language. Her Privates We couldn't be more than privately circulated with its intended language intact until the 1970's. Take a number, James Joyce. The novel in no way reads as though it were written to offend rather than testify, but there may be a slight tweak of readerly sensibilities nonetheless when Bourne is teased for lapsing himself into the soldier's ubiquitous slang and responds in his customary role of light comedy, "Oh, you all swear like so many Eton boys . . . Have you ever heard an Aussie swear?" Alas, we do not get the chance—or the meta-joke unless we are in on the pseudonymously published secret that the "Private 19022" who had gone to the Somme with the Shropshire Light Infantry was himself Australian—but when the men are suddenly instructed to wear their greatcoats en banderole, we do hear the no longer shockingly worded, indignantly plaintive outcry from one soldier floundering in a sausage of khaki serge, "'o's the bloody shit 'o invented this way o' doin' up a fuckin' overcoat?"
I like this novel beyond its full-metal-mackintosh vocabulary; like all war stories, it should not be embarked upon without bracing for attrition. In its catalogue of period-typicality, I appreciate the presence of Shem, who is one of Bourne's two closest chums and Jewish and possessed of a marvelous look of melting innocence which can get him out of just about any scrape with an officer—likened to the fish-pools of Heshbon, so it may as well be taken as read that he's hot—and just as Bourne's ribbing about his finances was exceeding my tolerance for even unserious antisemitism, the point of the story turned out to be that Shem who presents himself as a cynic of the bottom line actually chucked the safety of a staff job in England for the hazards of the front line in France and since the canard of Jews as slackers persisted through two world wars, I took the refutation as intended. Schoolboyish Martlow having a sailor's mouth even among soldiers may be more archetypal, but the kid makes the point that hasn't stopped being relevant through all the folk songs I grew up on and the wars of my own lifetime: "They don't care a fuck 'ow us'ns live . . . We're just 'umped an' bumped an' buggered about all over fuckin' France, while them as made the war sit at 'ome waggin' their bloody chins, an' sayin' what they'd 'ave done if they was twenty years younger. Wish to Christ they was, an' us'ns might get some leaf an' go 'ome an' see our own folk once in a while." Estimating the chances of that happening will send you on as bad a bender as Bourne, who inherited from his author, along with his age and education and perhaps his existentialism, the PTSD-fueled boozing into which his habitual, ironical detachment begins to dissociate as the novel approaches its climactic setting of the Battle of the Ancre. Like everything else real, it comes down to what people will do for one another, which is different from what they might do for a principle or an order, or at least one has to keep hoping so. But also a heck of a lot of swearing. "If you don't use any bad language when you're awake, you make up for it in your sleep."
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