When
A Passionate Prodigality
was first published in 1933 it was hailed as one of the finest English works to have come out of the First World War. Today this memoir reads with a graphic immediacy, not merely in the descriptions of the filth and shock and carnage that characterized the struggle, but in its evocation of men at war – ‘certain soldiers who have now become a small quantity of Christian dust’.
Stylish, honest and eloquent,
is less a book than a living voice, demonstrating an important if little remembered truth: ‘The poetry is not in the pity. To hell with your generalized pity. What the survivor remembers is not the fears he knew, the pains, but the faces and a few words of the men who were with him at the front.’