Frederic Manning was born in Sydney in 1882 to a wealthy family. He was a sickly child, and was educated almost entirely by tutors. From age sixteen he lived with one of them in England (apart from occasional visits to his family) where he pursued a literary career before and after the war until his death from pneumonia in 1935.
He joined the King's Shropshire Light Infantry as a private in 1914.
The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916 was published anonymously in a limited edition by Piazza Press in 1929 - 'the events described in it actually happened; the characters are fictitious' - using the language of his fellow rankers, including their accents and obscenities. A sanitised version was printed and reprinted as
Her Privates We in 1930, and the original version was reprinted in 1977. The book was described by Ernest Hemingway as 'Probably the greatest book of men at war ever written,' and by Ezra Pound as 'One of the finest books ever written about the horror of warfare on the Western Front'.
The source text was Project Gutenberg Australia 0200261.txt, checked against a pdf version (which has its own typos and inconsistencies) of the 1929 edition from the University of Sydney Library. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, and replaced italics, diacritics, and scene breaks.
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