Remembrance Sunday and ‘The Middle Parts of Fortune’

‘Faith. Her privates we…’

Hamlet, Shakespeare

We are still here. The stock photo of the great-grandfather, dashing and moustachioed in dress, looking into the distance at the future and the background, is pulled routinely rom the dresser. A moment’s quiet thrown pensively into the well of humbling silence of the names and voices lost to war. That of Frederic Manning’s is, however, one that remains.

The Middle Parts of Fortune, which loosely chronicles the author’s time amidst the ranks in a constant battle between the unwanted elevation of social background and his desire to serve with good men, is often compared against its somewhat hazy mirror image – Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The latter is, I believe, the superior book though many attest that opinion due to Remarque’s depictions of violence and their effect on the psyche. Lead protagonist Bourne’s (a.k.a. Manning’s) war is conversely filled with waiting, bureaucracy and a wet, seeping attrition of faith in the cause.

Perhaps in place of those perceived inadequacies in parallel with the “quintessential” novel of World War One, Manning presents us with something very important, voices (helped greatly if reading the un-censored version). Not merely through the saturation of the dialogue with dialect do we garner a sense of the British army as individuals under the uniforms, but through Manning’s privileged straddling positions between officers and “men”. This feeling of seeing the faces and, more importantly, hearing the voices that consist not an army merely but at first a group of humans; is the triumph of this piece of literature – something we would all do well to educate ourselves with if we are to gain some insight into unbelievable times.

Manning, like so many others, endured -and so:

‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them’

For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon