Books: Western Front Englished

HER PRIVATES WE—Private 19022—Putnam ($2.50). Says Arnold Bennett, booster of books, preferably British: “Her Privates We will be remembered when All Quiet on the Western Front . . . is forgotten.” Like the German novel, Her Privates We is a record of personal experiences in the trenches, as the plain soldier knew them. It too is plotless, simple narrative, un-propagandist, unrhetorical. Its author has preferred to remain anonymous. Says “Private 19022”: “The events described actually happened; the characters are fictitious.” He tells of the fighting on the Somme and Ancre fronts during the last part of 1916; his characters are a company of an English regiment he calls the Westshires. Hero is Bourne, a gentleman ranker, who has come through the Somme battles with his two chums, Shem and Martlow, without a scratch. Not regular soldiers, they are veterans now, have the veteran’s point of view, try only to do as much as they can when they have to, make themselves as comfortable as possible betweenwhiles Fellow enlisted men like and admire Bourne, have seen him proved in action, but feel the difference between his class and theirs. Officers resent this, think it wrong for him to be in the ranks. Finally his captain persuades him to put in for a commission. Bourne, having grown into the private soldier’s ways of life and feelings about officers, agrees against his will would rather stay a private. He comes through another battle unharmed. But his chum Shem is wounded, Martlow killed. A few days before he is due to leave to begin his officer’s training. Bourne is practically ordered to volunteer for a trench raid into the German front lines The raid is successful. They are coming hack, when Bourne is shot through the chest, dies as he is being carried in. With more humor than All Quiet on the Western Front, Her Privates We is curiously like it in tone: in its quiet admiration of some men’s courage and cheerfulness, its despair and hatred of a subhuman way of life that uses men to stop bullets, feed rats. Her Privates We points no moral, needs to point none.