Three Poetic Images of Hell from Frederic Manning

L'Enfer
Georges Leroux, 1921

Grotesque (Poem)

These are the damned circles Dante trod,

Terrible in hopelessness,

But even skulls have their humour,

An eyeless and sardonic mockery:

And we,

Sitting with streaming eyes in the acrid smoke,

That murks our foul, damp billet,

Chant bitterly, with raucous voices

As a choir of frogs

In hideous irony, our patriotic songs.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Frederic Manning (1882–1935) came to Britain in 1903 with his family. He originally signed up as a private in the King’s Shropshire Regiment, then started officer training in Oxford in April 1916. From August 1916 he served with the 7th battalion at the Somme and Ancre, and returned to the UK in December 1916 to undertake further officer training at Whittington Barracks before joining the Royal Irish Regiment in Dublin in May 1917. Greatly affected by his service on the Western Front, he began drinking heavily and was force to resign his commission in February 1918.

In 1917 he published a collection of poems under the title Ediola. This was a mixture of verse in his early style alongside war poems. In 1929 he composed a novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune, obviously autobiographical, about three soldiers’ experience of the trench nightmare, which is considered one of the greatest literary works to emerge from the war. A watered-down version was later published with the title  Her Privates We.

The Middle Parts of Fortune  (Novel Excerpt)

But war is a jealous god, destroying ruthlessly his rivals. . . In the last couple of days their whole psychological condition had changed: they had behind them no longer the moral impetus which thrust them into action, which carried them forward on a wave of emotional excitement, transfiguring all the circumstances of their life so that these could only be expressed in the terms of heroic tragedy, of some superhuman or even divine conflict with the powers of evil; all that tempest of excitement was spent, and they were now mere derelicts in a wrecked and dilapidated world, with sore and angry nerves sharpening their tempers, or shutting them up in a morose and sullen humour from which it was difficult to move them.

Fricourt (Somme Battlefield)
Borlase Smart

The Face  (Poem)

Out of the smoke of men’s wrath,

The red mist of anger,

Suddenly,

As a wraith of sleep,

A boy’s face, white and tense,

Convulsed with terror and hate,

The lips trembling…

Then a red smear, falling…

I thrust aside the cloud, as it were tangible,

Blinded with a mist of blood.

The face cometh again

As a wraith of sleep:

A boy’s face delicate and blonde,

The very mask of God,

Broken.

Note:  In an earlier posting, we presented Manning's reflections on death. It can found HERE.