The First World War seems to have been too beastly for literature, or perhaps simply too efficient at killing the people who might have written novels about it. Other than the Poets (or to quote Blackadder, the "endless, bloody, poetry") and All Quiet on the Western Front which my not having read is rapidly becoming a mortal embarrassment, this seems to be the only significant work of literature produced by a combatant about the front line. Frederic Manning certainly wasn't your common-or-garden Tommy — he was a litterateur, an Australian, probably gay, and in his late thirties when he enlisted — but is a monument to the men who found themselves, through no fault of their own, entrenched in the Somme. What makes it live and breathe is the ventriloquism — the brilliantly rendered voices of a Britain where regional accents and vocab were yet unmuddied by mass media. I learnt for "crazy", and for a cobbler, and I was glad to see that "cunt-struck" has over a century of pedigree. The swearing is as fluent as can be. Very few writers can render accents convincingly in prose, and Manning is one of them. He was with the Shropshires (or "Westshires" in the novel), where I'm from, and some of the voices here reminded me of the codgers they brought into my primary school in the 80's to tell us first-hand what a terrific disaster the whole thing was for everyone involved.