A passionate prodigality

Description:

When A Passionate Prodigality was first published in 1933 it was hailed as one of the finest English works to have come out of the Great War. Today, this memoir reads with a graphic immediacy, not merely in the descriptions of the filth and shock and carnage that characterised that struggle, but, particularly, in its evocation of men at war. Stylish, honest, and eloquent, A Passionate Prodigality is 'less a book than a living voice', demonstrating an important if little remembered truth: 'The poetry is not in the pity. To hell with your generalized pity. What the survivor remembers is not the fears that he knew, the pains, but the faces and a few words of the men who were with him at the front...'

subjects: English Personal narratives,  The Royal Fusiliers,  13th Battalion,  1914-1918,  World War,  World War, 1914-1918,  Campaigns,  British Personal narratives

People: Guy Chapman

Places: Western Front,  southern and central France

Times: July 1915 through the end of the War in November 1918.