Eidola: Enriched edition. The Brutal Reality of WWI Through a Soldier's Eyes

by Frederic Manning

Eidola is a collection of poems by the Australian author Frederick Manning Many of these poems are written during the first world war. Although born in Sydney, New South Wales, Manning at this period was resident in England and joined the military after a few attempts failed because of ill-health. The poems he wrote for "Eidola" were mainly introspective, although written during service in 1917.

52 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1917

About the author

Manning was born in 1882 in Sydney, Australia, and whose father was a one-time mayor. Educated privately, he was thereafter sent to England to complete his studies.

In the immediate pre-war years Manning established a reputation as a minor poet and critic among a small circle of intimates.

With the outbreak of war in August 1914 Manning enlisted as a Private with the 7th Battalion King's Shropshire Light Infantry, serving in the trenches in France among some of the more bloody battles of the war.

In 1929 Manning anonymously published in a private edition his novelised memoirs of the war, The Middle Parts of Fortune, in two volumes. In place of his name he simply listed his army serial number.

The following year, 1930, an expurgated edition of the book was commercially published as Her Privates We - without the strong language deemed likely to offend a wider readership.

Manning wrote no more fiction, retiring instead into scholarly seclusion. He died in London in 1935; it was a further eleven years before he was finally identified as the author of the war classic hailed by Hemingway as "the finest and noblest book of men in war I have ever read".

T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) observed that "no praise could be too sheer for this book ... it justifies every heat of praise. Its virtues will be recognised more and more as time goes on."