Guy Chapman (1889–1972)

I usually enjoy WWI memoirs, but A PASSIONATE PRODIGALITY simply never quite engaged me, with the author's matter of fact account of his progress as a junior officer across France and the dreary trench life shared with his rag-tag British unit. True, his dry humor evokes the occasional chuckle, but that wasn't enough to keep me reading, so, after ninety-plus pages, I finally just gave it up. My apologies to the late Mr Chapman. This book was first published over 80 years ago. The new Pen & Sword edition is a handsome volume, but the story itself I found to be "just okay."

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA… (mehr)

Chapman wrote a very matter-of-fact, very laconic account of his service during the Great War.

This book is often used by some WWI-hobbyists to prove that things weren't half-bad, that a lot was boredom, or marching to-and-fro, that the pacifists and oxbridge-veterans-turned-pacifists along with the liberals and lefties of the 1960s have it quite wrong.

I can't say I am convinced. No, not at all.

Chapman has a writing style as dry and stiff-lipped as tinder. If one is willing to overlook certain extremely distantly written passages for what they are, then yes, one might arrive at such ideas. However, I've read a few too many of these dry, distanced memoirs by now, and I've also read up on the effects of PTSD and PITS not to recognise what I am reading there. The horror makes it through quite intact when you know where to look:

"...my eye caught something white and shining. I stooped. It was the last five joints of a spine. There was nothing else, no body, no flesh..."

"...This area was strewn with dead. The dead had haversacks. The haversacks had socks...The allowance was two pairs per man...we acquired some thousands pairs of unauthorized socks..."

"...One private ran across No-Man's-Land with an apron full of bombs, drew the pin of one, slung the whole lot into the trench and jumped in on top of them..."

"...the privates were nearly all children, tired, hardly able to drag their laden shoulders after their aching legs. Here and there an exhausted boy trudged along with tears coursing down his face..."

"...and there is a 'still' of the grey puzzled face of a boy, in the arms of two pals, who has been shot through the testicles, the scrotum swollen to the size of a polo ball..."

Chapman's voice is so far detached that it sounds as if he is retelling a tale he read in a book in his early childhood, yet what he tells is quite often so gruesome, you--the reader--groan, and the very fact of this detachment alone makes this quite the reverse of what some people wish to make out of it, for he also peppers his account with at times quite vicious attacks on the upper echelons and their stupidity. Chapman was in a perfect position to observe exactly this, as he served for a long time as adjutant and intermediary between the NCOs and the general staff--not quite here and not quite there. As a consequence he could directly observe the blunders and arrogances committed and he had no compunction mentioning these in the very same acerbic, dry tone.

This is one of the more important accounts of this war.… (mehr)

2208 A Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of Autobiography, by Guy Chapman (read 22 Apr 1989) The author, in 1965 a British history professor, in 1933 published this book, in which he tells of his time as an officer in the British Army from 1915 to 1918. He was at the front often, was never wounded, and he writes well. He did get back to England on leave occasionally, but this book dwells little on leave time. It is vivid and real and honest, and of course awful. In his 1966 foreword to this edition Chapman talks of Arnold Zweig's "great trilogy, the only 20th century novel to stand beside 'War and Peace'" but then does not name the books making up such trilogy! This book is an excellent book, even though I count 58 books I have read up to now (Apr 22, 1989) on World War One.… (mehr)