A passionate prodigality

the long version

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...'