Before you is the most terrible, most cruel, most uncompromising book about the First World War. A book in which every word is true. Frederick Manning (1882–1935) was born in Australia and became famous as a poet quite early, and in 1903 he moved to England. Since childhood, Manning was distinguished by poor health and an indomitable spirit, so with the outbreak of the First World War, despite a number of refusals, he managed to volunteer for the front. He found himself in the midst of the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles on the Western Front. What he saw and experienced left a serious imprint on his subsequent life, and in 1929 he published the novel “The Private Parts of Fortune”, the prototype of one of the characters, Bourne, was Manning himself. “The Private Parts of Fortune” became the standard of military prose for English-language literature. It is not for nothing that Frederick Manning was named among his teachers by such different authors as Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound. The book contains obscene language!