‘Excursion into a foreign tongue’

Abstract

This chapter juxtaposes the writings of two men whom we might think of as non-standard First World War combatants. Both were literary men; both were somewhat older than their fellow soldiers when they joined up: Frederic Manning was thirty-four when he enlisted as a private in the Shropshire Light Infantry in October 1915, and Ford Madox Ford was forty-one when he enlisted in July 1915 and was given a commission in the Welsh Regiment. Manning was born in Australia and had come to England in 1903; Ford was half-German. He went through the war under the German surname of Hueffer, his family name, and changed his surname to Ford only after the end of the war.