''They can say what they bloody well like, but we''re a fuckin'' fine mob.''

Deep in the mud, stench of the Somme, Bourne is trying his best to stay alive. There he finds the intense fraternity of war and fear unlike anything he has ever known.

Frederic Manning''s novel was first published anonymously in 1929. The honesty with which he wrote about the horror, the boredom, and the futility of war inspired Ernest Hemingway to read the novel every year, ''to remember how things really were so that I will never lie to myself nor to anyone else about them.