A Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of Autobiography

This classic WWI memoir by a decorated infantryman and historian presents a vivid account of life in the trenches on the Western Front.   During World War One, Major Guy Chapman, OBE MC, served in the Royal Fusiliers and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery. Joining soon after war was declared, Chapman was stationed in France and fought in the Battle of Arras.   When Chapman’s memoir, 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 it reads with a graphic immediacy, not merely in the descriptions of the shock and carnage of war, but in its evocation of the men who fought—“certain soldiers who have now become a small quantity of Christian dust.”