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Bion's war diary, which he kept with him during combat, covered his years fighting in tanks in France during the First World War. He was just twenty years old when he began writing it. War Memoirs constitutes the final part of Bion's autobiography. It comprised three hardbound notebooks written soon after he had been demobilized from the Army and had begun his studies at Queen's College, Oxford. He wrote it for his parents as compensation for having found it impossible to write to them during the war. It has been aptly described by Winship (1999) as a “book about the blood and guts of a youth who cut his teeth in the most devastating of circumstances”.
Bion begins it, with the entry on 26 June 1917, by stating,
In writing this, I cannot be absolutely accurate in some things, as I have lost my diary. In the main it will only be my impressions of the various actions. I do not intend to write much about life outside of action except in so far as it will give an idea of the life we led. My dates of events out of the line cannot be accurate. Actions are, however, accurate as they are very clearly stamped on one's memory!
The actions he describes in the War Memoirs are terrifying and detailed. They form the basis for his later understanding, as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, of the inner torments faced by the patients he treated. In Band of Brigands: The First Men in Tanks (2009), Christy Campbell, referring to a segment of Bion's descriptions, wrote: “Bion (who later became a psychoanalyst) looks repeatedly in his account at how sentient human beings continue to operate when everything around them is dissolving into violent chaos” (p. 290). Such is the detail recorded by Bion that they have been found valuable by military historians of the period. Brigadier General Sir Hugh Jamieson Elles led the action of 20 November 1917 in
which Bion was nominated for the Victoria Cross and earned both the British DSO and the French Légion d'Honneur. Colonel Mackenzie sent a detaile