Foreword to Diary. War Memoirs 1917-1919

I wish to express my gratitude to Cesare Sacerdoti for making possible the publication of this book of war memoirs to mark the centenary of Wilfred Bion's birth. It is not only especially apt at this time but is also a valuable addition to the already numerous and wide-ranging Bion writings.

Francesca Bion

1997

This is Bion's factual record of his war service in France in the Royal Tank Regiment between June 1917 and January 1919, written soon after he went up to The Queen's College, Oxford, after demobilization. Hand-written and contained in three hardbound notebooks, it was offered to his parents as compensation for having found it impossible to write letters to them during the war (see ‘Commentary’, p. 199). It has none of the nightmare quality he so vividly depicted in The Long Week-End; he would have been unable to express his very recent painful experiences, especially to his parents. But it is evident that he had them in mind throughout: detailed descriptions of tanks and equipment, explanations of battle strategy, photographs and diagrams were included for their benefit – and ‘bloody’ became ‘b___y’ in deference to their disapproval of swearing, a by no means unusual attitude at that time; Shaw's ‘Pygmalion’ had been first performed only five years earlier, shocking audiences with Eliza's ‘not bloody likely’.

He writes in the immature style of a public-school boy of that period, using ‘awful’, ‘terrific’, ‘beastly’, ‘absolutely’, ‘frightfully’ and a liberal peppering of ‘verys’. But one must remember that it was his first piece of descriptive writing: he had entered the army at the age of eighteen soon after leaving school; he was catapulted, like millions of others, from schoolboy to combatant soldier in a few months. The horror of that war inflicted on such young men did not contribute to their maturity; it destroyed their youth and made them ‘old’ before their time. Bion's remarkable physical survival against heavy odds concealed the emotional injury which le