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No one who has not been through the chaos and carnage of the First World War on the Western Front in France and Belgium can really understand what it must have been like. This book is an addition to the already quite substantial collection of Bion's autobiographical writings and
deals specifically with this period of his life. Edited by his widow, Francesca Bion, it consists of three sections.
The major portion of the book, to me the most interesting, is a Diary. This was written not during the war itself but immediately afterwards in 1919, after Bion went up to Queen's College, Oxford. This Diary, a chronological account of his service in France between June 1917 and January 1919, is written for his mother. During the war itself Bion found himself unable to write to his parents at all, although at the time not quite knowing why. One assumes that his experiences were too indigestible, too incommunicable, to be put into words for his family to read. The Diary is an attempt to fill in these gaps, belatedly to provide for his mother some kind of account of what he had been doing and what had been happening to him.
The second section of the book is a short ‘Commentary’ written in 1972 after Bion read the Diary again, as he says, for the first time since it had been originally written. The Commentary takes the form of a conversation about the contents of the Diary between a person he calls ‘Myself’, the Bion of the then present day aged 75, and a character called ‘Bion’ who is the 21-year-old of 1919. The third section of the book was written in 1958 after his memory was jogged by a train journey with Francesca through Northern France. It is an account of the Battle of Amiens and is written in the third person about the experiences of a ‘Captain Bion DSO’. It is a much more literary narrative, almost reading as a short story. It breaks off in the middle of a sentence. As Francesca reminds us, Bion was at the time also engaged in the writing of Learning from Experience so