This is especially apparent in Mann’s novel because of the variation in the quality of the writing about war and that concerning the ‘private’ lives of the soldiers. Mann runs the public and private themes throughout the novel – the dreadfulness of the war, on the one hand, and the love Frank Jeffreys has for an English girl, Mary Hatton, which is destroyed when he eventually discovers that she had once given herself to another soldier, Charl Bentley. On the personal theme, Mann is capable of appalling writing like this:

His entire faculty of recognition, stretched too tautly on the bow of his desire, flew out at the first glimpse of the girl coming towards him as if it could be retained by strength of will no longer for the more careful discernment of its mark’s identity.

But the battle scenes, if somewhat familiar by now, are brilliantly done. The waste of the war, as well as the extraordinary episodes of heroism that it produced, are movingly conveyed.

Flesh in Armour is an intensely patriotic novel. The covert nationalism which critics such as Pringle have professed to discover in Manning’s novel is completely out in the open in this novel, which is an unqualified hymn of praise to the Australian soldier. It opens with two young soldiers in London – ‘their hates distinguished them as Australians’ – and closes with an impassive recital of the statistics of the Australians in combat which show them as far more successful and valiant troops than any other nationality (the New Zealanders are not mentioned). The most lyrical section in the novel is the short Chapter XVII, which is a panegyric to the Australian soldier:

His throat for a minute constricted painfully and his eyes glinted. The Australians – the Australians. Ah, if the five divisions had been three, company on company. But they were scattered into different corps. They should all be one – one corps, one and indivisible in body as they were in spirit. Were the Tommies afraid of the new nations? Standing to attention, dreaming to drums and trumpets.

At one point late in the novel, the now decimated Nth Battalion is threatened with being absorbed into other, English battalions and their soldiers (covertly supported by their officers) go on a kind of peaceful mutiny until the order is changed. This event, like most of the general events in the book, actually occurred and is discussed in Patsy Adam-Smith’s book, The Anzacs. The depleted Australian troops also save the bacon of the much larger contingent of American troops when they are introduced into the war – and the novel.

As a concomitant of the nationalism and celebration of the heroism of the Australians, the novel also contains a savage series of attacks on the incompetence of those running the war and especially the English system of selecting and promoting officers on the basis of class. Of one inexperienced officer, the novel comments:

Like half of the Tommy company officers, the boy was fitter for the nursery than to command men – as if to be a boy just out of a good school were the best criterion of fitness for this job.

Another soldier comments thoughtfully, ‘Don’t you think it a strange thing, Aussie, old chappie, that while England has generally managed to rake up a decent general in the past after a while, it hasn’t been able to in this war, which is the biggest?’ Mann does not seem even to mind the other side of the Australians’ undoubted heroism, which several war writers such as John Keegan and Robert Graves have commented on, their brutality and ruthlessness when it came to taking prisoners. He describes without apparent disapproval the outraged reactions of the troops to the casualties among their own men:

As the men scrambled forward they, too, began to fling their Mills bombs. The Fritzes began to put up their hands – too late for most of them. No ‘beg pardons’. For the first time, Frank Jeffreys killed a man, stabbing him in the stomach. A number of the enemy in the holes got away but not those at the pill box. There, the C company men, especially mad to avenge their dead on the wire, slaughtered the enemy clinging against the concrete, and those who ran out shouting from the exit.

Later, one of the men articulates this ethic to a German prisoner: ‘You can’t expect to tum a machine gun on us and then throw up your hands’.

Flesh in Armour is divided into nine sections, which basically alternate between peace and war. This is a common enough structure in World War novels and is not dissimilar to The Middle Parts of Fortune. There are scenes in London and in France, with the latter being divided between those of combat and the scenes of peaceful respite before the fighting is resumed. There is a sober, documentary kind of quality about the book that is impressive: events are carefully dated, beginning with August 1917 (there are hints that several of the characters have been fighting for some years already) and culminating in the period immediately before the Armistice. This, plus the impassive lists of the steadily diminishing troops, more effectively than anything else conveys the tragedy of the war. Casualties are incessant and, by the end of the novel, only the skeleton of the battalion is left.

The novel concentrates most of all on three men, none of whom attains more than a generalised kind of life. Charl Bentley, who gets from Mary Hatton everything that he wants, is a naive, totally unself-conscious and uncomplicated kind of man who, predictably, is the only survivor of the three. Frank Jeffreys, who falls in love with Mary, is the intellectual – or, at least, schoolteacher. He eventually cracks under the combined pressure of the war (at one point, he is buried alive in mud and dragged out by comrades only just in time) and his eventual conviction of Mary’s infidelity. He kills himself. Jim Blount is a kind of epitome of everything that is admirable, very similar to Manning’s Bourne, and he dies heroically. Flesh in Armour is not a profound novel psychologically, but it is compelling reading and has many moments of extraordinary power. Perhaps the greatest of these is the scene (Chapter XL) in which one of the soldiers, Johnny Wright, begins to sing the nursery rhyme. ‘Little Bo-peep has lost her sheep’ as the soldiers are waiting to go into battle. It is a scene of masterly power and almost unbearable pathos. This is a fine, and moving novel.

Although he went on to write seven novels in all, as well as several volumes of verse, Mann never equalled the quality of Flesh in Armour. What the later novels reveal is that he was in general less interested in war than in sexuality – especially female sexuality – in all its forms. The love interest in his first novel assumes greater importance retrospectively when one reads his later work. Although his male treatment of female sexual impulses can be awkward and self-conscious at times, he is well ahead of his time in offering us such portraits as that of the eponymous Andrea Caslin, a woman who frankly acknowledges her own sexual urges and need for gratification as well as the necessity to live in a man’s world by rules that men have created to their own advantage. In that novel and in Venus Half-Caste, Mann explores most fully a theme that obsessed him throughout his fiction.