The German Prisoner. INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR.

A Signed Limited Edition; 8vo, Publisher's crimson buckram, wood engraving frontispiece by William Roberts, with an Introduction by Richard Aldington, top edge gilt, gilt lettering, others uncut, pp. 36, privately printed, 1930.

This is number 492 of 500 copies signed by the Author, and further inscribed to the recipient of the book Arthur Dawson, with a long quotation from the work on front free endpaper. The inscription reads:

"To Arthur Dawson.

Yours sincerely

James Hanley

Remember young Dollan mounting that old woman. Looked like a bloody witch. I still remember her nearly bald head.

Well!

Any you chucked young Dollan off, and got into bed with her yourself.

Page 29."

A very good example.

The German Prisoner is the terrible story of two soldiers and their sadistic treatment of a young German prisoner in a shell-hole of No Man's Land during the First World War.

Richard Aldington (1892-1962), a committed pacifist by 1930, sponsored the private publication of The German Prisoner, and wrote an introduction for the work. In his introduction, Aldington states in part:

"Here we see human nature ruthlessly exposed in its most abject and most terrible circumstances; we see the unspeakable wrong which is worked upon human souls by those who are supposed to be its guardians and guides. Why are these men in this hell? Mr. Hanley leaves us to find the answer. But what force and vitality there are in this presentation of men driven to madness under this inconceivable stress of modern war."

James Hanley was born in Liverpool to a working class family in 1897. As a young man he served in the Merchant Navy before deserting and joining the Canadian Army, where he fought in France. The German Prisoner was privately printed rather than commercially published, so that it avoided the fate of Hanley's published work a year earlier entitled "Boy", which was banned under obscenity rules for the next 60 years.

(National Museums Liverpool.)

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