ABSTRACT
Wilfred Bion’s first writings on the war are his War Memoirs. The Memoirs are a factual record of Bion’s war service in France in the Royal Tank Regiment between June 1917 and January 1919. In the late 1960s/early 1970s, the Bions, in California, Francesca Bion made a typescript of the original War Memoir diaries, and Bion read it for the first time in 50 years. In August 1958, Bion and Francesca, his second wife, visited France and the battlefields of the First World War. The Long Weekend (from which the quotes of his childhood have been taken) was written in Bion’s seventies. After some months of what he describes as a good training in the United Kingdom, Bion sees his first action at the third battle of Ypres, the Battle of Passchendaele July/August 1917. Bion knows that the British defensives being lauded do not in fact exist.
