Wyndham Lewis's 'most active colleague': William Harcourt's 1917 Diary

Throughout Wyndham Lewis’s military service on the Western Front one of his close colleagues, William Harcourt, was keeping a detailed daily diary. This article reproduces its text from late May to late October 1917 with explanatory notes. Having been in family possession until its recent archival deposit, Harcourt’s contemporaneously recorded testimony offers an important counterpoise to the recollections that can be found in Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). Its publication therefore provides Lewis scholars with a valuable resource that may be useful in re-exploring the wartime experiences that were so influential upon his art and writing.