World War I
By the time Bowra left Cheltenham College, his father was Chief Secretary of the Customs Service, residing in Beijing with a household employing thirty servants. In January Bowra's mother came to England, to visit her sons, who were both about to see active service in the army. In May, Bowra departed with his mother for China, travelling through Norway, Sweden, and Russia. In Beijing Bowra visited the Great Wall of China and the Ming Tombs, and witnessed the funeral ceremony of Yuan Shikai.
Bowra departed Beijing in September, and on his way home spent three weeks in St Petersburg (then called Petrograd), as the guest of Robert Wilton. During this time he attained a working knowledge of Russian and attended opera performances in which Feodor Chaliapin performed.
On returning to England Bowra trained with the OTC in Oxford, before being called up and sent to the Royal Army Cadet School in March 1917. Bowra served in the Royal Field Artillery, on active service in France from September 1917. In 1917, he saw action at Passchendaele and Cambrai, and in 1918 participated in resistance to the Ludendorff Offensive and the following allied counter-offensive. During this time he continued to read widely, including such works as The Wild Swans at Coole and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Greek and Latin authors.
Bowra was left with a lifelong hatred of war and military strategists, to an extent that he seldom mentioned the war afterwards. Bowra later told Cyril Connolly, "Whatever you hear about the war, remember it was far worse: inconceivably bloody – nobody who wasn't there can imagine what it was like." Anthony Powell wrote that Bowra's wartime experiences "played a profound part in his thoughts and inner life", and records that when a cruise ship on which they were travelling held a ceremony to place a wreath in the sea as it passed the Dardanelles, Bowra was so affected that he retired to his cabin. Following the Second World War he would be accommodating to returning servicemen who wished to study at Oxford, telling one applicant who was worried about his deficiency in Latin, "No matter, War Service counts as Latin."
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