Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser

I said it might be appendicitis…and Forster spat and said, ‘Ah doot it’.

On one occasion, a newcomer to his section complained about stomach pains the night before an attack: In both nationality and class he was something of an outsider, although it seemed that it was the class differences that stood out more. As a result he joined the Border Regiment, which recruited from that part of England. Although the author considered himself a Scotsman, he grew up in the town of Carlisle, about 12 miles south of the Scottish border, where his father had a doctor’s practice. The reader certainly gets a feeling of authenticity from this memoir. They cannot see that they have been conditioned by the past forty years into a new philosophic condition, … they fail to realise there is a veil between them and the 1940s.” “…have a tendency to envisage themselves in the 1940s, and imagine their own reactions, and make the fatal mistake of thinking that the outlook was the same then. In his introduction, the author comments that later generations: Maybe it was ever thus, and it’s a theme that features quite prominently in George MacDonald Fraser’s memoir, written in the late 80s.

These days, if I watch historical drama on TV, I’m often left with the feeling that the programme makers have imposed modern social attitudes on the period featured. Some very funny stuff there, but his memoir of the war in Burma is another thing altogether funny, but tragic, and true. Fraser in the Flashman series, you should do so. Not for the faint of heart, but so truthful in its description of the combat infantryman's world. They were there to do a job and get out alive, and that's how most soldiers feel. And yet, Fraser and his comrades were not blood-thirsty few soldiers are, and those that are, are usually poor soldiers. His battalion had spent months being shot at and losing men in the jungle, by Japanese who melted away in the forest, and finally they were fighting in the open he tells of his happiness in being able to finally see and shoot the enemy.

Fraser is brutally honest, as when he describes being in the last battle of the war, in which, finally, the invisible enemy became visible. The strange decisions the soldiers had to make, like whether to shoot Japanese soldiers while sleeping, or to wake them up first, are the reality of the grunt's world (they decided it didn't matter much, one way or the other). Having served in infantry units myself, I felt the truth of this account in my bones. Fraser described his service in General Slim's Army in Burma as the 'last echo of Kipling's world', and that is not so far off the mark. Fraser's talents as a fiction writer, but it's all true. Written by the author of the Flashman historical novels, it benefits greatly from Mr. This is, hands down, the best first person account of war in the China-Burma-India Theater in WW2.

Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser