Quartered Safe Out Here is one the of the quintessential infantry memoirs, a tale of six months with Nine Section in Burma in 1944 and 1945. Fraser, of course has won lasting popularity as the author of the Flashman series, and he brings all his literary weight to this memoir. It's really about the ten or so men of Nine Section, grousing Cumbrian bandits in the finest tradition of their Boarder Riever ancestors. The rolling Cumbrian dialect, the complaints and arguments, the stand-tos and patrols and attacks, all come through.

Memory is a fickle thing, and tentpoles of fervent adrenaline in assaults on bunkers and desperate night actions and interspersed with long periods where nothing much happens, or nothing that could have stood out to be remembered 50 years later. And as with the Burma Campaign as a whole, it was the last brave show of the British Empire, where an army composed of Gurkhas and Sikhs and innumerable other Indian ethnicity, with madcap East African convoy drivers, and regiments from some specific English county, slugged it out with the cream of the Japanese army in the trackless jungle hills. There's glory, and humor, and jungle sores and malaria and dusty marches.

I could have done with fewer complaints about modern society having gone to the dogs, but Fraser is entitled to his pint and his grousing, because the story is incredible. Just a fantastic book.