Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by Harvill 1993
Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 1993
George MacDonald Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008334581
Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780007325764
Version: 2019-04-08
FOR JACK, ANDREW, HARRY, AND TOM,
SOME DAY,
THE TALE OF A GRANDFATHER
You may talk o’ gin and beer
When you’re quartered safe out here,
An’ you’re sent to penny fights an’ Aldershot it,
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
RUDYARD KIPLING, Gunga Din
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Introduction
Author’s Note
Quartered Safe Out Here
Epilogue: Fifty Years On
Footnotes
Glossary
About the Author
Also by George MacDonald Fraser
About the Publisher
It is satisfying, and at the same time slightly eerie, to read in an official military history of an action in which you took part, even as a very minor and bewildered participant. A coloured picture of men and guns and violent movement comes between the eye and the printed page; smells return to the nostrils, of dusty heat and oil and cordite smoke, and you hear again the rattle of small arms and crash of explosions, the startled oaths and the yells of command. And if the comparison is a humbling one, it is worth making if only to show how dehumanised military history has to be.
By rights each official work should have a companion volume in which the lowliest actor gives his version (like Sydenham Poyntz for the Thirty Years’ War or Rifleman Harris in the Peninsula); it would at least give posterity a sense of perspective.
For example, on page 287 of The War Against Japan: volume IV (The Reconquest of Burma), it is briefly stated that “a second series of raids began … and – Regiment suffered 141 casualties and lost one of its supporting tanks …”
That tank burned for hours, and when night came down it attracted Japanese in numbers. We lay off in the darkness with our safety catches on and grenades to hand, watching and keeping desperately quiet.