The author is perhaps best known for his Flashman books, but this is his memoirs of his time as a soldier in the British Army in Burma, during WW2.

Some of you will recall that this was the theater in which my father served, so I grew up with an awareness of that fighting, the names of famous battles drifting by in Dad's conversation, even tho he "didn't like to talk about the War." In adulthood, I eventually realize the main reason for his silence was that he'd served as a company clerk, and had not actually seen combat! So, coming upon this book, I was intrigued to read the experiences of someone who had actually lived what Dad could only hint at.

First thing to strike me is that the book is decidedly non-PC. It was written in the mid Seventies, before such delicacies were thrust upon us, and in the opening sentence Fraser refers to the enemy collectively as "Jap". Not "the Japanese" or even "the Japs". Just "Jap". That aside, within a few pages he has already managed to give me a sense of what it was like to be inside his head as a 20-something in the middle of a bloody jungle war.

The title of the book, for those not familiar, come from the opening stanza of Kipling's GUNGA DIN, which I also read first (and often) as a child.

You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
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.

••

Not really. From the earliest days of realization that the Sun was a star, and that the stars were therefore suns in their own right, authors began speculating about life on other planets, even on the Sun itself! Wells was the first to suggest that life might turn out to hostile, tho!