Quartered Safe Out Here

George MacDonald Fraser is best know as the author of the Flashman series of anti-historical novels. Flashman went everywhere the British Empire could find him, not as model soldier but as an arrant coward and all-round bounder. My son-in-law put me onto him. But it turns out that Fraser also wrote one of the finest World War II memoirs that have ever crossed my desk: Quartered Safe Out Here. The title is ironical: as a nineteen-year-old private first class, Fraser wasn't quartered safe; he was on the line in 17th Indian Division's reconquest of Burma in 1944-1945. It's a great yarn, told from long distance--it was first published in 2001.

The war story is a good one, but I also like Fraser's neat juxtaposition of today's dainty sensitivities with the realities of all-out war against a brutal enemy: "The damage that fashionable attitudes, reflected (and created) by television, have done to the public spirit, is incalculable. It has been weakened to the point where it is taken for granted that anyone who has suffered loss and hardship must be in need of 'counseling'; that soldiers will suffer from 'post-battle traumatic stress' and need psychiatric help. One wonders how Londoners survived the Blitz without the interference of unqualified, jargon-mumbling 'counsellors', or how an overwhelming number of 1940s servicemen returned successfully to civilian life without benefit of brain-washing. Certainly, a small minority needed help; war can leave terrible mental scars--but the numbers will increase, and the scars enlarge, in proportion to society's insistence on raising spectres which would be better left alone. Tell people they should feel something, and they'll not only feel it, they regarded themselves as entitled and obliged to feel it."

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford