Rating: 
Summary: Superbly written, totally honest
Review: The author of the Flashman series gives his account, from the ground level, of the campaign in Burma with his beloved Nine Section. This war memoir is fascinating for several reasons. First, Fraser is, for all intents and purposes, Flashman himself: the broad racial delineations, the bald admiration for famous generals, the unabashed Imperialist fervor mixed with rational analysis of battle, even the fear of waiting before battle and the mad adrenaline rush afterwards. It strikes me that Flashy isn't a character at all, just Fraser himself, made a bit more cowardly, and set in the Victorian era. For Fraser is one of the last of the old unreconstructed crotchety men of the empire: the book is vehemently non-PC. Fraser admits that he still feels hatred for the Japs (as he calls the enemy), even preferring not to sit by them in public places today. The '40s propaganda image of the Jap as "an evil, misshapen, buck-toothed barbarian who looked and behaved like something sub-Stone Age" is Fraser's image of them to a T. (Which might say something about his abilities to assess things rationally, since by his own admission civilized lights mustn't shine much in war, or you'll lose; and his section committed what would be called war crimes today; obviously, both sides harbored the same kind of racist illusions, but Fraser can't see that). He bemoans many other facets of modern mores as well (like "counseling" and "war guilt"), but the main thrust of the book is the sometimes funny, sometimes appalling, obviously soul- changing experience that was war. It's a superb war memoir, peppered with odd characters and vivid battle scenes, and a very important record of what the average foot-soldier felt at the time.
Rating: 
Summary: A brilliant memoir
Review: This is a wonderful evocation of a period I'm glad not to have known first hand. Fraser has created a marvelous memoir of his time as an enlisted man in the British 14th Indian Army during World War II.Fraser strikes a nice balance between what might be called the "patriotic" and "revisionist" schools of military memoir. He neither praises the war and his part in it as a great adventure nor completely damns it as an unnecessary, unthinking, descent into utter brutality. Which leads me to beleive that it's a better reflection of what it was really like than many works out there. Of particular interest on this score are two sections: First, Fraser takes scornful issue with some of the ideas Paul Fussel puts forth in "Wartime." Then he discusses the use of atomic weapons to end the war, with a conclusion that is rather unexpected. But these are sidelights to the meat of the book -- a description of his time with the 17th; the campaigns as seen from a foot-soldiers point of view; his descriptions of his officers and fellow soldiers; what it felt like, in action, on patrol, and in camp. It is all written in Fraser's usual readable, conversational, and engaging style. This book is indispensable.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant memoir
Review: This is a wonderful evocation of a period I'm glad not to have known first hand. Fraser has created a marvelous memoir of his time as an enlisted man in the British 14th Indian Army during World War II. Fraser strikes a nice balance between what might be called the "patriotic" and "revisionist" schools of military memoir. He neither praises the war and his part in it as a great adventure nor completely damns it as an unnecessary, unthinking, descent into utter brutality. Which leads me to beleive that it's a better reflection of what it was really like than many works out there. Of particular interest on this score are two sections: First, Fraser takes scornful issue with some of the ideas Paul Fussel puts forth in "Wartime." Then he discusses the use of atomic weapons to end the war, with a conclusion that is rather unexpected. But these are sidelights to the meat of the book -- a description of his time with the 17th; the campaigns as seen from a foot-soldiers point of view; his descriptions of his officers and fellow soldiers; what it felt like, in action, on patrol, and in camp. It is all written in Fraser's usual readable, conversational, and engaging style. This book is indispensable.
Rating:
Summary: Fraser's own story and own voice
Review: This is Fraser's memoir, written decades later, of his experiences as a teenaged infantryman fighting the Japanese in Burma with General Slim's army in World War II. He doesn't exaggerate those experiences or attempt to twist them into a novelish coming-of-age story or a Flashman-style comic adventure. There is a strong element of the old-style "dialect story" in the recreated dialogue between Fraser and his comrades, most of whom are from Cumberland in the North of England, but these are both convincing and fun, and when the group comes under fire you share Fraser's feelings of comradeship with them in part because of that dialogue. What surprised and pleased me most about this book is the imprint of Fraser's own personality and strong opinions --- Flashman he is not. He's an old man now, and has grown more conservative and just a little cranky, but he's no less sharp an observer, resulting in a voice that's perfect (for my tastes) for first-person narration of and commentary on witnessed historical events. He indulges in some sentimentality that his famous character Flashman would have mocked --- about the characteristics of "Englishmen," for instance --- but knowing what he experienced in Burma you feel that he's more than earned the right to sentimentalize. Toward the end he leaves his narrative to defend the use of the atom bomb against Japan; he says that to protect his grandchildren he'd "gladly throw the switch on the entire Japanese nation," and that if you can't say the same you've got no business being a parent. I was shocked and delighted with the honesty of that sentence, and of this book as a whole.
Rating:
Summary: No quarter asked or given
Review: This wonderful autobiography of Frazer's wartime experiences with British forces in Burma should be compulsory reading in military training schools. The book contains all of the hallmarks of fluid writing, natural dialogue and a fine storytelling sense that readers of Frazer's Flashman books know well. But here too is a compassion for the ordinary soldier and a realistic accounting of how Frazer's companions thought, felt and fought their way through one of the harshest battlegrounds of the Second World War. Some of Frazer's views -- about the Japanese, about the treatment of prisoners of war, about how soldiers regarded war dead from their own numbers -- may make contemporary readers uncomfortable. But the book is all the more valuable because of Frazer's willingness to recount what he remembers from the time rather than to sugar-coat or glamorise some difficult truths. I would have liked to read 'Quartered Safe Out Here' some years earlier when my father, a Second World War veteran, was still alive. The books gives an insight into the thinking and experiences of a remarkable generation of people. I could not recommend it more strongly for those interested in the psychology of conflict or in the experiences of the Second World War generation.
Rating:
Summary: Where the dawn comes up like thunder
Review: What with George Orwell loose about the shop in the 1920s, and some true head-cases as described by Fraser crashing about the underbrush in the war, it is little wonder that apart from Mrs Aun Soon Kyi, modern Burmese seem to have gone bonkers. For it was in Burma that the British found themselves engaged in an anticolonialist struggle against Japan's brand of colonialism, without meaning to do much more than protect India. Why it was necessary to protect India was apparently forgotten, and indeed, the British presence in the Middle East in the immediate post-war period was in order to ensure coaling and oiling stations for ships traveling to dear old India, and, as I have said, nobody really knew why it was necessary to go to the coral strand, apart from the central heating issue back home. The British empire was an Enchanted Glass that was still in existence when I was an American lad which had quite outlived its usefulness, and Fraser served its last moments of military semi-glory in the war. ... George MacDonald Fraser is a curious case. As a writer he is far more talented than many writers who've gone on to commercial success and Hollywood, yet Fraser's audience seems limited to fans. He does not seem to go beyond a certain point. I believe this is because Fraser expresses an "English-ness" with which many actual Englishmen are uncomfortable. His stories are informed by a sort of irony that was perhaps perfected in the British middle and upper classes between the wars as a result of the horrific experiences of what is still known, in Britain, as the Great War. This is an essentially subaltern irony that speaks truth to power and which manages to display a consciousness ultimately at variance with dominant paradigms. Rather than reinforcing the military and industrial disciplines which were expressed in the treatment of Royal Navy other ranks during the conflict with Napoleon, like Patrick O'Brien, Fraser's characters go with the flow, as we Americans say, with an eye for the main chance. Thus Fraser is quite comfortable to recount, in detail, just how and why the ordinary British soldier voted Churchill out in '45, and the extraordinarily decent and humane Clement Attlee, in. Every so often in our republic and Britain, the electorate acts in its own interests. ... Fraser's British soldiers elected a Labor pol in '45 because while Winston was quite useful for frightening the Germans, he'd established beyond a doubt in the interwar period that he was completely incompetent at domestic affairs, the economy, and the concerns of the Missus back home about the drains. The average ranker may not have known that Winston returned England to the gold standard in '25, one of the stupidest moves ever made in the UK's economic policy and one that caused a general strike a few years on. But he knew that Winston had been forced to "wander in the wilderness" in the 1930s for a [dang] good reason, and not as part of any hero's journey. Winston had been forced into Sheol because he was a hazard to life and limb. I realize that we Americans are supposed to idolize Churchill, but there are quite enough admirable Britons, George MacDonald Fraser among them, who deserve a ten-foot high statue in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, far more than Lady Thatcher (don't get me started.)
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