Will I love Quartered Safe Out Here?

This soldier's eye view of WW2 is gripping and moving

Before reading this book, I knew very little about the British Burma campaign. Fraser’s memoir is so compelling because it was written forty years after the events it describes.

I love that he can reflect on his time in Burma and the knowledge gained over the intervening period. I also appreciate that he acknowledges how the passage of time may have colored his memories.

I go back to this book often, often just diving into one of my many favourite scenes. Fraser is the author of the famous Flashman series, and the humor of these books also occasionally appears in Quartered Safe Out Here.

However, since this book is about Fraser’s service as a young soldier in the Burma Campaign of 1944-45, there are many descriptions of the brutality of firefights (or duffies, as they were called), men being killed or wounded, and the effects of this brutality not just on Fraser but also on the other men in his platoon (hard-bitten men… show more.