Memoir of the Bobotes

Memories of the Balkan War of 1912-13 have been largely wiped out by experience of later and vastly greater and more efficient wars; but Joyce Cary, aged twenty-three, one-time art student in Edinburgh and Paris and newly down from Trinity College, Oxford, went through it as a stretcher-bearer in the Red Cross. "I wanted," he told a friend towards the end of his life, "the experience of war. I thought there would be no more wars." So this book has a double interest: as an extraordinarily vivid account at first hand of a forgotten war fought by peasants under primitive conditions; and as the first work, written almost twenty years before his first novel was published, of one of the greatest novelists of our time.