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Three Books

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Lt. General Slim. 14th British Army, Burma. Mentioned in Dispatches.

I had promised a different piece this week, but had a friend and his wife stop in for the weekend and that threw me off my game.  They were up from Paso Robles, California, where they raise wine grapes – Syrah, Petite Syrah — on a magnificent chunk of the central coast, and also to pick up some elk meat I’d been holding for them in our freezer since our hunt last fall. And, as things go, the weekend vanished in an insalubrious 72-hour fete that left me feeling like I’d spent the weekend with Robert Plant and the boys in some second-go at Hammer of the Gods.

I’m getting too old for that shit — and for the making excuses for it — and mostly it is counter-productive to the business of writing. That said, the work I promised is underway and continues – research is at a premium in this piece.  But in the meantime I thought I’d toss a few recommendations your way:  two memoirs and a fascinating historical read you won’t want to miss.

First up is Bomber Pilot, by Philip Ardery.  Ardery was a Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Cross (twice) recipient from the second-world war.  He flew in the raid over the oil refineries of Ploesti, where 53 airplanes and 446 airmen were lost, finished numerous missions over North Africa and Europe, and eventually returned home to Kentucky where he lawyered out the rest of his life.  Self-deprecating to a fault, with a terrific eye for exactly the right detail, Ardery puts the reader in the cockpit of those giant Liberators as they did their bit against the Nazi’s.  Want to know what the life was like?  Read this book.

Next is Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser. Fans of the Flashman series will know of Fraser, and his razor wit, which he puts to good use in this memoir of his experiences with the British 14thArmy, last of the Border Guards, in the fight for Burma.  Fraser builds his memoir around the experiences of his Nine Section, which he would later come to lead, and writes brilliantly about his experiences fighting the Japanese to clear the road south to Rangoon.  From craits, monsoons, and centipedes, to Japanese ambushes and banzai attacks, from his love-affair with the Lee-Enfield to his laugh out loud funny experience teaching an Asiatic British officer how to employ the Piat, an unwieldy British anti-tank gun, one need look no further than John Keegan’s review:  “No doubt one of the great memoirs of the Second World War.”  If Keegan, who is the finest military historian to have graced the earth, says it, you can take it to the bank.  Which is what I did, and I can assure you the deposit will put a very large smile on your face for years to come.  Fraser also has some choice moments for revisionist historians, which are frankly overdue, under publicized, and terribly important as we go about this business of thinking critically.  He spares no venom for those who would question the use of the atomic bomb, and with a Scotsman’s flair.  Read this book.

Finally, do whatever it takes to get your hands on God’s Wolf, by Jeffrey Lee. Lee took a degree from Oxford in Arab and Islamic History, and this book is a fabulous read concerning the life of Reynald de Chatillon, a lower-level Frank crusader who took his show on the road and became the scourge of Islam during the Second Crusade.  Reynald has been sadly disparaged by many, including the chroniclers who were his contemporaries, but also by modern historians — who tend to inject contemporary thinking into ancient scenarios and therefore invent bizarre conclusions.  But Lee takes another look and concludes that Monsieur de Chatillon was something quite beyond his soiled reputation.  So much so that, during the late unpleasantness with modern Islamists, Al Qaida addressed their FedEx bomb, programmed to detonate over Chicago, to Mr. Chatillon, some 800 years after his beheading by Saladin.  He certainly left an impression on the Islamists of his own era, and this book explores why and how.  Students of the crusades — I am one, will find in this eminently readable book, which makes a terrific companion piece to Peter Frankopan’s writings on the Crusades and the Silk Roads, a quiet little masterpiece of history.

That is all. Do with this what you must.  And for now, I am back to reading about The culleus, which was the Roman practice of confining an inmate into a sack with an ape, a dog, and a serpent, and throwing the whole works into the ocean.  It was a punishment reserved for those who had killed close relatives, but a punishment nonetheless, which is part and parcel of the work I keep promising.

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Craig Rullman

Craig Rullman

Craig Rullman is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and occasional buckaroo. He is the author of The Bunkhouse Chronicles: Field Notes from the Figure 8 Ranch, and Director and Producer of a forthcoming documentary film -- The Outside Circle: A Movie of the Modern West.

Comments

  1. Rick Schwertfeger says

    “Quartered Safe Out Here” is sitting within sight almost at the top of the To Be Read pile. Looking forward to it.

    Reply

  3. Breaker Morant says

    Yes, I am smiling right now. My favorite book by my favorite author. Personally, I love the scene when he falls down the well,

    Now. that you have bitten into “Quartered Safe” take the next step. Not to “Flashman” but to the “Private McAuslin” stories.

    These are a collection of short stories of his time as a young officer in a Highland regiment in North Africa and Scotland after the war. Every story is a pure gem, I can’t pick a favorite. While I re-read “Quartered” every few years, I dip into “Private McAuslin” all the time. 

    Then there is “Light’s on at Signpost”-which is mainly about his work in the film industry.

    I only wish he had written more about his dad who,as a doctor, served with Selous in WW1. He has a couple of great paragraphs on that in “Mr. American.”

    Reply

    • Craig RullmanCraig Rullman says

      Excellent, a Fraser scholar leads the way. I will acquire these immediately. The well scene is brilliant, and for an old infantry hand is just perfect. I once lost a Marine on a long night patrol. PFC Freestone. He had somehow fallen into a tree, which is far too complicated a problem to write about here, but it happened, and we spent an hour in a patrol halt trying to quietly extract him from the upper branches into which he had fallen. We were not under fire, but nevertheless, if it can happen, it will. I have been re-reading the Captain Grief bit from Quartered Safe almost continually. The genius of it. The raw, sheer, brilliance of that just blows me away. Thanks Breaker.

      Reply

      • Breaker Morant says

        Going on like a schoolgirl with a crush. I was just paging through “Light’s On” and ran across something I had forgotten. Fraser’s father actually buried Selous.

        Reply

          • Breaker Morant says

            The actual quote might be of interest. In a chapter on the movie projects that got away, he says. Oh,the Fraser book that didn’t get written on this topic. I guess I just have to be satisfied with a couple of good paragraphs in Mr. American.

            »>“And I also regret an American producer’s failure to fulfill his ambition to film a Rider Haggard novel; when he asked me if I was familiar the author I was able to stun him into gratifying silence by saying: “My father buried Alan Quatermain.’ (This was true. Quatermain was based on the famous white hunter, F.C. Selous, who was killed in East Africa in the First World War, when commanding the Legion of Frontiersman, to which my father had been attached as medical officer.)”«<

  4. Breaker Morant says

    Fraser is obviously more than a “Flashman” guy. I am not the biggest Flashman fan as I much prefer his other stuff.

    I am chuckling a little bit about you re-reading several times the Captain Grief part. You have the true Fraser bug now. You will find yourself re-reading him several times over the next few years.

    When I read articles about hunting, people who have been to Africa many times say that the only people in the hunting world that they envy are those going to Africa for the first time.

    I think the only people I envy in the reading world are the people who will be reading “Private McAuslan” for the first time. If you like it, you will be re-reading it.

    Here is a link to the Amazon book.
    https://www.amazon.com/Complete-McAuslan-George-MacDonald-Fraser-ebook/dp/B004OA63XU/ref=sr_1_3?crid=213W3BJG0F1Q0&keywords=quartered+safe+out+here&qid=1555035581&s=gateway&sprefix=quartered+%2Caps%2C328&sr=8–3

    Reply

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