George MacDonald Fraser

[Re the Piat anti-tank weapon] Like many British inventions, it looked improbable, unwieldy, and unsafe - and it worked.

Not that lance-jack [lance-corporal] is any great eminence; it is an appointment, not a rank, and is the worst dogs-body's job in the Army, as Hitler and I could tell you.

No doubt newspaper reports and broadcasts had encouraged us, civilian and military, to regard him [the Japanese] as an evil, misshapen, buck-toothed barbarian who looked and behaved like something sub-Stone Age; the experiences of Allied prisoners of war demonstrated that the reports had not lied and reinforced the view that the only good Jap was a dead one.

No one underestimated Jap: he might be a subhuman creature who tortured and starved prisoners of war to death, raped women captives, and used civilians for bayonet practice, but there was no braver soldier in the whole history of war, and if he fought to a finish...

Putting a grenade into a bunker had the satisfaction of doing grievous bodily harm to an enemy for whom I felt real hatred, and still do.

"Gravity, muzzle velocity, density, intensity, one for his nob, and bullshit baffles brains! There - into the breach, old Whatsit, and if all else fails we'll fix a bayonet on the bloody thing and charge! Fire at Will, he's hiding in the cellar, the cowardly sod!"

A Gurkha subaltern whom I met later told me that commanding a platoon of them was like leading a group of perfectly-disciplined ten-year-olds, and I believed him.

We all have kindly impulses, fostered by two thousand years of Christian teaching, gentle Jesus, and love thy neighbour, but we have the killer instinct, too, the murderous impulse of the hunter...

Only very young soldiers and head-cases object to boredom in war-time.

...armchair strategists can look at the last stages of a campaign and say there's nothing left but mopping-up, but if you're holding the mop it's different. The last Jap in the last bunker on the last day can be just as fatal to you personally as the biggest battle at the height of the campaign, and you don't look or think much beyond him - wherever he is.

[Regarding the 'Advance to Contact'] The simple truth about war is that if you are on the attack, you can't do a damned thing until you find your enemy, and the only way to do that is to push on, at whatever speed seems prudent, until you see or hear him, or he makes his presence known by letting fly at you.

Certainly no general [Slim] ever did more with less; in every way, he was one of the great captains.