War is hell, the adage goes. "So awful," Farley Mowat adds in this memoir of World War II frontline service, "that through three decades I kept the deeper agonies of it wrapped in the cotton-wool of protective forgetfulness, and would have been well content to leave them buried so forever." Turned away from the Royal Canadian Air Force for his apparent youth and frailness (though, he writes, he had been living off the Saskatchewan countryside and was in fine shape), Mowat joined the infantry in 1940. The baby-faced second lieutenant quickly earned the trust of the soldiers under his command, especially when, as he gleefully recounts, he bent army rules to suit such exigencies of the field as securing a stout drink and finding warm, if non-regulation, clothing. Somewhat happy-go-lucky at the outset, Mowat and his colleagues soon adopted a darker view of the war after engaging elite German forces in the mountains of Sicily.

Ever the naturalist, Mowat recalls that he learned to identify German weapons by their sounds, "a discovery which excited me almost as much as if I had stumbled on a batch of new bird species." But the war was no game, and Mowat's memoir grows ever more sombre as friends and compatriots fall, one by one, to enemy fire and illness. His book, a graceful work of personal history, does his fellow warriors honour even as it protests the madness and destruction of war. --Gregory McNamee