GenevaBookClub: A group of school boys desperate to join the German army at the outbreak of the First World War for a great adventure. Spured on by their school master. They discover the horrors of war all too soon. As in many war novels the character discovers on returning home on leave that the view of war of the people back home and the reality are far removed from one another and that he does not belong there any more. The novel gives a vivid account of the physical and mental horror of war. Wriiten in 1929 between the war it is an antiwar book and written at a time when the world was starting the descent into the Second World War.

GenevaBookClub: In this, the first of Spike Milligan's uproarious recollections of life in the army, our hero takes us from the outbreak of war in 1939 ('it must have been something we said'), through his attempts to avoid enlistment ('time for my appendicitus, I thought') and his gunner training in Bexhill ('There was one drawback. No ammunition') to the landing at Algiers in 1943 ('I closed my eyes and faced the sun. I fell down a hatchway'). Filled with bathos, pathos and gales of ribald laughter, this is a barely sane helping of military goonery and superlative Milliganese.