Weidenfeld £14.99 pp180

War, Nicholas Mosley tells us, “is both senseless and necessary, squalid and fulfilling, terrifying and sometimes jolly”. He goes on to say that “humans are at home in war (though they seldom admit this)”. He should know, since, as a subaltern barely into his twenties, he fought his way up the spine of Italy with the London Irish Rifles; and he has gone on to write here a brief account of his adventures that is not only entertaining and often extremely funny, but tells us much about the chaotic nature of war as fought on the ground.

As a well-connected young man, Mosley was keen to join a smart, “black button” regiment, but faced two impediments: he had an appalling stammer (“Don’t laugh at the officer!” a kindly sergeant shouted as he tied himself in knots), and his father, Oswald Mosley, had recently been interned (“Not any relation to that bastard?” an adjutant asked him, quickly adding, “My dear fellow, I’m so dreadfully sorry”). His aunt, Lady Ravensdale, pulled some strings, and he was on his way. Fellow trainees on the Yorkshire moors included Raleigh Trevelyan, whose book about Anzio became one of the classics of the war, and the poet and glass engraver Laurence Whistler, who described a piece of Naafi fish as “the Piece of Cod that passeth all understanding”.

Mosley joined his regiment in the Appenines in the winter of 1943 and, as a callow 20-year-old, found himself in charge of veterans of North Africa. A bookish youth, he devoured The Brothers Karamazov and Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow; he wrote at length to his father about Nietzsche and Superman, and to his aunt about Human Perfectibility: after he had been demobbed, he went up to Oxford only to be told that they didn’t “do” Nietzsche or the existentialists, and left after a year to become a novelist. At a less elevated level, he joined in the chanting of “King Farouk, King Farouk, Hang your bollocks on a hook” while on leave in Cairo.

His first encounter with the enemy was an embarrassing business. His platoon was briefly captured: Mosley pretended to be dead, and was annoyed when a wounded man called for help (“I wanted to tell him to shut up: couldn’t he see I was dead?”).

Later, he won an MC for capturing a strategically placed farmhouse. The whole business reminded him of childhood games: he performed an adroit “Nijinsky leap” when confronted by an enemy soldier, and worried that his German had failed him when ordering the opposition not to fire (“Was I not using the word for ‘shit’ instead of ‘shoot’?”). Like Siegfried Sassoon in the trenches of the first world war, Mosley felt far closer to his German equivalents than to the purple majors at the base; and he, too, has written a masterly account of what war is really like.

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