There were the books we carried on operations. The three most popular of them were chosen because they were all about war and were very thick: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, James Jones The Thin Red Line, and The Cross of Iron by Willi Heinrich.
    We carried one copy with us on operations. Some blokes like me carried their own stick-books as well, and virtually everything listed here in this chapter I read under military circumstances. They were torn up into roughly ten page sections—for meal breaks—and one page sections, for smoke-os—and generally passed around, along with the cigarettes. You read them in the order they came to you, which was rarely sequential, although sometimes back in base camp, an effort would be made to find the bit after page 238 or whatever. Mostly they were unrecoverable. Blokes would take single pages with them when they went for a shit, read them then wipe their bums with them. Men rolled cigarettes with them when they ran out of papers. We pinned pages to trees in places when we needed to find our way back precisely. We drew diagrams and passed notes on them. Casualties would forget to leave them behind when evacuated (thoughtless bastards). The pages were splattered with blood and mud and vomit, torn and tattered and eventually were all muddled in together. Lots of the pages became simply lost. They had been wet through innumerable times. By the end, there wasn’t anything left of any of them.

After advancing six paces, and getting off the track into the snow, Pierre looked about under his feet, glanced rapidly at Dolohov, and stretching out his finger, as he had been shown, fired. Not at all expecting so loud a report, Pierre started at his own shot, then smiled at his own sensation and stood still. The smoke, which was made thicker by the fog, hindered him from seeing for the moment; but the other shot he was expecting did not follow. All that could be heard were Dolohov’s rapid footsteps, and his figure came into view through the smoke. With one hand he was clutching at his left side, the other was clenched on the lowered pistol. His face was pale. Rostov was running up and saying something to him.
    “N … no,” Dolohov muttered through his teeth; “no, it’s not over”: and struggling on a few sinking, staggering steps up to the sword, he sank on the snow beside it. His left hand was covered with blood, he rubbed it on his coat and leaned upon it. His face was pale, frowning and trembling.
    “Co… “ Dolohov began, but he could not at once articulate the words: “come up,” he said, with an effort. Pierre, hardly able to restrain his sobs, ran toward Dolohov, and would have crossed the space that separated the barriers, when Dolohov cried: “To the barrier!” and Pierre, grasping what was wanted, stood still just at the sword. Only ten paces divided them. Dolohov putting his head down, greedily bit at the snow, lifted his head again, sat up, tried to get on his legs and sat down, trying to find a secure centre of gravity. He took a mouthful of cold snow, and sucked it; his lips quivering, but still he smiled; his eyes glittered with strain and the exasperation of the struggle with his own failing forces. He raised the pistol, and began taking aim.
    “Sideways, don’t expose yourself to the pistol,” said Nesvitsky.
    “Don’t face it!” Denisov could not help shouting, though it was to an antagonist.
    With his gentle smile of sympathy and remorse, Pierre stood with his legs and arms straddled helplessly, and his broad chest directly facing Dolohov, and looked at him mournfully. Denisov, Rostov, and Nesvitsky screwed up their eyes. At the same moment they heard the shot and Dolohov’s wrathful cry.
    “Missed!” shouted Dolohov, and he dropped helplessly, face downward in the snow.
    Sitting in the jungle, reading War and Peace in a fragmentary fashion as we did, I ended up with little idea of how much of it I had missed. Interestingly, however, in 1987, I sat down and read the whole thing all the way through, in the right sequence this time. Sure, I was impressed by Tolstoy’s scope and skills, but it did all seem familiar. On reflection, I don’t think I really missed out on anything at all by reading it all a-jumble. It was certainly far less of a chore. At a mature age, it really takes a lot of discipline to read a book that size. But that was what they actually did in the days before television. Wasn’t any different really. Most of the very long books published in those days were rubbish. Things like War and Peace and Dickens were rare.