As did the day. You camped at the foot of the slopes trying to sleep while above the barrage continued relentlessly and in the morning Bugsy was prodding you awake with his elbow.
 “The one thing you can say in favour of army life is that you get to see lots of beautiful sunrises.”
It looked pretty unremarkable as you grappled in your pack for your first cigarette for the day. But then, it was only first light.
 “Hear that?” he then said.
You listened. You could hear nothing but the usual morning cacophony of farts and coughs, like some perverse human farmyard. And then you realised—it was what you couldn’t hear that was unexpected.
 “They’ve stopped!”
 “Yeah.”
 “Oh fuck.”

The ancient history naturally led me to a misplaced  romantic view of the subject of warfare. This, it seems, I extended into more contemporary reports. The following is just one of many examples where the book offered a terrible view of the true horrors of war, but somehow, at the time, I ignored all that and was influenced only by the blood and danger, the glory and the excitement. Looking back, its hard to understand how.
    Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island was one of those books that I misread at the time. I was in it for the gore and cruelty of the capture of the Australian troops in Malaya and life in Japanese POW camp. Somehow I completely failed to notice that the book was a fierce condemnation of the British Military.
   This is the story of the many who suffered for the mistakes of the few... it says on the front flap. ...he(Braddon) is impelled by a(n) ... anger that man’s individuality is being liquidated in a series of frightful wars, followed by equally frightful Peaces. In war-time he sees individual man doomed as a unit in that Mass of Manoeuvre with which generals cheerfully fight international battles. In peace time he sees individual man doomed as a unit of that political Mass of Manoeuvre with which pressure groups adroitly perpetrate their pointless feuds.
     I re-read it years later and here was a man living through the worst imaginable circumstances, warning us of the even greater dangers that have now come to pass. It is a much better book than I could have hoped to realise at the time. Had I been able to read it with any powers of reflection at all, it might have changed the whole course of my life. Instead, I must have somehow skipped the bits I needed to read most as I ploughed on, searching for adventure and heroism. For the book tells all of the things that, when I was drafted some years later, I would have said no one had ever warned me about.