Memoir of the Bobotes

Joyce Cary, the renowned novelist and author of The Horse's Mouth, was 23 years old at the start of the Balkan War of 1912-1913.

A one time art student in Edinburgh and Paris and newly down from Trinity College, Oxford he went through the war as a stretcher-bearer in the Red Cross.

Shortly after his return he wrote Memoir of the Bobotes without thought of publication.

It is an extraordinarily vivid account of a forgotten war fought by peasants under primitive conditions - yet particularly fascinating today to readers with memories of later Balkan wars.

It is both a moving and illuminating account of the war but it also offers a self-portrait of a young, upper-class Englishman - idealistic, sensitive, romantic -living in the belief that 'there would be no more wars'.

Cary went on to become one of the 20th century's greatest novelists.