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“An officer – he must have been a new arrival, and a right clown – ran out in front of the company and shouted, with enthusiasm: ‘Men! The war in Europe is over!’”

—The novelist George MacDonald Fraser – then a lance-corporal in the Border Regiment in the British Fourteenth Army – spent VE Day in 1945 waiting to attack a Japanese-held village in Burma. From his memoir QUARTERED SAFE OUT HERE

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There was a long silence, while we digested this, and looked through the heat haze to the village where Jap might be waiting, and I’m not sure that the officer wasn't waving his hat and shouting hip, hooray. The silence continued, and then someone laughed, and it ran down the extended line in a great torrent of mirth, punctuated by cries of “Git the boogers oot ’ere!” and “Ev ye told Tojo, like?” and “Hey, son, is it awreet if we a’ gan yam?” Footnote: “Gan yam” is Carlisle dialect for “Go home”; elsewhere in Cumberland it is “Ga yem”.

Quartered Safe Out Here

‘There is no doubt that [Quartered Safe Out Here] is one of the great personal memoirs of the Second World War’ John Keegan Life and death in Nine Section, a small group of hard-bitten and (to modern eyes) possibly eccentric Cumbrian borderers with w…
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