War, Senseless and Necessary George Garrett (bio) Time at War by Nicholas Mosley (Dalkey Archive, 2006. 186 pages. Illustrated. $12.95 pb) In hospital and on my journeys down I had been thinking—If ever in later life I come to write about all this I must try to find a style in which to express the contradictions of war—the coincidence of luck and endurance; of farce and fear; of anarchy and meaning. —Nicholas Mosley Time at War took a while coming to be. Nicholas Mosley, writing in his late seventies, tells us that he had to wait patiently for the right time to deal with the subject and with his own recollected memories, meanwhile being fully engaged in a busy writing career producing seventeen novels—one of which, Hopeful Monsters, won the Whitbread Award for 1990—and nine works of nonfiction before he felt able to offer up a truthful accounting of his experiences as a young infantry officer in World War II. Freshly out of Eton and just nineteen years old in 1942, he enlisted in the army and managed to overcome "the two grave impediments to my being accepted as a potential officer." These were a bad stammer, one that was not overcome until well after the war was over, and the awkward public fact that his father, Oswald Mosley, right-wing politician and the leader of the British Union of Fascists, was in prison as a security risk. The intricate networking of the British upper classes (for example, Churchill himself was a social friend of Oswald Mosley and went out of his way to ensure that Mosley's confinement was as comfortable as possible) helped to override and overcome those impediments. As for the stammer: "Irene Ravensdale, my dead mother's older sister and a Baroness in her own right . . . was acquainted with the Colonel-in-Chief of the Rifle Brigade: these were the days of the old-boy net, when people supposedly of influence could be expected to know one another. So my aunt had a word with the Colonel and explained—I have no idea what she explained, but by the time a Rifle Brigade recruiting team came down to Eton to hold interviews with potential officers, I was told that I would be accepted as a trainee, although this did not guarantee that I would graduate." Of a much more liberal persuasion than his father, Nicholas nevertheless took the British class system for granted. He writes: "Most Etonians who had not got family connections with the other services or with the cavalry regiments opted to go into one of the Guards regiments; or if they wished to be slightly less conventional, into the Rifle Brigade or the King's Royal Rifle Corps." One way and another Nicholas ended up serving most of the war in the 2nd Battalion of the London Irish Rifles, a lively but distinctly unfashionable outfit. He served in North Africa, then during the long and brutal Italian campaign, and finished his war in 1945 in occupied Austria. We follow him closely, first in various training camps and then in combat. He is wounded, captured once [End Page lxxix] (briefly), and is awarded the Military Cross for bravery—all of this is being narrated not only by the boy-soldier but also by the old man now looking back to his beginnings and sifting unreliable memories. The immediacy of the story is gained and enhanced by excerpts from the diaries that he kept for at least part of the time; by letters to and from his father and family and friends; and by photographs, mostly casual snapshots that he took with a camera he bought while on leave in Egypt in 1944. As in metafiction, Time at War follows the process, a search by the author here and now for a way, an appropriate "style" to tell his story of the then and there as honestly as he can and, if possible, to make good sense out of both his remembered experiences and the search itself. As he puts it near the end of this remarkable book: "For many years I forgot I had planned an epic. But here...