"The trouble with these people is they've no idea what patrolling means. It's just a phrase to them. 'Active patrolling!' They think it just means a nice walk in the moonlight." (pg. 16)

A short and sweet book detailing a single night patrol of British infantrymen in North Africa in 1943. The book is based on author Fred Majdalany's own experience as an infantry officer in that theatre, and is suffused with authentic details of war and army life. The writing is brisk and unfussy – a straight-shooting approach which is mirrored in the author's uncompromising critique of these night patrols. They are, Majdalany argues (and he should know), futile for intelligence-gathering, wasteful of unit cohesion and energy, and frivolous regarding the lives of the soldiers who must perform them.

The book frames the dogged endurance of the PBI (the 'poor bloody infantry') against the indifference of the army bureaucracy – the patrol and its target are proposed off-the-cuff by "some silly little bastard who hadn't justified his existence lately" (pg. 19) – and Majdalany deftly walks a fine line between cynicism and stoicism in his world-weary protagonist, Tim Sheldon. Patrol focuses on the spear-point that the frontline infantry represents, and how the army staff is the "awful lot of shaft" that is blunting the spear-point through needless overwork. It is this, rather than the usual approach of emphasising the horrors of combat or the value of comradeship or philosophising over whether war is justified, that marks Majdalany's book out as a worthy entry into the war-novel library. ( )