
‘I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent . . .’ | Extract from Conundrum
I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent on the banks of the Tagliamento river in Venezia Giulia, I found the commanding officer of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers rising to his feet to greet me. Yet I was entering a man’s world, the world of war and soldiery. I felt like one of those unconvincing heroines of fiction who, disguised in buskins or Hussar’s jacket, penetrate the battlefields to find glory or romance: and the colonel’s civilized gesture of welcome, to an undistinguished and unpromising reporting subaltern, seemed to me a happy omen. So it was.