MANUSCRIPT. [A journal of an English soldier, E.L. Cook, of the 9th Armoured Division, Royal Army Medical Corp of the British Army in India. Bombay, n.p.: 1942-1945.] 151pp., manuscript, 8vo (205 x 163mm.) 75 leaves of clearly legible hand-written journal entries describing the experiences of an English soldier as his regiment journey through India towards Burma, list of cities visited, and of those that died from disease to rear. (Some spotting, one loose leaf.) Original boards (spine lacking, worn). Note: the 9th Armoured Division (C.S.S.) arrived in India via Cape Town in June 1942. The 9th didn’t see military action and, indeed, the only reference to battle is a brief glimpse of Japanese aircraft overhead. For twenty minutes the sound of gunfire was ‘like music to my ears’. However, the journal has its own fascination. Lots of whiskey and gin is drunk, days of alcohol in Calcutta, seeing Lou Costello in ‘Rio Rita’, playing the gramophone with ‘Len and Busty’ at the military stop-point. They insist he stays over a few days (‘the best friends anyone can have’), cycling through the jungle and finding a waterfall (‘the fourth largest in the world’). But he is changing, ageing. He enjoys the hard graft of taking all the cargo downriver in a sampan. The Padre is asked to give a service. There’s a need for meaning when soldiers are ‘singing hymns with all their hearts and soul, men who had never seen inside a church’. The Padre, too, notices this need, and prolongs the service. Towards the end, he writes movingly, perhaps drunkenly, a section on ‘Fleeting Thoughts’. He wonders if his wife Mary will ‘notice the change in me’, but ends with valediction to the company: ‘all the fellows who I have lived daily with for three solid years here in India, worked with, sweated and toiled, and many a time been drunk with, we have cussed each other mercilessly, argued over trifles, had queer moods all of which has brought us closer together’.