Description: 1943, the North African desert. Major Tim Sheldon, exhausted and battle weary, is asked to carry out a futile and unexpected patrol mission. Fred Majdalany's intimate, tense novel puts this so-called minor mission centre stage, as over the course of the day and during the patrol itself, Sheldon reminisces about his time as a soldier, his own future, and what it means to confront fear.
Brief description: Fred Majdalany (1913-1967) was an officer in the British Eighth Army during World War II. After the war he resumed his career as a theater publicist and journalist, writing for the Daily Mail and Time and Tide. He is the author of many books, including The Battle of Cassino, The Battle of El Alamein, and The Monastery, which was adapted by the BBC.
Review Quotes: "A tightly written novel by a man who is a full-time writer and critic, and who was a wartime combat infantryman. The combination is a particularly happy one. From a purely military point of view, [Majdalany] has given us as excellent and accurate an account of a patrol action as there is in military writing, whether fact or fiction. If that were all he had accomplished this would still be a valuable book. But he has gone a great deal beyond reporting. Majdalany is one of a bare handful of contemporary writers who can get inside the soldier's mind and then write sensibly about what he finds there. . . . The fact that Majdalany has successfully illuminated for us the workings of [the character's] mind and the limitations of his endurance mark him as both a novelist of the first rank and a student of leadership and command whose opinions deserve careful study. Patrol, in short, deserves a place in the permanent literature of war."--Orville C. Shirey "Army Combat Forces Journal"