Memoir of the Bobotes is an extraordinarily vivid account of a forgotten war, fought by peasants under primitive conditions and perhaps a precursor for Balkan wars of more recent memory. This literary tour de force is both a moving account of war and a touching portrait of the naivety of youth, originally written as a journal of the author's own experience - Cary was a Red Cross stretcher-bearer and cook in the Balkan War of 1912 to 1913. From one of the greatest writers of the twentieth-century, Memoir of the Bobotes is a beautiful classic of British and Irish literature. Joyce Cary was born in 1888 into an old Anglo-Irish family and educated at Clifton. He studied art, first in Edinburgh and then in Paris, before going up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1909 to read law. On coming down he served as a Red Cross orderly in the Balkan War of 1912-13, the inspiration for Memoir of the Bobotes, before joining the Nigerian Political Service. He served in the Nigeria Regiment during the First World War, and his time in Africa provided the inspiration for his first four novels. Though he settled in Oxford as a full-time writer in 1920, it was not until 1932 that his first book was published. At the time of his death in 1957, he was recognised as one of the leading novelists in the world.