In And No Birds Sang Mowat tries to do what in the midst of war he knew he could not: make those far removed from battle understand what it was like. Even after almost 40 years, the material is too powerful to accommodate itself to a personal memoir….

Through anecdote and story, the book does entertain.

But surely this is not what Mowat intends, for as he makes the war interesting its tedium remains hidden. Mowat is at pains not to glamorize his subject, yet there remains something glamorous about his tales of crashing shells, impossible treks and scaling cliffs. For war memoirs to succeed, they must subvert the romanticism which naturally accrues to the record of war without becoming as hard to get through as the war years themselves. The personal memoir may be the worst format for accomplishing this, for the author tells of his own growth...