Looking back across more than twenty years, it seems strange that the educated lance-corporal, whose voice, lyric or plaintive or poignant, added so distinctive a note to the literature of the Second World War, was almost never female. Why not, when the swathe of conscription cut through both sexes? A generation later, Mary Lee Settle has filled the gap with something more searching, because more precise than documentary. [All the Brave Promises] is experience not transmuted but filtered and refined by memory….

Miss Settle weathered [the problems] and was accepted. She renders it all with neither bitterness nor inverted romanticism: the insanities of discipline when administered by inadequate officers and n.c.o.s, the loathsomeness of mass feeding when nobody concerned in its management could cook in the first place, the oases of solitude and understanding, the dumb support of the herd, and the sheer, brutalizing boredom...