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Or if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. What is the Chinese war like? Well at least I know it isn't like wars in history books.

You know those lucid tidy maps of battles when used to

study at school, the flanks like neat little cubes, the pincer movements

working with mathematical precision, the reinforcements never failing to arrive, it isn't like that at all.

War is bombing an already disused arsenal, missing it and killing a few old women.

War is lying in a stable with a gangrenous leg. War is drinking hot water in a barn

and worrying about one's wife. War is a handful of lost and terrified men in the mountains

shooting at something moving in the undergrowth.

War is waiting for days with nothing to do, shouting down a dead telephone, going without sleep or

sex or a wash.

War is untidy, inefficient, obscure, and largely a matter of chance.

So Tom, that was W.H. Orden, the great poet, and he was talking on the BBC in January 1939, having come back from China about his experience of the Second World War in China, which of course had not started yet,

according to the traditional chronology, because we think of World War II beginning in 1939,

but it didn't if you're in East Asia did it. It absolutely did not and the war between

...