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The life of Sergeant Roger Lamb, a young Dubliner who had served the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the American War of Independence was the subject of a novelistic enterprise originally published in two parts because of war time paper shortages. The final result is a pair of picaresque novels concerned with the passions and frustrations of a distant war which mirrored many of Graves' own feelings for World War II which was happening around him. As an account of the struggle for independence, the horrors and excitements of war, the two novels were well reviewed and popular when published in the early 1940s. This chance to have both parts of what Graves considered to be a single project in one volume offers the opportunity of access to a literary and historical creation which both opens up the world of the American War of Independence, and the creative life and mind of a great writer of the 20th century.