No Time for Dreams: A Soldier's Six-Year Journey Through WW II

Sidney Allinson is a Victoria-based communications consultant, Canadian
news correspondent for Britain’s The Army Quarterly and Defence, and
author of The Bantams: The Untold Story of World War I.

Robert Metcalfe, who served in the Green Howards Regiment, has written
an informal memoir of his experiences as a junior officer throughout
World War II. His book provides a clear picture of everyday life in a
British infantry regiment. It begins with the day a proud Metcalfe
enlisted with the famous Yorkshire regiment and takes us through the
variety of duties he performed and the rich cast of characters he
encountered during his six years of military service overseas. His
unit’s vagabond life in a dozen countries reminds us that the war took
citizen soldiers far abroad and transformed those who returned home at
war’s end.

Simple maps trace the unit’s travels, and photographs—whose
subjects include Metcalfe’s wartime marriage to an army nursing
sister—capture the period. No Time for Dreams effectively conveys what
it was like at the sharp end of things on now-forgotten foreign
battlefields.