Where were you at Waterloo?

By Nicholas Best

One morning the Gobelin Guards are trooping the colour. The next day they are flown out to the Indian Ocean to resist an invasion of British Casuarina.

Vainly awaiting the intruding enemy from a neighbouring republic, they instead become hilariously entangled with local escorts seeking medication and marriage, an expense-hungry war correspondent filing stories of imaginary battles, and a film director staging scenes for an army recruitment documentary.

This, Nicholas Best’s first novel, is a brief but hilarious satire of British military life which traces the antics of the Gobelin Guards from central London to the Indian Ocean.