One is that Roller is profound and lyric. It continually reflects on the fact that any shot, skirmish, battle, war – they are all but additions to the never-ending list of human conflicts: ‘Saracen and Crusader, and back before them Assyrian and Phoenician, Pharaohnic Egyptian and maybe Hittite, Canaanite, all the long-dead warlike tribes and nations. Alexander had marched south along the coastal plain, Napoleon and the Turkish armies in 1914–18 ...’ At the same time the soldiers in Roller, like all soldiers in all armies, delight in the small pleasures life continually offers – a swim, the slant of light through trees into shade below, a dixie of hot stew – before they sooner or later die. Another is that it presents an extensive but detached treatment of the use of Cyprian mules for transport during World War I. Only for a moment do we wonder why, and then we realise: how important is transport to an army, how one beast relies upon another in the process of living and dying.

The third may disturb many critics, the novel’s lack of a centre, a dramatic point for it to move inevitably toward and from. To be fair, there are two significant events which do stand out – a drunken visit to a bordello and, of awful irony, a brawl between two Australian professional boxers. Otherwise, the novel mainly shows the tedium, the cold, the fatigue, the diarrhoea, the death, sometimes swift and sometimes slow, of men and mules.

The changes do not take place dramatically within the sequence of the narrative as a whole but, Stuart would have it, within some of the men who people it.

The last of the series will appear later this year, portraying Colin in the prison camps of Asia. Significantly, its title will be I Think I’ll Live.