Bretherton: Khaki or Field-Grey?

Bookseller Notes

A highly-regarded work of war fiction, scarce as a first edition; the first novel by Walter Frederick Morris, a graduate of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, it was praised by J.C. Squire in The London Mercury as 'undoubtedly the best of the English war-books', whilst Arnold Bennett grouped it with R.H. Mottram's 'Spanish Farm Trilogy' and A.P. Herbert's 'The Secret Battle' as the finest in that category. It is also a spy novel - and praised in that respect by Eric Ambler, who considered it one of the finest in the genre - as well as containing elements of the supernatural through its opening tableau, in which Captain Gurney is drawn to a ruined chateau by music that seems to have been played by a British officer in German uniform who is, despite the sounds emanating, dead at the piano.