Paperback, Pocket Classics series, Alan Sutton, 1996.
Book condition: the spine is creased but unbroken with a small tear at the bottom, otherwise generally a nice copy of what is, for some reason, a scarce title in any edition.
Volume 5 in the 15-volume A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight series.
The publisher's blurb for the first edition (1955) states: 'The theme of this fine historical novel of England and the battlefields of France during the Great War is fear and the quest for courage. The story is seen mainly through the eyes of Phillip Maddison who, having fought through the Battle of Ypres as a private soldier, is terrified of going into action again. While home in England on sick leave, he obtains his commission; and as a very junior subaltern he is posted to a fashionable "county" regiment of pre-war territorials stationed in Suffolk. Here the former junior clerk from suburbia finds himself an outsider, constantly being ragged and snubbed for his gaucheries. He is the "temporary gentleman" in uniform – yet the only officer in the "Cantuvellaunians" who has learned to fight before he has learned to shave. At length, he volunteers to return to the front; and as the novel reaches its climax in the Battle of Loos, so Phillip rises for a while from his fearful self.
'The battle scenes in A Fox Under My Cloak are described with tremendous power and realism; all the more striking by contrast with the scenes of life at home as seen through the eyes of other members of Phillip's family. The book contains much, however, that is in lighter vein; the account of Phillip's interlude in training in a English country town is especially full of brilliant and amusing impressions of a vanishing world of leisurely "good form". Henry Williamson has waited many years to write this novel. "A Fox Under My Cloak," he says, "is not only the soldier's world. It was written, after much research among archives and upon the scene of the battle near Béthune, as part of the tragedy of European man, divided against himself. It was written with love for all remembered faces of nearly forty years ago. There are no villains in the story – only human beings."'
(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's A Fox Under My Cloak.)
