A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad. Poems. With a preface by Colonel J.H.Collett. by F.W.HARVEY - 1916

Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd., London, 1916. Book. Good. Hardcover. 1st Edition. First Edition (first printing). Small 8vo. xv, 64pp. Original publisher's blue cloth with a lettered and decorated title plate pasted to the upper board. The cloth lightly soiled and discoloured in places, with some wear to the backstrip ends. Free endpapers toned. Contemporary former owner name and date inked to the head of the title page. A touch of spotting to three or four preliminary leaves, and to the margins of several concluding leaves. Some uneven off-set toning to the dedication leaf from where a slip of paper was at some point stored. A good copy of the author's uncommon first book, published in September 1916 shortly after his capture by German troops whilst carrying out a reconnaissance patrol. Harvey spent the remainder of the war as a P.O.W. Fifty-seven poems and prose-poems, most of which were written at the front and first published in the 'Fifth Gloucester Gazette' (the first paper published in the trenches). The subject is primarily his home country ("Mud, blood and khaki are rather conspicuously absent. They are, in fact, the last things a soldier wishes to think or talk about" - from the preface). See Reilly p.161..