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WILLCOCKS, Sir James, General.
The Romance of Soldiering and Sport.
Publisher: London: Cassell and company, Ltd., 1925
Stock code: 61960
Price: £150 Currency Conversion
First edition. Vignettes from numerous colonial campaigns in India and Africa through to France in the First World War, where Willcocks commanded the Indian Corps. Willcocks served as a transport officer in the Second Afghan War, and with the small Indian contingent in the Sudan 1885-6. In 1889 he was intelligence officer on the Chin-Lushai Expedition, and 2 years later with the Manipur Expedition. "For the next five years, leave, polo, big game shooting, and staff appointments in India occupied Willcocks until, in June 1897, he was appointed assistant adjutant-general of the field force being formed in the Tochi valley in Baluchistan. On the conclusion of that campaign in November he was offered by the War Office the post of second in command of the new force about to be raised by Major F. J. D. Lugard in west Africa. Willcocks accepted, and arrived at Sierra Leone in March 1898 …and in 1899 became colonel-commandant of the West African Frontier Force. His first real chance as a commander came when he commanded the Asante field force for the relief of Kumasi. Despite many difficulties Willcocks relieved it on 15 July 1900" (ODNB). Command of the Indian Corps represented the zenith of his career as friction between him and Haig blocked his path to commander-in-chief of India. Entertaining, anecdotal autobiography of a turn of the century military career.
Octavo. Original red cloth, title gilt to spine and upper board. With the typographical dust jacket. Portrait frontispiece and fifteen other plates. Cloth just a little lightened at the edges, endpapers a differentially browned, sporadic foxing as usual, jacket clipped and with minor losses head and tail of the spine, but all in all a very good copy in the uncommon jacket.
