Tunes of glory - James Kennaway

Lt. Colonel Jock Sinclair is a rough talking, whisky drinking soldier's
soldier, a hero of the desert campaign who rose to his position through
the ranks. Colonel Barrow, an officer graduate of Oxford and Sandhurst,
had a wretched war in Japanese prison camps. But he has come to take
command of the Battalion he has long admired, the one that Jock Sinclair
has served in since he was a boy. In the claustrophobic world of
Campbell barracks, a conflict is inevitable between the two men and a
tragedy unfolds with concentrated and ferocious power.

James
Kennaway served in a Highland regiment himself, and his feeling for
'tunes of glory, for the glamour and brutality of army life gives added
authenticity and humour to this, his first and most famous novel. He
died in a car crash at the tragically early age of forty.