The best gay jungle story ever?

While rooting around various critical texts recently, I found an essay comparing D.H.Lawrence's The Prussian Officer with Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy. Lawrence's book is homoerotic and consumed by loathing. The Baxter was utterly new to me and of a far higher order. It has to be one of the best books about the second world war, set largely in Burma before shifting to India. It has the same officer and batman premise as The Prussian Officer but actually allows for love, and discreetly written sex, between the two men. The war scenes are unflinching, and the topic of homosexual love in the forces is embraced to an astonishing degree for 1951.
Does it have a happy ending? I want such endings in gay fiction, and could just about have fashioned one for this book. I wanted a happy ending for the novel I've just finished writing, but books build up such head of steam they steer their own way. Still, this book closes in a powerful enough way that you can just about take as affirmative if you're desperate to do so.
In the back of my copy the reader has written another book title: 'In the Absence of Magic' by Ernst Pawel. Another unknown classic maybe? I've just found a copy on the ever trusted abebooks so now one is on its way to me from 'Martin's Books' in Wales - it seemed to have my name on it! I'll let you know how it turns out.

And a PS ... I've just found the following on Abe Books. An autograph letter from Walter Baxter and the first bit of his biography I've been able to find. "Book Description: Good ALS, 2pp, 4to, Hotel Miramar, Gerona, Spain, 21 July 1952. Baxter's response is to a gentleman in Philadelphia who had enquired as to the availability of the manuscript of Baxter's novel Look Down in Mercy. Baxter, just beginning to try and make a living as a writer, considers selling his manuscript, because, though his book is a success, the financial rewards for a first novel aren't that great except in the form of congratulations from the publishers and critics. Baxter places a fairly high price on his manuscript, $1500.00, (". the book will live and probably always rank among the first three of the vast number of books written about World War II''), and writes that to accept less would not be of much help. In very good condition. Baxter, born in 1915, served in World War II in India and Burma. In addition to Look Down in Mercy (1951) he also wrote The Image and the Search (1953)." He's right to be so confident about the book in terms of quality. And how typical of course, his penurious state. The money will do him little good now, but that letter's all yours for £59.