Strix
VEX NOT HIS GHOST
IF Orde Wingate had been hanged for murder, and if Mr. Leonard Mosley had written a play about him, the Lord Chamberlain would not have granted the play a licence on the grounds that it would be liable to cause pain to Wingate's family. But it is a book, and not a play, that Mr. Mosley has written, so he is at liberty to say what he likes about a dead man. Judging by the first instalment of his work, which is being serialised in the Sunday Express, he intends to make full use of his freedom.
The blurbs with which the Beaverbrook press heralded the publication of extracts from Mr. Mosley's book were sen- sationally worded and implied that Wingate was, among other things, a traitor. Mr. Mosley began his reply to a letter of protest from the Wingate family by suggesting that they 'should surely have waited to rcad my book before deciding that it "traduces" the memory of their distinguished relative.' It is perhaps academic, in this sort of context, to ask whether it is a decent or even a permissible thing to write a book about a man who was killed at the age of forty-one eleven years ago without consulting his family (who have, incidentally, entrusted to Mr. Christopher Sykes the task of writing a definitive biography); but it is certainly a fact that neither Mr. Mosley nor the Sunday Express would have dared to publish what they have published about Wingate if he had been alive, because if they had he would have obtained, without difficulty, very substantial damages for libel. If you don't traduce a man's memory by suggesting that he was a traitor, how on earth do you traduce it? • * * 'I knew Orde Wingate too well,' Mr. Mosley wrote in the Sunday Express, 'to sully his name with any falsehood or exaggeration or deviation from the strictest fact.' One gains the impression from the first instalment of his book that it is the shabbiest innuendo rather than the strictest fact from which Mr. Mosley is determined not to deviate; but perhaps subsequent extracts will make a less disagreeable impression. He is, however, guilty of one thumping inaccuracy on a point which would seem basic to an appreciation of Wingate's character and achievements. The passage reads as follows: 'Those who know the secrets of his mind and heart [among whom the writer did not apparently think Wingate's widow worth including] know that he died an unhappy and frustrated man.'
This simply is not true. I cannot claim, as Mr. Mosley does on what I fancy are somewhat slender grounds, to have known Wingate very well; but I saw a good deal of him between 1942 and 1944, and the only occasion on which he did not appear unhappy and frustrated was just before he died.
The advanced headquarters of the 3rd Indian Division were then at Imphal (the rather silly 'cover' designation of 3 Ind. Div. had been given to Wingate's force, which consisted en- tirely of British, Gurkha and West African troops, with a few Burma Rifles and a handful of Chinese). I spent two days and nights the,re about a week before Wingate was killed. I was in a rather torpid state, having descended in a glider in some quite irrelevant part of Burma on the first night of the operations, and having had in consequence a long walk Home; but I retain a vivid memory of a Wingate very different from the wry, brooding, thwarted figure, with head lowered like a buffalo about to charge, whom 1 had seen tramping the unappreciative corridors of GHQ in Delhi, or threading the steep, tortuous and disillusioning luitungs of Chungking.
His head was still lowered—partly, I always imagined, to conceal the broad scar left on his throat by the attempt at suicide in Cairo; but his face (hawk-like, strong and heraldic in a primitive sort of way, like the face of some legendary bird carved on the prow of a war-canoe) was relaxed and alight. One can hardly say of so astringent a character that he was gay; but he gave the impression of a serenity laced with inner excitement, and he talked freely, with the amplitude of an undergraduate and the learning of a very unusual don, on wide and speculative themes which had nothing to do with the campaign he was directing.
This was then going well. The airborne coup de main, brilliant in conception but very hazardous in execution, had succeeded. Calvert's 77 Brigade, who had carried it out, were in the process of establishing at 'White City' a stronghold which embodied and vindicated Wingats:s theories about the possibilities of supplying isolated but aggressive land forces by air; these theories, which now seem elementary, were then regarded by many as chimerical and far-fetched. 16 Brigade, under Bernard Fergusson, was—even if legend is true and its commander had to report his location as 'three miles south of the second U in UNSURVEYED'—making steady pro- gress. And 111 Brigade (Lentaigne's) was doing well too. Wingate was playing, and winning, a game for which he had invented the rules, fashioned the pieces and ruled out, on an intractable chunk of enemy-occupied Asia, the far from rigid board. It is small wonder that, in mid-March of 1944, he gave the impression of having fulfilled himself, of being happy.
The point about Wingate was that he was a very great fighting commander. His posthumous news value (out of which Mr. Mosley is certain, and the Sunday Express likely, to make money) lies in less essential attributes. Some of them are attributes often associated with greatness. Wingate was eccen- tric, outspoken, intolerant, autocratic. His powers of endur- ance were based on will-power rather than physique. He was scruffy. He sometimes showed off. He made enemies galore, and never bothered about making friends. Everything he did he did against the grain, insisting that he knew best and eventually getting his way. He was a fanatical Zionist and allowed himself (deliberately,-not in innocence) to be so com- promised in Palestine that he could never have served there again. He riled almost all his superiors (Churchill, Wavell and Mountbatten were among the few exceptions), and he often bullied his subordinates. He was not only a perfectionist (which many good and bad commanders are), but an artist, He was not only moody, but capable of despair. He was a difficult man.
But he did great deeds, and inspired others to do them too. Mr. Mosley clearly does not share the malice which motivated Mr. Aldington's nasty book about T. E. Lawrence, and goes out of his Way to express reverence for the memory of a man, some aspects• of whose life have supplied him with the raw material for a stunt. But I do not think it is honourable to denigrate a man, who served his country with distinction, only a decade after his death. In fact—not to put too fine a point upon it—I think it is a dirty trick.
Previous page
