Wavell on Allenby
Allenby : A Study in Greatness. By General Sir Archibald Wavell. (Harrap. x8s.)
HERE is a piece of work well done, and apt reading for the times. General Wavell is at once the pupil and successor of his great Palestine commander, and is qualified also by sobriety, detachment of view and a gift of clear, concise writing. His book is printed as he writes : fine large type and no trimmings, save an ingenious system of illustration whereby the Allenby homes in East Anglia, and the Zulu campaign in South Africa are pictorially as well as cartographically represented on the map. Only once is he inaccurate, and then in the elusive medium of the Arabic language. " Allenby's name translated into Arabic could be read as 'Allah en nebi' (' the prophet of the Lord ')." Not by an Arab; to whom it would mean (if it meant anything) blasphemy, "God the prophet."
Biographers of great soldiers labour under a difficulty from which civil biographers are relatively immune. The statesman moves in a world of speeches, elections, controversies, triumphs and defeats which, though sublimated by distinction, is yet the world of the general reader; who can also cope in varying degrees of familiarity with the achievements of administrators, the anecdoted memoirs of diplomacy, and the struggles of authors, artists and actors. In all of these the hero occupies, on almost every page, the forefront and middle distance of the scene. But a great soldier lives, moves and has his being in campaigns, often described (without much mention of him) in technical language and all too seldom 'relieved by battle action intelligible to the uninstructed layman. The frame is thus apt to dwarf the picture and to present not so much the warrior, as the war. Only one military historian has stood the test of time, to be read, re- read and read again: the detailed, the minutely-personal Homer.
Three factors have combined to save this Life from any such criticism : the skill of the very competent biographer; the cres- cendo of interest, culminating in one of the most brilliantly con- ceived victories in history, and, last and most, the rugged splen- dour of Allenby's character It seemed not for nothing that he • had been born on St. George's Day. His fearlessness, his straightness and horror of shifty ways—" Look out for that fellow," he warned the reviewer, of a Palestine Prelate : "he's as crooked as a . ram's horn "—were the expected attributes of the armed Paladin. To these were added his inexhaustible zeal and thoroughness in the King's service. His passionate -love and observation of nature could be deterred by no crisis: "When almost every moment was taken up by interviews and reconnais- sances, Allenby took his usual interest in the plants, animals, birds, and people of a new land. His letters to Lady Allenby, written from a train lying in a siding at the railhead, contain observations such as the following : Of birds, there are larks, wheatears, shrikes, bee-eaters, hawks, vultures. Flamingoes fre- quent the mouths of the wadis. There is a merry bird, the rufous warbler, who haunts the locality. He is pert and friendly. Loo1s. like a big nightingale, has the manners of a robin, and flirts his tail like a redstart. I saw one today attack a locust nearly as big as himself. There are also jackals, jerboas, lizards and scarab beetles . . .
Yet he read, most scholarly, the printed page as well as "nature's infinite book of secrecy," and remembered accurately all he read. He was "a purist, sometimes almost a pedant, in, the use of the English language. His style, both official spa colloquial, was :Ample and severe ; good, plain, homesplw English, purged of all superfluous adjectives or adverbs, all neokr gisms, colloquialisms, or idiosyncrasies." Split infinitives h?, would not endure, nor such easy small change as "the former and "the latter."
General Wave11's is no retouched "camera study" or "studio portrait." He records Allenby's comparative silence and ineffec- tiveness at the periodical conferences of Army commanders: where, like Kitchener in the Cabinet, he "did not make the im- pression that his abilities warranted," and does not spare the explosive violence of temper "soon over, but it usually left the victim visibly shaken and unnerved." He resembled Kitchener again in his utter detestation of war : in his letters home from South Africa he "does not conceal his opinion of the stupidity of war" . . . . " war was to him a tedious, distasteful business, which interfered with enjoyment of the quiet and beautiful fruits of the earth." Truly the War Lord has no place in the picture of England.
General Waved "gives reasons," which many will be disposed to accept, "for him to be regarded as the best British General of the Great War." He will assuredly live as the last great cavalry general. More than that, Allenby "had qualities of courage, loyalty, directness of thought and purpose, knowledge of his profession and common sense in the application of his know- ledge, that would have made him a great soldier in any age and under any conditions." Those who served him will remember
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