BOOKS OF THE DAY
Lawrence's Mantle
Eastern Approaches. By Fitzroy Maclean. (Cape. 15s.)
MR. CHURCHILL coined the name " Ambassador-leader " for the type of man on whom he expected the mantle of T. E. Lawrence to fall in the Second World War. There were many competitors for the mantle ; they were far more numerous than Lawrence's contemporary rivals, and it can hardly be doubted that at least some of them sur- passed him both in endurance and achievement in the field. But by one ultimate test he has always stood alone. No one yet has written a book to be compared with Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
War-time legend placed Fitzroy Maclean an easy first among the successors to Lawrence, at least after the capture of Stirling of the S.A.S. and the death of Wingate of Abyssinia and the Chindits. Eastern Approaches leaves little doubt that war-time legend was right. What is perhaps even more important, at least to a reviewer, is that there are moments when it almost passes the ultimate test. There are longer passages, it is true, where the author does not even attempt the test, especially in the later parts of the book ; but this is perhaps in itself a symptom of the immensely varied range of his practical qualifications and attainments, which cannot, like Lawrence's single and homogeneous field of achievement, be compassed in the coherent pattern of a monolithic (or even a heptalithic) work of literary architecture.
Few Englishmen have ever brought such talents to the service of adventure. It was much to combine the training of a scholar and diplomat, the gift of languages, the restless urge for travel and danger, the prestige of the House of Commons, and the disciplined experi- ence of a soldier who rose from private to major-general in four years ; but this was not all. He enjoyed in addition two subtler advantages which Lawrence wholly lacked. First, he had the well- bred Englishman's attitude towards the absurd conduct of foreigners —that happy blend of lively sympathy and ironic detachment which is here best illustrated by the description of " almost our only fatal accident" at a parachute-school, when " a visiting foreigner, who had gone up simply to watch the jumping, was so overcome by excitement that he jumped from the plane with the others, without pausing to put on a parachute." There was no danger that Maclean, like Lawrence, would mistake the cause for which his king and country had engaged him ; and secondly, again unlike Lawrence, there was no danger in his temperament of being perpetually " agin the Government." On the contrary, he enjoyed the complete confi- dence of every superior in the Allied hierarchy, from Mr. Churchill downwards, a blessing whose value none knew better than those to whom it was denied.
The monumental quality of the achievements to which these talents justly led is too well-known to need even the most summary review. The fact that the guerilla war in Yugoslavia occupies only the latter and lesser half of the book, not one word of which is dull, can be left to speak for itself. What matters more is how the story is told. The first and longer half is a masterly piece of narrative often worthy of comparison with the masterpiece it challenges. The latter half, which deals with the legendary mission to Tito, is less excellent as prose only because it is more important for history. To the future historians of the Second World War it will be no less indispensable, though on a lesser scale, than Mr. Churchill's own memoirs. But like them, too, it is not itself history ; indeed, it will sometimes seem to make the historian's task unnecessarily difficult.
Two examples of these difficulties may suggest ways in which later editions, which are sure to come, may be made more helpful without detracting from the brilliant merits of the work. There are, in the first place, very few precise dates given. In the first crucial year of the mission to Tito there are almost none: even the data of the mission's appointment (not merely the day and the month, but even the year) has to be deduced from parallel clues, such as that the downfall of Mussolini occurred during the week-end of Mr. Churchill's preliminary briefing at Chequers—an ominous coin- cidence for those who think that after the war passed its turning- point there was no more need for guerilla missions. The second clarification which is needed concerns the purpose assigned to this particular mission. Mr. Churchill himself is the authority for the mandate of "Ambassador-leader," which is corroborated by the continual emphasis on the prime importance of killing Germans. But a perfectly distinct task, that of finding out "who (sc. Tito or Mihailovitch) was killing the most Germans," appears prima facie to be incompatible with the first task of a mission accredited exclu- sively to Tito. The second task was one which experience in other occupied countries had already proved beyond question to be pos- sible only for a mission accredited under a single command to both (or all) rival forces.
But these are caqs: for the historian, not for the connoisseur of adventure. For him the first duty is to pay homage to the achieve- ment, to the book it has inspired, and particularly to the man who is common to both. When his career, which is still what is called an early career, is studied as a composite essay in the arts of adventure, diplomacy, politics, war and literature, it becomes clear that it can almost be described with rigorous exactitude as incomparable. Almost, but not quite, for there is one, and only one, man with whom at the same stage of his life comparison is altogether fit. The name will be found, among other places, at the beginning of the first
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