Books: The Bull

ALLENBY OF ARABIA by Brian Gardner. 314 pages. Coward-McCann. $6.50.

When General Sir Edmund Allenby died at 75 in 1936, the New York Times composed a reverent fanfare of farewell: "None who held high command will be so long remembered in the English-speaking world." Yet less than 30 years later, the object of this adulation is remembered only vaguely as a World War I Blimp attached by chance to a much more colorful and important object: Lawrence of Arabia. Such an impression, says Historian Brian Gardner (The Year That Changed the World: 1945), is ludicrously inadequate. In this sound and vigorous biography, he demonstrates that Allenby was a grand personality and a great general who executed an outstanding military masterpiece in World War I.

Born of an obscure Nottinghamshire family, Allenby could nevertheless claim a martial ancestor of distinction: Oliver Cromwell. Still, he joined the army merely by mischance, having previously failed his civil service exams. A big quiet clumsy boy, he passed out twelfth in his class at Sandhurst, and was promptly gazetted to the Inniskilling Dragoons near Durban, South Africa, where he spent the better part of the next 20 years. When the Boer War began, he was 38 and had never fired a shot in anger. When the war was over, he was a tough, cunning, unbeatable commander of cavalry—and a man with a mission. Astounded by the incompetence of his superiors ("generals with no more brains or backbone than a bran doll"), he angrily determined to "put matters right." He was well equipped for it. At 48, Allenby was a huge and powerful man with a chest like the hump of Africa and a head like Gibraltar, not to mention a tongue that could flay a rhinoceros. When "the Bull" saw red, battle-hardened officers sometimes fainted dead away.

A Free Hand. At the first Battle of Ypres in 1914, Allenby rallied his demoralized troops by "sheer strength of character" and broke a German attack that seemed certain to win the war. However, it was only in the summer of 1917 that greatness came looking for Allenby. At first, he wanted to turn it down. Assigned to supreme command of the Middle East, he roared indignantly that he was being "degommered"-demoted. But when the Cabinet promised a free hand and heavy reinforcements, he hit Cairo like a sandstorm—a superbly organized sandstorm.

Allenby, in the opinion of many military experts, was the first commander of the 20th century to meet and solve the problems of combined operations on a large scale. Infantry, cavalry, artillery, armor, sea power, air power, guerrilla forces, intelligence units, political possibilities—all the main instruments of modern war were available to other regional commanders of World War I, but Allenby alone, according to the author, had the administrative imagination to employ them in symphony. To orchestrate his strategy, he assembled a staff of geniuses—men like T. E. Lawrence, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Lieut. Colonel Archibald Wavell. Allenby offered these men responsibilities that few other generals of the age dared to delegate, but at the same time he dominated the scene with what Lawrence described as "a mind like the prow of the Mauretania—there is so much weight behind it that it does not need to be sharp."