Books: Great Britain's Uncle Dickie Mountbatten

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He was considered lacking in intellectual brilliance, but he was quick- minded and receptive to other people's ideas. The result, with a little help from his social connections, was an unending series of promotions. There was never a way to treat Dickie Mountbatten as if he were just another lieutenant. He had money of his own, and he had married the beautiful and exceedingly wealthy Edwina Ashley. It was a stormy union, marked by his many affairs and her infatuations, including one with Jawaharlal Nehru, but it lasted until Edwina's death in 1960. Stationed in Malta in the late '20s, the couple kept a 66-ton yacht in the harbor. Noel Coward, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and an assortment of royals were their houseguests.

As a commander of destroyers early in World War II, says Ziegler, Mountbatten was popular but reckless: "If a destroyer could leave skid-marks, (H.M.S.) Kelly would have disfigured every sea in which she sailed." Even so, the author largely absolves Mountbatten of responsibility for the failure of the bloody 1942 raid on Dieppe, a sacrifice made inevitable by pushing and shoving between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. And Ziegler argues convincingly that Mountbatten's handling of the transfer of power in India in 1947 was a success, considering political realities there. He opposed the splitting off of Muslim Pakistan from India and tried to prevent it. But religion had its customary disastrous effect on politics. Hindus and Muslims despised each other; partition and the bloodshed that followed, says Ziegler, were inevitable.

Despite Mountbatten's massive size, the evenhanded narrative moves with enormous grace and wit. This affectionate character study of a nearly extinct species can also be read as a fascinating gloss on World War II, or as a social history of wealth and privilege in decline. It was privilege, in the end, that killed Mountbatten. His habit over the decades was to spend his summers at Classiebawn Castle, an elegant old pile he owned in the Republic of Ireland. It will stand as one of history's sad ironies that Mountbatten had never taken part in the dispute over the control of Ulster and that, in fact, the Tories counted him a dangerous left-winger and a partisan of self- determination. But he was an English earl and a cousin of the Queen, and he died a sacrifice to the kind of tribal hatred he had worked so hard in India to overcome.