BOOKS
Prophecy Under Arms
By SIMON RAVEN
PURITANISM,' remarks Christopher Sykes early in his biography of Major-General Wingate,* 'is an abiding force in British affairs'; and there is hardly one of his 550-odd pages which does not provide good evidence for this assertion. The child of massively puritanical parents, the suc- cessor to a long line of honourable but strictly workaday military officers, Wingate passed an early boyhood which, but for the fact of his being one of a large family, puts one in mind of Edmund Gosse: for in the Wingates' household as in the Gosses' there was knowledge as well as the scrip- tures, curiosity as well as devotion; and here also was the same lowering parental dread that outside social influences could only be corrupting. As a result, when Wingate went to Charterhouse in 1916 he went as a day boy, an expedient which ensured that the moody and censorious reserve already noticeable in his disposition was in no way modified, He is remembered as threatening Master Phillip Radcliffe' with eternal hell-fire if he went to a Sunday concert, and as going off to pray by himself in the school chapel on a free huff-holiday. 'This was not looked on as whole- some,' writes Mr. Sykes: even so early did Orde Wingate invite the suspicion and distaste of his fellows.
Nor was he an object of affection at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He was, how- ever, the object of increasingly respectful remark. For it was at Woolwich that Wingate began the immense course of reading and fact-gathering which was later to provide him with his formid- able general culture; and it was here, too, that he shamed his would-be persecutors by walking naked and with dignity down a gauntlet of knotted towels and voluntarily diving into the icy water tank at its end. Newly commissioned into the Royal Artillery, he showed courage in the hunting field—though he was strongly suspected of a desire to show off; but it was only after he had attended a course in Arabic and been posted, in 1927, to the Sudan, that what was to be the recur- ring pattern of his career began to emerge.
This pattern, faintly discernible in his Sudan activities, repeated more boldly in Palestine just before the war and in Abyssinia a little later, the pattern finally demonstrated on an heroic scale in India and Burma, was shaped as follows. Win- gate would arrive in a theatre of operations with a general conviction that affairs here as elsewhere were conducted by officials and officers of 'herd mentality'—the type of men who had scoffed at him at Charterhouse, had flicked him with towels at the RMA—and with the added conviction that he himself, by reason of his military know- ledge, his strength of character and his zeal for all things just and godly, was ideally suited (and even divinely appointed) to bring matters to a .desirable conclusion. Fortified by these assump- tions, he would then seek unsparingly for the particular solution to the local problem, and, usu-
ORDE WINGATE. By Christopher Sykes. (Col- dins, 35s.) ally found that this solution was itself dependent upon the whole-hearted adoption of the right cause—a cause which was not necessarily con- ceived in a manner reassuring to authority. Thus he arrived in Palestine in 1936, when the Arabs were in revolt because the Jewish immigrants were gradually displacing them from their land. The rights and wrongs of it all were multitudin- ous and confusing; but the majority of British officials were (probably wrongly) pro-Arab, and this despite their declared obligation to the Jews. As for Wingate, he espoused the cause of the Jews in the most extreme possible fashion—he became a Zionist. Having found so characteristic a cause, he was not slow to propose an administrative and tactical solution that would be consistent with it. The Jews of the kibbutzim must be organised, with a stiffening of British officers and NCOs, into units which, largely by means of night patrols, would seek out and destroy hostile Arab bodies in their areas: to assist in this arrangement the illegal Hagana must be tacitly acknowledged and official reluctance to arm the Jews set firmly on one side: and he, Wingate, must be charged with the overall training and ordering of the new units. It should be observed, at this juncture, that Wingate was nobody and nothing other than a captain supposedly and subordinately employed in Intelligence work.
But to continue with the Wingate behaviour pattern. Having, as in Palestine, determined with intensity and righteousness upon the correct solu- tion, Wingate would then allow no rest to any- body, let him be water-carrier or General Officer Commanding, until he himself was permitted to implement the course of action he favoured. Memoranda poured thick from his pen; hour: long monologues enraged comfortable Staff offi- cers who were just setting off for the races; assistance was sought (behind the backs of the local hierarchy) from influential connections in England; the air was continually charged with the flow of argument and with evangelistic im- precation. And in the end (as in Palestine, so in Burma) Wingate would get his way. Sooner or later and by sheer persistence he would find the right ear and impress the right man (Churchill himself smiled personally upon the birth of the Chindits). To the extreme annoyance of the 'herd' in their smug little offices, Wingate would be accorded troops, supplies, and blessings to his ex- act specification, and then, adding performance to promise, would make a swingeing—and in- fallibly dramatic—success of his undertaking. For however the racegoers might opine on their veran- dahs, Wingate had that quality which pertains to the greatest Captains : believing passionately in his cause and in his own power to fulfil it, he made his followers the unconquerable disciples of his faith.
But the last stage of the recurring pattern tended to be less happy. Since Wingate knew he was always right, he saw no reason to compromise in the interest of military or political expedience. Sooner or later, therefore, he would always go too far; he would do or say something which placed him temporarily beyond forgiveness. In Palestine he forgot that the Government had problems to
consider other and possibly more urgent than Jewish welfare; in Abyssinia he overlooked the
fact, so passionately was he devoted to the ideal of Abyssinian independence, that a strategy de- signed for global war might require that his ideal
be qualified in some respects. Inevitably, success
would be followed by recall—recall to discover, not the recognition he expected, but the hostility of those whose commands he had defied and whose patience he had exhausted. Only the last and greatest of his adventures did not end in
recrimination, and before this could happen Win- gate was dead. There is every sign that, had he lived, even his Burmese achievements would have been thrown back at him with rancour from many quarters; for, as it is, certain authorities have pro- . nounced these achievements 'phoney' and their fame inflated, have claimed that, while his ex- ploits made valuable propaganda, their strategical import was negligible.
Now, if one looks to Mr. Sykes, one finds that the pattern which I have been describing is lov- ingly traced and retraced, that the military in- trigues involved are subtly and entertainingly examined, and that both the theory and practice of Wingate's guerrilla tactics are soundly and clearly presented. One also finds the vivid por- trayal of a portentous personality. But at this stage one is entitled to ask for judgment—judg- ment both of Wingate's historical relevance as a leader and of his qualities as a man. As to the former, Mr. Sykes concurs with the Churchillian view that Wingate pointed the way to new and brilliant techniques in a limited type of warfare which was yet vital to the conduct of strategy in the Far East; and this assessment seems both plabsible and just. But as to the question of Win- gate's: qualities as a man, I find Mr. Sykes's atti- tude equivocal. And this brings us right to the heart of a very important matter.
Mr. Sykes adopts, in considering Wingate's per- sonality, a heavy and sanctimonious tone; and while he cannot avoid references to Wingate's tactless- ness, intolerance and pride, he is at immense pains to explain them away, repeatedly putting the blame for such excesses on the blockheaded com- placency of Wingate's colleagues or excusing them on the ground of his fervently religious tempera- ment. However, if one considers the general pat- tern of his career, and if one further considers the individual incidents, as related by Mr. Sykes, which make up that pattern, then it is plain be- yond question that Wingate was egotistical and self-opinionated, petulant, self-dramatising and paranoiac, ill-tempered, bullying, inordinately ambitious, a nagging bore and a relentless ex- hibitionist. This emerges very clearly from Mr. Sykes's book, however ingenious the excuses he provides.-It emerged equally clearly from accounts I often heard, while myself in the Army, from in- telligent, fair-minded and responsible senior offi- cers who had served variously under Wingate's command and actually on his staff. It is pointless for Mr. Sykes to attribute Wingate's vicious peevishness solely to the slackness or perversitY of brother officers who disliked or thwarted him. Such officers were, as often as not, decent and far- sighted men who recognised self-absorption—and. fanaticism—when they saw it. It is a tribute, of course, to the genius of Sir Winston Churchill that he should have appreciated Wingate's null' tary capacity and sought to canalise the man's prophetic energies into the fulfilment of military aims. But herein lies Wingate's only defence: when we have wars, people will say, then we must have men like Wingate. To my mind this is orl° more excellent reason for not having wars.
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