LORD ALLENBY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3783, 17 July 1936, Page 9

LORD ALLENBY

LAST OF THE GREAT CAVALRY COMMANDERS.

Waiting from London on May 20, to an Australian contemporary, “Old Stager” says:— .With the quick colourful imagery of the Celt, Mr Lloyd George has described Field-Marshal Lord Allenby as the leader of the Last Crusade. The romantic analogy may not bear strict scrutiny. For present signs and portents suggest more likelihood of the valley of the Jordan flowing again with the tide of war than with milk and honey. But there is an intriguing resemblance between Allenby’s impetuous crusading elan and massive physique and our historical vignette of Richard Coeur de Lion. One can well imagine King Richard hitting it off admirably with the Aussie cavalrymen whom Allenby commanded, or Allenby spurring right gallantly in sombre mail in the lists of Ashby de la Zouche. What would be strictly true, viewing the irresistable process of military mechanisation, is to describe Allenby as the last of the great cavalry ■ commanders. The next time the Syrian moon witnesses a crusading invasion its beams will glimmer, not on stirrups and sabres, but on tanks and bombing planes. The strong probability is that the next crusaders will be robot dragons, and as likely as not they will spit poison gas. Allenby has been laudated by manyadmiring obituarists, but none of them possessed either the intimate knowledge of the dead field-marshal or the genius to give it expression that Aircraftsman Shaw had. We find the supreme testimony to Allenby in Lawrence of Arabia’s “Seven Pillars,” the one worthy prose classic produced by the Great War. Lawrence was a ruthless judge o' character. His debunking of typical Brass hat swagger as camouflage to military incompetence is brutal. He handles them, does this delicate Oxford scholar, with the heart of a poet and the brain of a Napoleon, as a surgeon specialist would an anatomical specimen. When Allenby was transferred from the Western front where his cavalry division met and grimly checked the raiding German Uhlan patrols in the first clash of European battle, and he later took command of the third army, to take charge in Egypt. Lajwrence met him for the first time in a memorable tete-a-tete. “I fell to wondering if this heavy rubicund man was like ordinary generals, and if we should have trouble for six months teaching him.” Lawrence describes it as “a comic interview.”

“Allenby was physically large and confident, and morally so great that the comprehension of our littleness came slowly to him. He sat in his chair looking at me—not straight, as his custom was, but sideways, puzzled. He was full of Western ideas of gun power and weight—the worst training for our war—but, as a cavalryman was already half persuaded to throw up the new school, in this different world of Asia, and accompany Dawnay and Chetwode along the worn road of manoeuvre and movement. Yet he was hardly prepared- for anything so odd as myself —a little barefooted silk-skirted man offering to hobble the enemy by his preaching, if given stores and arms and a fund of two hundred thousand sovereigns to convince and control his converts. Allenby could not make out how much was genuine performer and how much charlatan. The problem was working behind his eyes, and T left him unhelped to solve it.” “He did not,” writes Lawrence, “aslc many questions, nor talk much, but studied the map and listened to my unfolding of Eastern Syria and its inhabitants. At the end he put up his chin, and said quite directly, ‘Well, I will do for you what I can,’ and that ended it. But we learned gradually that he meant exactly what he said, and that what General Allenby Could do was enough for his very greediest servant.” Not the least convincing proof of Allenby’s true greatness is that, a professional soldier trained in the Sandhurst and Aidershot tradition, and a cavalryman to boot, he had yet the vision to recognise the genius and dynamic potentiality of the comic opera little figure in sheik’s attire, and to back this fcmateur warrior-my-stic’s romantic escapade in Arabia through thick and thin. . Not many of our typical Brass Hats would have had such gumption.

They would have regarded Lawrence as a mountebank interloper, and snubbed the grotesque intruder with all the starched ferocity of a sublimated R.S.M. upon whose majestic presence a seaside nigger minstrel had dared to insinuate himself. Lawrence left him to work out a difficult and unfamiliar equation unhelped, and Allenby was more than equal to the test.

Lawrence was no star-worshipping cinema fan. He was a hard-boiled grim realist of the Desert. Yet he worshipped Allenby this side of idolisatry, and tells us, “The good cheer and the conscious strength of the C-in-C was a, bath of comfort to a wlearly person after longlstrained days. His breadth of personality swejt aWay the mists of private and departmental jealouies. What an idol the man was to us prismatic with the unmixed self-standing quallity of greatness, instinct and compact with it.” There is warranty enough, in these glowing tributes, that in Allenby we mourn no sham publicity hero, no faked mythical colossus, but a real cavalry leader and captain of men whose intrinsic spirit entitles him to rank in the very vanguard of history’s most glittering squadrons. He rides with Roland. His shade salutes, with compeer gesture, the plumed ghost of Prince Rupert. And the age of mechanism prolaims him the last of history’s great knights of the saddled charger. After him comes the deluge of the tanks. Most of our big commanders of the Great War have joined up for the Great Duration. Jellicoe, Beatty, French, Haig, Smith-Dorrien, ' Plumer, Monash, Byng. Rawlinson, one by one they have saluted Death and passed into the warrier elysium. But Allenby’s fame, through his own sheer merit and also by reason of his lucky cavalry star, which led him away from mass factory-made slaughter on the stagnant Western Front, will outlive that of most if not all of his contemporaries. Whilst the rest engaged in a dull but deadly war of attrition, trench system against trench system, Allenby fought a swift campaign of decisive movement, and his spectacular victories embraced ground hallowed by ancient renown and cities old in Bible history. Jerusalem and Baghdad have a ring about them that no tremendous modern epic could impart to even Ypres or Verdun. lan Hamilton’s Gallipoli adventure had as romantic a setting, perhaps even an older aura. It was an epic, not brilliant success, but of fiasco. Thus do the fates order our mortal lottery of destiny.