A PEN PORTRAIT

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 66, Issue 5603, 9 April 1943, Page 2

A PEN PORTRAIT

OF THE EIGHTH ARMY COMMANDER

BERNARD LAW MONTGOMERY

(By

A.F.

in the London Observer)

it is thirty-four years since Bernard Law Montgomery, who is “ Eittie Monty '' to his friends, left Sandhurst to join as a subaltern the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, of which from 1931 to 1934 he was to command a battalion. Ten years of his youth had been spent in Tasmania, where his latner was bishop. He says that the strictness of his religious upbringing left him fed up with “ too much oi that sort of thing,” and the rigid personal asceticism which is such a feature of his character to-day does not arise from purely spiritual causes. His keenness for athletics is of long standing; he played rugger for Sandhurst and hockey for the army. He is remembered as an exceedingly hard-working young officer, not much interested-in the more social activities of the mess. A friend tried to ■ ersuade him to take a girl to a dance and chose fittingly as he thought, the '.’icar’s daughter, whom he invited to tea and seated next to Monty. But, alas r ! she was discovered both to smoke and drink. Montv pronounced her “ not maidenly.” and stayed away from the dance. When, later in life, rather to everyone’s surprise, he got married. h° ruled his household with ■he authority of a medieval knight. Tfrp jovons prr-’val of p son he treated

n \toff problem end orders tor hi<= hrt irtcr ord woltor ™ • l-r> --vJina. n Cr'-v'ninlv nnL. For ’-n much staff wort-.” Montgomery had more than three ■ears on the Western Front during he la-1 \t.ir, being mentioned six times in dispatches and winning the T 1.5.0. and the French Military Cross, ■ome sav that he was one of those .ion who* had to see too much of warrxc’- during that time that his eyes - ot that, curious, misty-grey, “ tired ’■ look which so often deceives people nto thinking him older than his fiftyfour years. Certainly his eyes have seen much. When he lay wounded in “ no man’s land ” another man went Out to brino- hin) in. He was hit and fell dead over Montgomery’s body. For seven hbftrs the Germans pumped lead into both of them, most of the bullets striking the corpse. As a result, Monte,ornery lost one lung and owes his life to the presence of a amous surgeon, who ordered that he sf'iculd not be touched at the dressing elation, but should bo sent back to England tor special treatment. His >L--. ■ •?.l fitness since is all the more extraordinary. ' during the years between V.. U-. at the Staff Colleges at ■oetta and Camber]ey, that Montgomery started working out the system of command which he has retained and improved upon ever sinceAt that time he called it the fixed E-attle scheme. In essence it was to ensure that a commander should have full knowledge of what was going on : 11 along the line, and to reduce to minimum what Clausewitz called the “ friction of war.” Montgomery’s ystem enables him to impose his own This he 1 with Ro’umel. While rc.r ntly in com- ■ land of a corns, and later an army, training

and manoeuvres, lessons which have made him the equal of Rommel in experience. Mistakes were often made but he never allowed them to be made twice. In manoeuvres he would be followed bv two of his staff officers on motor cycles, whom he would order to take down the name of an officer who had distinguished himself either by success or failure. He struck the fear of God into many. He was often brusque and rude, but never sarcastic. “ You’re good, Mr So-and-so, but you’re not good enough,” he would say to an officer he was going to sack. On entering his headquarters one would be confronted with a notice: Three Questions of the Day: (1) Are you 100 per cent fit ? (2) Are you 100 per cent up in your job ? (3) Are you 100 per cent full of binge ? Binge was the name of several of his exercises, and was a pet word of his. No one knows why, for the nearest Monty has ever got to what others call a binge is to go to the piano and sing “ Little Brown Jug,” polishing off the performance with a glass of water.’ Actually he , seems to us? the word binge in its more Edwardian sense of punch, zip. or just guts. He gave a rude jolt to officers and men who were comfortably combining a little domestic ease with their military duties by ordering all wives out of areas under his command. Coming on top of the six-miles-a-week run for all ranks under forty years of a«-e, this was too much of a good thing for some.

Like Joffre, Montgomery retires to bed by ten o’clock and rises at five. He is a hard thinker and a quick thinker. He can retain enormously intricate staff problems in his head. In fact, he boasted that in France in 1940 he never had to write an order He believes in making himself absolutely clear to his officers. It is said that immediately on arrival in the desert he addressed all his officers, ignoring protests that some must not be taken from the front line in ordei to attend. “ N.C.O.’s should be perfectly* competent to take over, after two years in the field,” he is reported to have replied. Monty is a 100 per cent professional soldier. His only ambition is to do the job as well as possible. To him this just means hard work. As well as stupendous mental alertness h? has that infinite capacity for taking pains in all matters, big or small. He has, too, the great quality essential in a good general—robustness of temperament. Because of his hard thinking he is not easily surprised, and his serenity in the dangerous moment when his preparations for the offensive were interrupted by Rommel’s attack seemed to eradicate the word “ flap ” from the desert vocabulary. But. above all, he believes in that maxim of Ardant du Picq that “ the man is the first weapon of battle.” Every nian, whatever his trade or speciality (cook, clerk, driver, or signaller). a soldier first. Every man knows his job in the team. He is the first British general who can say: “ The Army and the Air Arm are operationally one.” His faith in the British soldier has been rewarded with a famous victory for British arms. To Monty and his Army has fallen the honour of destroying for ever the legend of German invincibilI ity.