'In defeat unbeatable; in victory unbearable," Winston Churchill is said to have remarked about Field Marshal Montgomery, the victor of El Alamein and the Normandy landings. Those six words tell us more about Monty than 60 or even 600 of this biographer's, whose enthusiasm for his subject may be measured in an almost unstinting verbosity.
This is a shame, because Montgomery's reputation deserves rescuing from the butchery he himself did it. Conceit collided with garrulous vanity in Montgomery, and the result was a strutting, prating human coxcomb. Yet that said, Montgomery was nonetheless a genuinely great wartime general who, when war was done, then wrote the book around which the modern British army was constructed.
Soldiers are a herd species, quick to sense both weakness and loyalty. They expect death, but they don't expect it to be wanton or wasteful, and they want the reassurance that while they live, their leaders will care for them. This assurance Montgomery gave them; and for that, British soldiers worshipped him.
And he worshipped them back. He stood at the apex of a hierarchy of male regard, and his affection towards his immediate subordinates diffused throughout his command. He was unabashed about his feelings, most powerfully expressed in the death-panegyric he gave to his ADC, Major Charlie Sweeny - "an Irish boy with a delightful brogue". Yet inexplicably, Nigel Hamilton does not quote the most telling part of the eulogy. "Charles . . . knew the depth of my devotion to him, because I had told him of it; he knew that he could call on me for anything he wanted . . . I loved this gallant Irish boy and his memory will remain with me for all time."
What other military leader of modern times spoke so freely of his love for another man? The failure to cite these telling words is all the more baffling because Nigel Hamilton has rightly identified Montgomery's affection for men as a powerful, indeed overwhelming, influence over his life in what the author terms his subject's "homosociality". (We hear a lot too about "homophobia" and even "heterophobia" too: oh dear me).
The author is professor of biography at De Montfort University, aka Leicester Technical College, and the title "The Full Monty" is on an intellectual par with naming a tech after a Norman warlord. So naturally, the title is not merely banal; it is wrong. This is not the full Monty, but the half Monty, with volume two to follow. Why? The author has already published a three-volume biography on Montgomery. Is he gradually working his way down to the one-volume biography which, properly edited, The Full Monty could and should have been? Or is he founding the new intellectual discipline of Montology at his rather aptly named university?
One certainly has the right to expect a professor of biography not to reiterate baseless myths, such as Ludendorff's "claim" that the British army were "lions led by donkeys". He said no such thing. Nor is it good enough to trot out the old saw that Haig was a reactionary stick-in-the mud, when he rivals Montgomery in the scale of his wartime reforms.
The author is critical of Montgomery's conduct during the Arab revolt in Palestine in 1938, though not critical enough. Montgomery had operational command over much of Palestine, and must be held answerable for what British soldiers did there. Instead of accepting that he was dealing with a political movement, as he finally had in Ireland in 1920, he chose instead to believe he was dealing with criminal gangs. The legalised atrocities that followed - undescribed here - constitute one of the darkest chapters of the British army in the 20th century. I take no pleasure in saying that the crucifixion of the indigenous people of Palestine was begun by the British, and executed by Montgomery and by another general of Irish extraction, Dick O'Connor, and has been atoned by no one ever since.
This cannot take away from Montgomery's greatest achievement - the wartime reconstruction of the British army that after 1918 had departed into a vast organisational denial, in which dysfunctionalism and displacement activity were its primary goals. Heedless of the lessons of 1914, the British embraced a self-sustaining idiocy called the 10-year rule, which assumed that the next 10 years would always be free of war in Europe. Perhaps a clinical psychiatrist might just be able to make sense of such wish-fulfilment masquerading as policy, though I doubt it.
When Montgomery finally achieved the high command he deserved, he proved to be a pragmatic leader, recognising the limitations of the military instrument he had inherited. The British army of 1939-45 was culturally and organisationally inferior to the Wehrmacht, and no one man could undo that organic disorder. Instead Montgomery's battleplans, invariably models of cautious lucidity, took those innate deficiencies into account.
However, Montgomery did not lead a "British" army against a better equipped German army at El Alamein, as so many British historians maintain, but instead a Commonwealth army (just one of his four infantry divisions was British) against a German-led and gravely under-equipped Italian one which had substantial German support (only 31 of the 71 Axis infantry battalions in the battle were German).
All mythologising aside, Montgomery now deserves to be restored to his proper place in military history. This can only be done by a well-argued, well written account of his many achievements; and The Full Monty, alas, is not it.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist. His first novel, Banks of Green Willow, has just been published by Scribner/TownHouse