The Full Monty

Nigel Hamilton

Allen Lane £25, pp944

The other day, some big cheese from the US army was explaining its ignorance of Pashtun intentions in hilariously unambitious terms. His excuse for the lack of intelligence about America's new enemies boiled down to this: you couldn't find an agent willing to spend time in Afghanistan without women.

The interesting thing about this ludicrously limp excuse - what on earth would Burnes, Younghusband or any of the other heroes of the Great Game have said? - is that it inadvertently constituted a wonderful justification for employing homosexuals in the military. Historically, many of the greatest soldiers have been gay. From the Spartan 'army of lovers' onwards, great generals have been driven not just by ambition, but often by desire for and obsession with their troops.

This observation is now so well established that there is a temptation to apply it in cases where it may not be appropriate. Few, if any, of the great generals who preferred the company of men could plausibly be described as homosexual in the modern sense, probably not even Frederick the Great. And there is a substantial category of martial heroes whose submerged, unexpressed desires cannot reasonably be excavated by biographers, and all we are left with is a marked shyness with women and a sentimental attachment to men.

In few moments in the past would that have borne the saucy interpretation we would routinely apply now. Letters between men of 100 or even 50 years ago often read like impassioned declarations of love; it is extremely difficult to interpret the tone, and say confidently at what point the declaration of a Beautiful Friendship is a proposal to exchange bodily fluids.

In short, I'm not convinced that Montgomery was homosexual. This biography, the first volume of a recension of a more reticent life in three volumes, claims to take advantage of new information to explore the great general's sexuality. If one feels uneasy at concentrating on the subject here, that is, largely, a fair reflection of this biography's focus - the fantastic vulgarity of the title should act as a small warning. Montgomery had, by any standards, a life of magnificent heroism, wisdom and achievement, and there is something trivial about thinking about him in terms of did-he-or-didn't-he?

The substantial claim of this revised life, however, is that the great achievements and the military devotion of Montgomery sprang from a suppressed longing for manly sergeants. The ingenuity of the argument, as well as the undoubted command Hamilton displays over his material, means that this biography deserves consideration.

The evidence for Monty's homosexuality is pretty thin. He married late, at a point when a wife would benefit his career, and had never shown much interest in women. There are sentimental letters about cuddling up to soldiers in the cold trenches of the Great War, and the second volume will explore impassioned, but still not obviously lewd letters to smallish boys. And then there is the bizarre House of Lords speech Montgomery made about the proposed legalisation of homosexuality in 1967; he tabled a grotesque and plausibly self-hating amendment, proposing the age of consent as 80. (He was 78 and joked that by then one would be able to pay off the boys out of one's old age pension).

Against that, it must be said that there doesn't seem to have been a great deal of gossip about Montgomery. His marriage was famously happy. And, though he did take an interest in his men's sexual habits - he referred to their diversions, embarrassingly, as 'horizontal refreshment' - the tone of his diktats on sexual health and the avoidance of VD seems to me relaxed and helpful and not remotely prurient.

Irritatingly, there is so much more interesting about Monty. He was the one general who really learnt from the disasters of the Somme. His concern for the welfare of his men wasn't lechery, but a reaction against the appalling conduct of Haig, who sat in his chateau eating foie gras and complaining that not enough men were dying to secure a result. At Dunkirk, Montgomery learnt, at first hand, that the spirit of Haig was not dead, and served under men whose lives were remote from and callous towards the lives of the Poor Bloody Infantry. At El Alamein, facing the near genius of Rommel, Montgomery put his convictions into practice. The result was one of the greatest triumphs of British arms.

Montgomery, I think, was remembering the folly of the Somme when he made the great tactical decision at El Alamein to dig in at Alam Halfa, to reinforce and reinforce and reinforce and not to move. 'Rommel,' Hamilton says, 'was dumbfounded.' He could not believe that the British were not to be lured into attack, and faced, too late, the prospect of the Afrika Corps being destroyed by the RAF.

Brilliant as he was, Rommel's tactics were fundamentally those of Frederick the Great and Clausewitz. Monty remembered the Somme and would not succumb to the fantasy of a 'big push'. He was a brilliant soldier, but, at that point, he revealed himself as nothing less than a visionary and the great victory at El Alamein turned the course of the war. Hamilton's account of the triumph occupies, rightly, nearly half of the book and is a thrilling read.

For that, one forgives his biographer a great deal of speculation. The command of this biography, and the nobility of its subject, make it worth recommending. It is diminished only by the extent and impertinence of its theories about Montgomery's inner life. It all sounds like those biographers who trace not just Napoleon's ambition, but his achievements, to the fact that he was short or had a small penis. What matters is not Monty's victory over his sexual desires, but his victory over Rommel.