"The Man on Foot"

The world's greatest living cavalryman sat reading in his high-ceilinged London study one noon last week. Suddenly the book slid from his hands, his chin sagged to his chest and Field Marshal Sir Edmund Hynman Allenby, first Viscount Allenby of Megiddo* and of Felixstowe, was dead.

Lord Allenby brought his military reputation through the War with less damage than most of his peers. Born of an untitled Yorkshire family, he entered the Army after flunking Indian Civil Service examinations. Having proved himself a cool, competent bush fighter in Bechuanaland, Zululand and the Boer War, he was a major general in command of all British cavalry by 1914. Flanders was no place for horsemen. His career was nearly wrecked by the slaughter of his cavalry at the battle of Arras in 1917. Two months later he was sent to see what he could do about the situation in the East.

Starved for troops by the High Command, whose eyes were glued to the Western Front, Allenby launched a campaign up the coast of Palestine, taking Beersheba, Gaza, Bethlehem and Jaffa, splitting the Turkish armies. On Dec. 9, 1917, without firing a shell into the Holy City, he walked into Jerusalem, in deference to the Arab legend that Jerusalem's conqueror would enter on foot. Thenceforth the Arabs respectfully called him "El Nebi" ("The Man on Foot").

Having backed Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence's Arab revolt in the desert, Allenby ran off his climactic campaign in the autumn of 1918. On the actual field of Armageddon, dread coastal plain where St. John the Divine predicted "thunders and lightnings . . . a great earthquake . . . a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent," Allenby fought his greatest battle, won his title, feinting at the Turks' centre with cavalry, rolling up their right with infantry. With the fall of Aleppo and Damascus, the Central Powers were cut off from their allies in the Near East.

Famed as a disciplinarian, he took the unpopular post-War job of British High Commissioner to Egypt (1919-25). The thankless business of suppressing Egyptian riots is supposed to have lost him an earldom. A squarejawed, heavyset, vigorous man, he specialized in English and Spanish literature and in his collection of birds, live and dead. For special pets he had a war-horse called Hindenburg and a marabou stork.

A pacifist and philosopher in his declining years, he last month delivered his own valedictory in what was his final public appearance, his investiture as Edinburgh University's Lord Rector. Before Scotland's rowdiest undergraduates, who interrupted his speech by pelting him with paper bags filled with flour, with colored streamers, beans and peppermints, he imperturbably declared: "Unless the people of Europe discard this narrow nationalism that is miscalled patriotism there will be a return to the Dark Ages. The lust for expansion is not quite dead, but the glory of conquest is departing. Its gains are Dead Sea fruit, its legacy bitter memories alone."

At this point one young cad dropped a, live hen from the gallery. Squawking hysterically, the bird flew around Lord Allenby's head.

Evenly "The Man on Foot" went on: "Is it too much to believe that the human intellect is equal to the problem of designing a world State in which neighbors can live without molestation? . . . Man has become willingly or unwillingly a citizen of the world, and the duties of that citizenship cannot be evaded. It is on you, the young and rising generation of the future, that our civilization depends."

*Hebrew for Armageddon.

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