Books: Victorian Warrior

MONTGOMERY (255 pp.)—Alan Moore-head—Coward-McCann ($4).

On the morning of Aug. 12, 1942, "a general on probation, a thin and unimposing little figure in battledress and a peaked cap ringed with red, a man unknown to the public and the world," stepped out of a Liberator on the desert outside Cairo. His new command: the demoralized mixture of Britons, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, Greeks, Czechs, French and Poles who made up Britain's Eighth Army. His mission: "Go down to the desert and defeat Rommel." Six months later, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery had...