(See Cover)
One evening last January, in the pale green dining room of Ottawa's Rideau Hall, Winston Churchill sat at a banquet table, ruddy-faced in an atmosphere redolent of brandy and cigars. He was Prime Minister again, and enjoying it. Sitting near him were Lords Ismay, Cherwell and Alexander. Among the 40 guests, few noticed the tall, slim British general seated downtable. But suddenly Churchill waved a brandy glass at the officer and bellowed:
"Templer! Malaya!"
The buzz of conversation, momentarily suspended, was resumed. Five minutes later, Churchill bawled:
"Templer! Full powers!"
Ten minutes later his gruff voice cut through the cigar smoke again:
"Full power, Templer. Very heady stuff. Use it sparingly."
There had been a council of war at Rideau Hall over Commonwealth defenses. Most urgent subject: the 3½-year "state of emergency" in Malaya, where Communist terrorists 1) had taken more than 3,000 lives; 2) were costing $150,000 a day to combat; 3) threatened tin and rubber production, Britain's best dollar earners. A few months before, Communists had ambushed and killed High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney, the topflight colonial administrator who had been sent out to put order into Malaya's civil service. Said the London Daily Telegraph: "The trouble [has been] not only murder, but mugwumpery."
Churchill ran a broad finger down Britain's army list and halted at the fifth name: General Sir Gerald Walter Robert Templer, K.C.B., K.B.E., C.M.G., D.S.O. A message to Cobham, Surrey brought 54-year-old General Templer flying to the banquet room in Ottawa. Three weeks later he was in Malaya, with such military and political powers in his kit bag as no British soldier had had since Cromwell.
Polo & Palestine. The dragon-tooth soil of Northern Ireland has farrowed a fine litter of Britain's great generals—Montgomery, Alexander, Dill, Alanbrooke, Auchinleck. It also farrowed Gerald Templer, a thin, deceptively fragile-looking, tough soldier. His father, a dedicated officer in the Royal Irish Fusiliers, had some discussion with his mother about what to call the child, but there was no discussion about his career: it was Wellington, Sandhurst, and the army. Says his mother, now in her 80s : "He always wanted to be a soldier, and I did my best to make him so."
So did he. He scraped into World War I as a subaltern at the age of 18, made the retreat from the Somme. In 1919 he was part of a hush-hush force in the Caspian Sea area which helped defend the White Russian fleet from Bolshevik attack: "All pretty unsatisfactory from a political point of view, though great fun for a young officer." Now he likes to say that he is the "only senior British officer who ever fought the Russians." Between the world wars, he played polo and rode to hounds, became bayonet-fighting champion of the British army, made the 1924 Olympic squad as a 120-yard hurdler. He also saw action in Palestine, where he won a D.S.O. in guerrilla skirmishes against the Arabs. Palestine taught him "the mind and method of the guerrilla," and introduced him u) the Arab-Jewish problem: "I can remember lying in bed weeping about the tragedy of it."