Rommel and the rebel

Rommel and the Rebel

Rommel and the Rebel, by Lawrence Wells (Doubleday, 415 pp., $17.95)

WHAT, EARLY in World War II, were people to make of the sinister chivalry, the mysterious reputation, and the oddly compelling threat posed by Erwin Rommel, "the Desert Fox'? After all, it's not every day that Winston Churchill would say to the House of Commons, "We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.' Perhaps the prime minister shouldn't have been so gallant as to speak the truth publicly; indeed, General Auchinleck once instructed his commanders and chiefs of staff to quit using Rommel's name: "There exists a danger that our friend Rommel is becoming a kind of magician or bogeyman to our troops, who are talking too much about him. . . . Even if he were a superman, it would still be highly undesirable that our men should credit him with supernatural powers.' How much further could glory extend than so to dominate the imagination of the enemy, like Hannibal, like Napoleon? Rommel's honor survived the war intact, and the Field Marshal was soon to be the subject of an admiring biography by Desmond Young and the popular movie derived from it.

But what was the source, the secret of Rommel's wily ability on the battlefield? Though Rommel had already distinguished himself in the First World War, there were those in America in the early Forties who thought they knew the answer. Rommel's audacity and poise, his on-the-spot flexibility and aggressiveness, his uncanny Finger-spitzengefuhl, seemed familiar from the story of another great soldier, the Confederate "cavalryman'--a leader of mounted infantry, more like--Nathan Bedford Forrest. Rommel appeared to be a Forrest redivivus; so that Robert Selph Henry, in his "First with the Most' Forrest (1944), felt obliged to deny rumors that Rommel had ever visited America or studied Forrest's stamping grounds in person.

Rommel and Forrest seemed a natural pairing; and now Lawrence Wells --taking off from a 1937 newspaper clipping about a visit by five German military dignitaries to Mississippi and the battlefield of Brices Cross Roads-- improves on history by supposing that Rommel, incognito, was one of the five.

In taking Rommel on an American tour, Mr. Wells does not miss opportunities for amusing juxtapositions: The future Field Marshal walks through Harlem, for instance, where he is accosted by a "ho',' who makes him think: "A farm implement? I thought she was a prostitute. She does not look like an agricultural worker, though she is sturdy enough.' Rommel gets mugged in Central Park. But the author has more on his mind than pastiche, as may be seen when Rommel observes an on-site re-enactment of the third day at Gettysburg. There, with unnatural naturalness, Rommel confronts "a young Union lieutenant with mutton-chop whiskers and a waxed mustache. For an instant it seemed as if a grinning nineteenth-century ghost had come to recruit him.' But the greater ghost is yet to come.

The young American Max Speigner is the witness and translator who attends, with Rommel, a recounting of Forrest's "running of Streight' and who accompanies him on a tour of the scene of Forrest's masterpiece, Brices Cross Roads, which Rommel and Speigner survey by motorcycle in a vivid re-creation of that remarkable battle--a dramatization of Rommel's identification with Forrest. And Speigner is there when Rommel goes off to Rowan Oak to drink with the author of Sanctuary and play a nocturnal game of tennis with him. Speigner accompanies Rommel and Faulkner as they explore the terrain and lore of Shiloh.

In the second part of this novel, Max Speigner becomes more an actor in history than an observer of it. He is drawn into the British war against the Afrika Korps before Pearl Harbor, as an expert on Rommel. He is able to anticipate the mind of the general, who so appreciated the technique and mystique of Forrest. Forrest and Rommel and Speigner are conjoined in interlocking intuitions, a military mysticism that leads Speigner to capture Rommel, only to be captured in return.

Speigner has the greatest respect for Rommel: but a Scottish correspondent leads him to see an enveloping truth, which he tells Rommel himself:

. . . Your style is to fight fair. Your fairness is legend. You are a hero to the Eighth Army, did you know that? They have an expression for chivalry in battle. They call it "doing a Rommel.' Your fairness is what makes you dangerous. Both sides respect you. You make war honorable, so that all the rest-- Hitler's persecution of Jews and Free French and Poles, the camps where civilians are interned--all of that can go on.

Similarly, when he captures a German soldier, Speigner understands a truth about Forrest that takes the form of a fantasy about slavery:

And now he's mine. . . . He belongs to me. . . . But he's not for sale. I'm taking him back to Mississippi after the war, and we're going to plant cotton, and sell it down the river at Vicksburg, and maybe build a railroad together.