Sir Herbert Plumer stood out as an archetypal Colonel Blimp
- smart to a fault white hair white moustache pot-belly. But his appearance belies the fact that he was one of the best-performing & best-regarded officers on the Allied side. Plumers crowning glories were the attack on Messines Ridge in 1917 & his successful implementation of the bite & hold strategy that contributed so much to final victory. Plumer destroyed all his papers but the author has meticulously researched this biography & has written a lucid account of this undeservedly neglected hero which throws fresh light on generalship on the Western Front.