An Officer but Not a Gentleman : BORN OF WAR <i> by Thomas Taylor (McGraw-Hill: $17:95; 464 pp., photos and maps) </i>

In this fiercely intelligent biodrama--literature’s substituent for the television docudrama--the late and largely inexplicable British Maj. Gen. Orde Charles Wingate is presented in lavish, analytical, yet largely inconclusive whorls.

Which is, of course, history’s view of this World War II irregular, this consummate lone rover who trashed the book on combat gentility to write a new one on desert and jungle gut fighting.

For his framework, author Thomas Taylor, a Berkeley attorney, chose the official record--of Wingate’s 1936-39 command of night patrols against Arab raiders in Palestine; of his feinting, jabbing rampage across Ethiopia to grab Addis Ababa from superior Italian forces; and of Wingate’s Chindits, a brigade of British, Gurkha and Burmese guerrillas who infested Burma for two years and may have spiked a Japanese invasion of India.

For his fiction, Taylor plumbs a quartermaster’s store of Byzantine supposition. He has invented Wingate’s conversations and correspondence, also the characterizations by his contemporaries.

And from this blurring, a young military hero and legend (Wingate did indeed win three Distinguished Service Orders, Britain’s second highest decoration for bravery, and had been promoted to major general at age 40) emerges as an infuriating contradiction--a dedicated, patriotic, professional soldier with about as much respect for authority as Caesar had for the Roman Senate.

In all the gainsaying, Taylor paints Wingate as a religious zealot who attempts suicide. Here is a poet who can kill with his bare hands. Stark realist one minute, golden romanticist the next. A sensitive commander who weeps for the death of his men; a callous leader prepared to leave his wounded to be tortured to death by the enemy.

At the midpoint of the volume, not surprisingly, Wingate topples into a vile, catatonic depression that requires daily psychotherapy before his command his restored. For his readers, Taylor waives the physician-patient privilege and the imagined, extensive tete-a-tete is the author’s chef-d’oeuvre .

We, presumably by Taylor’s design, are left to decide the man. Was Wingate of Burma another Lawrence of Arabia or Montgomery of Alamein or a Clive of India? Or a Custer of Little Big Horn?

Wingate died in the crash of a U.S. Army Air Force C-47 in India in 1944. He was heading behind enemy lines to rejoin his Chindits in support of Gen. Joseph Stilwell’s advance across Burma. In a House of Commons eulogy, Winston Churchill said of him: “There was a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny.”

Within that accolade--no matter our civilian measurements-- was an undeniable credential of Wingate the warrior. For beneath his leadership, Wingate’s Raiders forged and refined combat methods that remain today.

Ironically, it was Wingate’s ways, adopted by the Viet Cong, that mauled America so dreadfully in Vietnam.

Ord Wingate was buried in Arlington Cemetery, having died aboard an airplane of American nationality. Churchill, David Ben-Gurion and Haile Selassie separately appealed to President Truman for his remains. All were diplomatically refused.

In death, notes Taylor, there was no final defiance for Wingate. For once, authority triumphed.