Odd this day
3 January 1915
Well, if it’s 3 January, it must be… YES, THAT’S RIGHT! The 110th anniversary of legendarily unhinged soldier Adrian Carton de Wiart losing his left eye. It was surgically removed after he’d been shot in it the previous November in Somaliland…
What with WWI, he was impatient to get back into action, but the Medical Board “seemed rather shocked at my desire to go to France … I imagine they did not wish the Germans to think we were reduced to sending out one-eyed officers”.
So he went back to them wearing “a startling, excessively uncomfortable, glass eye”, and they passed him.
On emerging, I called a taxi, threw my glass eye out of the window, put on my black patch, and have never worn a glass eye since.
Once ‘safely’ back on the Western Front, he was shot in the hand, and — according to his 1950 memoir, Happy Odyssey — “two of the fingers were hanging by a bit of skin … I asked the doctor to take my fingers off; he refused, so I pulled them off myself and felt absolutely no pain in doing it.”
Yes, Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart, VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, to give him his eventual full name and titles, was one of Those Chaps. (Some of you may remember Major Alfred Wintle, MC. We’re on similar territory here.)
Carton de Wiart took part in the Battle of the Somme (1916, machine gun bullet through the back of the skull, one in an ankle), Arras (1917, shot in the ear), Passchendaele (1917, shot in the hip), Cambrai (also 1917, leg), and still fought in WWII.
He said the only effect of the bullet in his skull was that “whenever I had a haircut the back of my head tickled”. Mind you, one of his friends, who had a pet lion cub, lost a leg in WWII, and apparently came round from his anaesthetic and said “I hope they have given my leg to the lion”. (Do you know, I think there might be a reason why it was a British writer who came up with James Bond, rather than one of any other nationality.) Anyway…
During WWII, Carton de Wiart was a prisoner of war with the 6th Earl of Ranfurly, who wrote to his wife Hermione to tell her that “General Carton de Wiart is a delightful character and must hold the world record for bad language”.
His finest moment, though, may have come back in WWI, while he was convalescing in London after one of his many wounds, and happened to be in his London club one afternoon when a fellow member approached him.
He then told me there was a man paying undue attention to a lady he knew and he wanted to fight him and asked me to second him in a duel.
The next words Carton de Wiart sets down may not altogether surprise you:
I agreed at once
to which he adds:
as I think duelling a most excellent solution in matters of the heart, and saw that my man was a tremendous fire-eater with only one object in view, to kill his opponent.
And if that makes it sound like London was full to the brim with unhinged Chaps Of That Sort in this era, I see no reason to doubt it. However, the opponent may not have been made of quite such stern stuff. He
found the whole idea quite ridiculous. I assured him that my friend was adamant and determined to fight with any suggested weapon, but preferably with pistols at the range of a few feet.
Finally convinced that Carton de Wiart’s friend was serious, the opponent expressed his concern that they “should all get into serious trouble”, to which General Sir Adrian C de W was able to offer words of ~ahem~ reassurance:
the war was on, everyone too busy to be interested, and … it would be simple to go to some secluded spot like Ashdown Forest with a can of petrol and cremate the remains of whichever was killed … He promptly sat down and wrote an affidavit not to see the lady again.
Our hero was appalled at this “tame” outcome, which suggested
that as he did not like the lady enough to fight for her, he needed a thrashing.
Carton de Wiart was also fond of parlour tricks, especially after a “liquid dinner”. He would, for example, accept bets that he couldn’t tear a pack of cards in half and then tear a pack of cards in half — until he pulled his fingers off and couldn’t do it anymore.
He also used to enjoy diving over four men and being caught the other side by two “fielders” — until one of the fielders fluffed it and he landed on his shoulder. It didn’t hurt, so he continued to do it, but without the men to catch him. A third trick, he said — straddling a chair and falling over backwards — served him well until he fractured his spine. Yes, basically, I can’t recommend his memoirs highly enough.
He is also believed to have been the model for Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy — an aggressive man with one eye who would
like to hear less about denying things to the enemy and more about biffing him.