Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart: The unkillable soldier
Not that you ever want to judge a person by their name, but if you were a soldier serving under someone called Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, the jokes would write themselves, wouldn’t they?
It would be extremely easy to think this guy was some rancid toff who didn’t know the meaning of the word battle, let alone the reality of it. A rich kid playing at being a soldier to his silver spoon friends, while sending the actual heroes off to die, while he basks in the glory. A closer look at Carton de Wiart’s upbringing would support this. Born to a Belgian family so aristocratic it was speculated that he was an illegitimate son of the literal king of Belgium, life could have been disgustingly easy for Carton de Wiart.
However, it wasn’t. Not by a long shot.
Carton de Wiart joined the British Army in 1899, dropping out of Balliol College in Oxford to do so. Perhaps wanting to avoid the slings and arrows you get with a name like his (truly, he had it harder than all of us), he gave a false name on joining up. Claiming he was 25 years old, ‘Trooper Carton’ when he was really around 20. Now, perhaps he already knew that an officer’s life wasn’t for him, and falsified his information in order to go straight to where the fighting was thickest. If so, he well and truly got his wish.
Carton de Wiart was deployed to South Africa shortly after joining and, within months, was sent home with a wound in his stomach and groin that would have killed most men. Hell of a way for his family to find out what their Adrian was planning on doing with his life because he hadn’t even told them that he’d dropped out of school, let alone joined the army. While his father was furious, he also knew that his son had made his choice and allowed him to stay in the army,
His time in the armed forces wouldn’t get any easier, not with the First World War just around the corner.
How did this soldier suffer during World War One?
Over the next decade, Carton de Wiart spent his deployment all over Africa and Europe before being deployed to what we know today as Somalia. Mere months before the First World War broke out, Carton de Wiart was shot twice in the face, losing an eye and part of his ear in the conflict. After taking a year to recuperate, the world was at war, and he was deployed to the Western Front. Despite taking positions of command, he still went through the wringer in ways that few other people did in the entire conflict.
Throughout the war, he was wounded seven more times. He was shot through the skull and ankle at the Battle of the Somme. He was shot through the hip at the Battle of Passchendaele. He was shot through the leg at Cambrai and lost his left hand in 1915. An event that, when a doctor declined to help him amputate his fingers, involved the mad bastard pulling them off himself. These continued acts of bravery earned him a Victoria Cross in 1916 and inspired one of the most badass proclamations in the history of the British Army.
In his memoirs, Carton de Wiart listed his myriad of injuries and said that despite all of that, “Frankly, I had enjoyed the War.”
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that despite the injuries, he was also proving himself to be more than a lucky soldier, but a brilliant commander and tactician, whose bravery was only matched by his intellect. He went on to live a long and successful life after the First World War, something that millions of people didn’t get to have despite suffering much less than Carton de Wiart did.
Call it luck, call it privilege, but you can’t say that Adrian Carton de Wiart didn’t make the most of his life.