Vigilante

He lost an eye, a hand, and part of his ear, was shot through the skull, the hip, the leg, the ankle, and survived two plane crashes — and wrote afterwards that he had thoroughly enjoyed the war. That is a direct quotation of the sentiment, not a flourish. He fought in the Boer War, the First World War, and the Second, across sixty years and three continents, and every time the doctors put him back together he went straight out and did it again. He wore a black patch over the socket and an empty pinned sleeve, and he was still being sent into war zones in his sixties.

The details are the point. In Somaliland he was shot twice in the face, losing an eye and part of an ear. On the Western Front his hand was so badly mangled a surgeon refused to remove the ruined fingers, so he pulled them off himself. At Delville Wood he took command of three other battalions after their commanders fell, and at La Boisselle he was awarded Britain's highest decoration for valour for holding a position under fire with his one remaining hand, throwing grenades by pulling the pins out with his teeth. He was shot through the back of the head, through the ankle, through the leg, through the hip, through the ear. In 1941 his plane ditched in the Mediterranean; he swam a mile to shore and was captured by the Italians. He was sixty-one. He then made five escape attempts from an Italian prison camp, including tunnelling for seven months, and got out for eight days disguised as an Italian peasant despite speaking no Italian and having one eye and one hand.

He came from nothing you would expect. Born in Brussels to a Belgian-Irish family, brought up in Cairo, sent to Oxford — and he walked out of university without finishing, enlisted in the British Army under a false name and a false age to fight in South Africa, and told his father afterwards. He was shot in the stomach and the groin in that first war. He was twenty-year-old and had already found what he was for.

He finished as Churchill's personal representative to Chiang Kai-shek in China, retired to Ireland, and spent his last years fishing and shooting on a lake in County Cork. He died in 1963, aged eighty-three, having outlived nearly everyone who had ever tried to kill him.

Forget the wounds and the medals and the count of wars. Remember only this: he was a man who considered his own life a resource to be spent, and spent it, repeatedly, without ever once expecting to be paid back.