“Frankly, I had enjoyed the war.” - Adrian Carton de Wiart
Born in Brussels in 1890, De Wiart was the son of an Léon Constant Ghislain Carton de Wiart, who was a well-known and well-connected lawyer and Ernestine Wenzig. Ernestines mother was Irish and this established her son’s connection to Ireland, where at the end of his decorated career, he retired to, buying and renovating Aghinish House in Carrigadrohid, Macroom Co. Cork. Before allowing himself to enjoy a deserved and hard earned retirement on the Cork and Kerry border, he lived through some of the most remarkable war stories and events ever recorded. He served four decades in the army and fought in three separate, wars. He was a combatant in WW1, The Boers War and WW2. He was shot 11 times, in the face, skull, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, ear, groin, the eye, the hand and his elbow. The gunshot wound to the eye, left the eye unsalvageable, he was blinded and the eye was removed, leaving him with his trademark eyepatch for the rest of his life. The bullet to his left hand was sustained in Ypres, on the Western Front in WW1, it completely annihilated 3 of his fingers and left two hanging on by a shred of skin. The doctor refused to remove them as he felt that a hand could be fashioned from them and they could be salvaged. De Wiart wasn’t happy with this and is recorded as ripping them off himself with his right hand. This led to him eventually losing his arm, which left him with his other trademark, an empty uniform sleeve. He survived his army base being bombed, a plane he was passenger in being riddled with enemy fire from below, and one plane crash. His plane, crash landed in Italy during WW2 and he was kept as a POW. As he was a senior member of the British army at the time, he became the highest ranking POW in history. He and his other POW made 5 escape attempts. One where they dug a tunnel for 7 months and were successful in getting free, however, freedom lasted a week before they were recaptured. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery as the British Army intercepted 6 separate dispatches from enemy armies mentioning De Wiart pulling the pins of grenades with his teeth and hurling them into enemy fire with his good arm, events such as this, earned him the moniker ‘The Unkillable Soldier’ a title he carried with him into retirement in Cork.
Unencumbered by any ideological inclination, and narcotised by the smell of blood, de Wiart was doggedly loyal to any arbitrary cause that would pitch him against armed adversaries. In other words, he was the field-marshal’s dream and the pacifist’s nightmare. He was also utterly, resolutely unkillable. De Wiart was born in 1880 in Brussels, but his family moved to Surrey, England, and then Cairo when he was a child. His father was a lawyer, magistrate, and a director of the Cairo Electric Railways and Heliopolis Oases Company and he was well connected in Egyptian governmental circles. Adrian Carton de Wiart learned to speak Arabic during his time here. However in 1891, his English stepmother sent him to a boarding school in England, the Roman Catholic Oratory School, founded by John Henry Newman. From there, he went to Balliol College, Oxford, but left around 1899, just before or during the Second Boer War, to join the British Army. Failing his law preliminary, de Wiart was drawn to the Foreign Legion, “that romantic refuge of the misfits”, but the outbreak of the Boer War sparked an epiphany in him, “At that moment I knew, once and for all, that I was determined to fight, and I didn’t mind who or what. If the British didn’t fancy me I would offer myself to the Boers.” On arrival in South Africa he was swiftly hospitalised with a bout of fever, but was released prematurely and randomly joined up with a bunch of local corps. Fighting with them, he copped the first of several bullets that would, over the course of his life, embed themselves in de Wiart, this one in the groin.
“I do not think it possible for anyone to have had a duller dose of war,” he later wrote, having been invalided back to the nursing home on Park Lane, London, that would become his second home over the course of the next few years. “I returned to England bereft of glory, my spirits deflating with every mile.” Once recuperated, he journeyed to Egypt to ask his father’s permission to commit his life to martial endeavour. After some persuasion, de Wiart senior gave his blessing, and shortly afterwards the young, thrill-seeking militiaman arrived back in Cape Town to joined the Imperial Light Horse Colonial Corps, who promoted him to corporal within days, then demoted him within 24 hours for threatening to punch his sergeant. “My vivid imaginings of charging Boers single-handed and dying gloriously with a couple of V.C.s were becoming a little hazy.” Before long, he was shipped to the 4th Dragoon Guards and stationed in India. De Wiart’s time in India generated some happy memories, but not for the first time in his life, the lack of life-threatening combat left him knee-deep in nihilism. “India for me was a glittering sham coated with dust, and I hoped I should never see her again,” he wrote.
Eventually returning to what had become his motherland and joining his regiment in Brighton, de Wiart distracted himself from the vacuous banality of peacetime by taking part in polo matches and making occasional jaunts to Austria, Hungary, and what was then Bavaria to spend the interwar years shooting deer, chamois and pheasants. Accepting an adjutancy with the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, his plans changed in 1914 when his father broke the news that he had been ruined financially due to the crash in Egypt, and an allowance would no longer be forthcoming. Soldiering in England not being sufficiently well paid to sustain him, de Wiart again sought active service abroad. His intended destination, Somaliland, where a low-key war effort was being waged against Mohammad ‘Mad Mullah’ bin Abdullah, required a promotion to major, and despite scoring just 8 out of 200 for Military Law, he set sail for the north-east African coast in July 1914. By his own admission, de Wiart’s “cup of misery overflowed” when he discovered, during a stop-off in Malta, that England had declared war on Germany. In light of this development, his forthcoming station of duty “felt like playing in a village cricket match instead of a Test”. De Wiart’s hunger to have his mortality tested in new and interesting ways was soon sated, though, during a testy battle with bin Abdullah’s Dervish forces. One bullet whistled through his rolled-up uniform sleeve; the next went through his eye, the next gunshot required the plucking of a bullet splinter from his elbow, the one after that required the services of a nearby surgeon to stitch up his ear.
His last Polish aide de camp was Prince Karol Mikołaj Radziwiłł, member of the Radziwiłł family who inherited a large 500,000 acre estate in eastern Poland. They became friends and Carton de Wiart was given the use of a large estate called Prostyń, in the Pripet Marshes, a wetland area larger than Ireland and surrounded by water and forests. In this location Carton de Wiart spent the rest of the interwar years. In his memoirs he said "In my fifteen years in the marshes I did not waste one day without hunting". After 15 years, Carton de Wiart's peaceful Polish life was interrupted by the looming war, when he was recalled in July 1939 and appointed to his old job, as head of the British Military Mission to Poland. Poland was attacked by Nazi Germany on 1 September and on 17 September the Soviets allied with Germany attacked Poland from the east. Soon Soviet forces overran Prostyń and Carton de Wiart lost all his guns, fishing rods, clothing, and furniture. They were packed up by the Soviets and stored in the Minsk Museum, but destroyed by the Germans in later fighting. He never saw the area again, but as he said "they did not manage to take my memories". De Wiart was posted back to the command of the 61st Division, which was soon transferred to Northern Ireland as a defence against invasion. However, following the arrival of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall as Commander-in-Chief in Northern Ireland, Carton de Wiart was told that he was too old to command a division on active duty. This was followed by command of the Central Norwegian Expeditionary Forces, in its hopeless attempt to hold Trondheim. A year later, he was sent to head the Military Mission in Yugoslavia but on the way, his plane crashed into the sea and after swimming ashore he was made a prisoner of the Italians. In August 1943, the Italians released him and sent him to Lisbon to negotiate their surrender terms.
From October 1943 until retirement in 1946, he was the Government's Military Representative with General Chiang Kai-Shek in China. On his retirement, he bought Aghinish House in Cork and moved there with his wife. His awards are as follows, Victoria Cross, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Companion of the Order of the Bath, Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, Distinguished Service Order (Mentioned in Despatches), Virtuti Militari (Poland) Croix de Guerre (Belgium) Legion of Honour (France) Croix de Guerre (France). Adrian died on the 5th of June 1963. He is buried in Killinardish Churchyard, Carrigadrohid, County Cork.
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