[The following is in regards to the great-grandfather of author and war correspondent Anthony Loyd, taken from his incredible memoir of his experiences during the Bosnian War, My War Gone By, I Miss it So.]
Her [Anthony’s grandmother] father was born of a liaison between a Belgian barrister and an Egyptian bellydancer. Raised largely by his stepmother and Irish grandmother, Adrian Carton De Wiart was educated in England and was studying law at Oxford when the Boer war began. He ditched his studies and ran off to fight. He was not a British subject and would have been happy to join the Boers if the British army had refused to take him. He was wounded twice in action, going on to fight the Mad Mullah in Somalia where he lost an eye. A man of violent temper, he had scant regard for the frailty of the body. Laughing with pride, my grandmother often told me how he had duped a medical board into passing him fit for service once more by wearing a glass eye which he then pulled out in a London taxi, threw out of the window and replaced with his trademark black patch. Wounded again, again, again and again in France during the First World War, on another occasion he pulled off what remained of his left hand in front of an aghast surgeon who had refused to amputate it in a field hospital.
As an expression of solidarity with such fortitude, my grandmother years later refused all attempts to give her an anesthetic to have her appendix removed. Citing her father’s example, she forced an exasperated London surgical team to operate as she lay there fully conscious. Her father had led his men over the top at the Somme, by this time missing part of his arm, and with the tiny band of survivors that managed to get as far as the German lines had stormed and held an objective against great odds.
Adrian Carton De Wiart must have sometimes pondered his loyalties. Shortly before the First World War he had married an Austrian countess, my great-grandmother. Although she lived in London during the war, her family fought for the Kaiser. When he went to collect his VC from the king, Carton De Wiart remarked that it was strange to win such an award when he was not even a British citizen.
After escaping from Poland at the start of World War Two he went on to fight the Germans in Norway. En route to Cairo in 1941 to be briefed on leading a special mission to Yugoslavia where he was to link up with Tito’s partisans, his plane crashed off North Africa. He was taken prisoner by the Italians, and after Italy’s capitulation went to China as Chiang Kai-shek’s personal emissary from Churchill, dying, finally, in Southern Ireland three years before I was born.
Note:
Adrian Carton De Wiart’s Wiki page notes that his mother was Irish, and that his father didn’t move to Egypt until De Wiart was six years old, so take the bellydancer bit with a grain of salt, I suppose.
Source:
Loyd, Anthony. “Ghosts.” My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Grove Press, 2014. 60-1. Print.
Further Reading:
Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO
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