A surgeon refused to amputate his ruined fingers. So he leaned over, and bit them off himself.

His name was Adrian Carton de Wiart. Born in Brussels in 1880, he walked out of Oxford to fight in the Boer War under a false name, lying about his age to get in. He was promptly shot in the stomach and the groin, and sent home. It did not put him off. Over the next fifty years, this man would be shot in the face, the head, the hip, the leg, the ankle, and the ear. In Somaliland, a bullet took his left eye. In the trenches of the First World War, he lost his left hand. He put on a black eyepatch and an empty pinned-up sleeve, and he went looking for more.

In July 1916, on the Somme, the senior officers around him were killed, so he took command of their battalions as well as his own. He had already lost a hand, so he pulled the pins from his grenades with his teeth, and threw them with the other. They gave him the Victoria Cross. Twenty four years later, past sixty years old, his plane came down into the Mediterranean. Wounded, he swam a mile to shore, and was captured by the Italians. So he helped dig a tunnel for seven months, escaped, and spent eight days on the run disguised as a peasant, with one eye, one hand, and not a single word of Italian. Then they sent him to China, where he fell down a staircase and broke his back.

He survived two plane crashes, three wars, and most of his own body. He finally hung up his uniform in his late sixties, and lived quietly until he was eighty three. And when he sat down to write the story of a life that should have killed him ten times over, he did not call it a tragedy. He called it Happy Odyssey. Because, in his own words: Frankly, I had enjoyed the war.

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