'The Unkillable Soldier' Who Kept Fighting Despite Losing an Eye and Hand in World War I

At the turn of the 20th century, Adrian Carton de Wiart was struggling academically. While considering whether to continue pursuing a law degree at the University of Oxford, he desperately sought clarity. When he found it, he discovered that his future lay not in a courtroom but on a battlefield.

Carton de Wiart left Oxford’s hallowed halls to enlist in the British military and fight in the Boer War in South Africa. He so desperately wanted to fight on the front lines that he signed up even though he was not from England and was too young to serve. He even used a false name, partly to disguise his intentions from his father.

“At that moment, I knew, once and for all, that war was in my blood,” Carton de Wiart, who was born in Belgium in 1880, recalled in his autobiography, “Happy Odyssey.” “I was determined to fight. … I don’t know why the war had started, and I didn’t care on which side I had to fight. If the British didn’t fancy me, I would offer myself to the Boers.”

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The British wisely fancied him. During four decades of service that saw him receive more than 30 military medals, Carton de Wiart transformed himself into a larger-than-life military hero. Called “the Unkillable Soldier,” he fought in three major conflicts and refused to stay sidelined for long despite losing an eye and hand in battle, surviving multiple plane crashes and being taken prisoner during World War II when he was in his early 60s.

That’s just the short list of what Carton de Wiart, who became a British citizen in 1907 and later was knighted, endured in war. In fact, he was wounded so often that the medical facility in which he often recuperated kept a pair of pajamas waiting for him.

Strong of mind and body -- he once ripped apart a deck of cards as a sign of his physical strength -- Carton de Wiart’s pain tolerance was first tested during the Boer War, which ran from 1899 through 1902 and pitted British forces against Afrikaner settlers known as Boers in southern Africa. Wounded in the stomach and groin, he returned to England to recover and came face to face with his father, who finally discovered the truth of his military service. Initially livid at his son’s deception, Carton de Wiart’s father eventually relented and allowed him to continue serving his adopted country.

Carton de Wiart made his father proud as few could match the young soldier’s fighting spirit, especially during World War I. In the early stages of the Great War, Carton de Wiart was serving with the Somaliland Camel Corps in east Africa, trying to fight back a rebellion, when he was shot twice. One bullet cost him his left eye while another tore off part of his left ear.

“He didn’t check his stride, but I think the bullet stung him up as his language was awful,” said Lord Hastings Ismay, who served alongside Carton de Wiart in Somaliland and went on to become NATO’s first secretary-general. “The doctor could do nothing for his eye, but we had to keep him with us. He must have been in agony.”

If so, Carton de Wiart wasn’t likely to admit it. He was fitted with a glass eye, which irritated him so much that he threw it away. Wearing a black eye patch that became as synonymous with him as his aggressive, sometimes reckless, nature, Carton de Wiart finally made it to the Western Front, a longtime goal. During the Second Battle of Ypres near the French-Belgian border in the spring of 1915, German artillery severely wounded Carton de Wiart’s left hand. Shrapnel, along with fragments from his own watch, left two fingers dangling, and when doctors refused to remove them, Carton de Wiart did so himself, ripping them off. A surgeon later amputated the hand.

No one would have blamed Carton de Wiart if he sat out the rest of the war, and yet he came back from more. His heroism reached another level at the Battle of the Somme -- a five-month engagement that resulted in more than a million casualties -- after the Germans killed three Allied commanders near La Boiselle, France, in early July 1916. Carton de Wiart stepped up, commanding all three of their units, dodging enemy fire as he relayed orders between them and pulling out grenade pins with his teeth before lobbing the explosives with his one good arm. For his actions, Carton de Wiart received the Victoria Cross -- the British military’s highest honor.

Later on in WWI, Carton de Wiart even survived a shot to the head during a night mission, the bullet miraculously passing through his skull without causing any permanent damage.

“Frankly, I had enjoyed the war,” Carton de Wiart said. “It had given me many bad moments, lots of good ones, plenty of excitement.”

By comparison, Carton de Wiart’s service during World War II was uneventful, but there was that time his seaplane crash-landed on a fjord and another instance when his plane went down in the Mediterranean and he swam to shore, only to be captured by the Italians. He was held as a prisoner of war for two years, escaping once for eight days by posing as a peasant. After his release in 1943, Carton de Wiart served as Britain’s military representative to China until 1946.

Carton de Wiart died in 1963 at the age of 83, but his exploits have inspired generations of service members in the United Kingdom, including British soldier Thomas O’Donnell. His left knee shattered in Afghanistan in 2010, O’Donnell improbably returned to active duty two years later. When he did, he evoked an almost mythical figure he never met to put his arduous recovery in perspective.

“I want to make it clear that I went through nothing like as much as he endured,” O’Donnell modestly stated. “Carton de Wiart is like ‘RoboCop.’”

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