Adrian Carton de Wiart

Adrian Carton de Wiart died at Aghinagh House in County Cork on 5 June 1963, ending a life so dense with wounds and crashes that it reads like a joke told by death itself. Shot in the face, head, stomach, groin, ankle, leg, hip and ear, blinded in one eye, tunnelled out of captivity and forced to rip off his own fingers, he still wrote that he had enjoyed the war. Governments may prefer pens, but he chose the sword, and the sword chose him back.