We all have our particular heroes, on whom we project our desires and our dreams and who show us the sometimes unbridgeable distance between what we are and what we would like to be. They don't have to be one-piece, exemplary heroes. In fact, there are often few things less exemplary than a hero, if we look at his entire life. I always think in this regard of that British artilleryman, Edward James Collis, who won the Victoria Cross in 1880, his country's highest decoration, for his bravery after the defeat of Maiwand during the Second Afghan War, only to lose it dishonorably in 1895 for bigamy. —it was discovered that he had a wife in Bombay and another in Wandsworth (convenient distance, some will appreciate); He also received 18 months of hard labor, which almost has to be worse than losing a medal. But, whatever their ultimate quality, heroes show us an ideal path and offer us a hanger on which to hang the best we do. The thing about the hanger reminds me of the time I visited the castle in the Austrian Burgenland of my favorite real hero (in fiction there are the unbeatable John Geste, Sandokan or Uncas), the explorer Lászlo Almásy, and, after trying on his warrior of an Austro-Hungarian hussar in his old room, I took a button.
Almásy, beyond the distorted romantic image that he gave of him The English Patient, He is not a hero to brag about. Without a doubt, the one owned by the late Joan B. Culla was much better: General Orde Wingate (1903-1944), Wingate of Burma, Ethiopia and Zion, the famous British military pioneer of the special forces, a true character. Among Wingate's achievements is having created the Special Night Squads in pre-partition Palestine, mixed Anglo-Jewish patrols to fight Arab guerrillas; lead, at the head of the famous Gideon Force, the deposed Haile Selassie to recover his Ethiopian throne taken by the Italian fascists, and above all found the legendary units of the Chindits, the long-distance penetration forces (that's how it sounds disturbingly erotic, in English they are the Long Range Penetration Units) that drove the Japanese crazy in Burma during World War II. Orde Wingate is also the man who tried to bring the pith helmet back into fashion (in decline since the campaign against the Mahdi), which requires almost as much courage as everything else.
I already knew Wingate, but it was Joan who, with her contagious enthusiasm for the character (with whom she bore a great resemblance, except for the sun hat) led me to immerse myself in her extraordinary life and destiny. I will not discuss here Joan's role as a leading historian, teacher and political activist, something that has already been done at length by people with much more judgment than mine. But of course, he knew a lot about heroes, adventurers and explorers. And as a friend it was a privilege.
We had many conversations (some in low voices during important official events, as well as at EL PAÍS Christmas drinks) and a long correspondence regarding our shared tastes. I don't know which of the two was more surprised to be friends with the other. I was intimidated by his intelligence, the firmness of his convictions and that he was always so well-groomed. It baffled him, I think, that someone could go through life with the vehemence, lack of commitment, and distinction of a Comanche. But we had a wide common playing field, where, brothers in arms, we had a great time. “Dear Jacinto,” she wrote to me, “excuse me for bothering you for a moment. I just read Richard Bassett's book. [no confundir con Lluís Bassets]“For God and the Kaiser, which you must have undoubtedly already eaten. From the first pages, from the chapter on the Great Siege of Vienna with its faint references to King Sobieski's winged hussars, I have been thinking about you. I found it to be a wonderful, exciting, evocative, well-written and quite well-translated text; and I have allowed myself the freedom to believe that your feelings as a reader are similar to mine: Luckily, we will always have our heroes in common (by the way, what a guy the aviator Gottfried von Banfield, the eagle of Trieste!).
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We shared many things over the years, his visits to the D-Day beaches in Normandy (with obligatory stops, he told me, at the Omaha Beach cemetery, the Pointe du Hoc battery, Ste-Mère-Église, Pegasus) , mine to the Remagen bridge (he loved that I sent him a postcard) or to Mila 18. Also, elated, the discovery of the relationship between Colonel Patterson, the hunter of the man-eating lions of the Tsavo, and Yoni Netanyahu (brother of the current prime minister), the Israeli commando chief killed in the hostage rescue operation in Entebe. In an email about the Polish winged hussars, some horsemen who fascinated us both showed a capacity for great daydreaming: “You don't know how many times, since I was 14 or 15, I have thought I saw in my imagination the Polish cavalry descending into the charging the slopes of Kahlenberg and falling on the Ottoman countryside, that September 11 [de 1683]… Surely you know it and have seen it, but years ago I gazed enthralled at the large tent of the vizier Kara Mustafa in the museum of military history in Vienna, not far from the Sarajevo car.” And he said: “For some mysterious reason, since adolescence, we have shared some myths and some heroes: the resisters of the ghetto of Warsaw, the great king Sobieski, Wingate.”
I have read about Orde Wingate these days in tribute to Joan Fire in the night the biography (for me the best) dedicated to him by John Bierman and Colin Smith (Pan Books, 1999). It so happens that Bierman is also the author of a wonderful one by Almásy (The secret life of Lászlo Almásy, the real English patient, Penguin, 2005). Wingate, known among his soldiers as The Beard (because he grew it against military regulations) and The Man, was and remains a highly controversial character, who has been described as a military genius and an irresponsible lunatic. Rebellious, rebellious, he had a huge ego, a difficult character, unbalanced behavior and eccentric and exhibitionist traits such as often showing himself completely naked, which is not common in a British general, not even in Montgomery. Born into a family of Christian fundamentalists, he had the Old Testament as his guide and identified with the struggle of the people of Israel to such an extent that he took up the cause of Zionism. His father was a colonel who beat him to harden him and who instilled in him to go through the world with the sword in one hand and the Bible in the other, like “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” Lawrence of Arabia (another of our heroes), with whom he shows some points in common, such as his spiritual vertigo and being somewhat poseur (although Wingate despised the Arab revolt and considered Lawrence a charlatan), He was a distant cousin of his on his mother's side.
Thanks to family influences, he landed a position in the exclusive Sudan Defense Force (SDF), a special forces-type unit. forward the letter (included the Camel Corps) in which he lived great adventures (he hunted lions, fought ivory traffickers) and achieved the delicious and romantic degree of bimbashi (elderly). As for romantic relationships, Wingate fell madly in love on a boat trip with a 16-year-old teenager, Lorna Paterson, whom he married after waiting for her to come of age. In 1936 he was assigned to Palestine where he committed himself to the cause of the Jewish people to the point of almost betraying his country. He liked to be contrary. “Everyone is against them so I'm for them,” he said. He saw in the Jews the children of Joshua, David, and the Maccabees. The Israelis, with whom he fought side by side in dangerous raids against the Arabs in which he showed incredible courage and was wounded several times, they would never forget him and they recognized him as hayedid, friend, a Hebrew word that meant everything to Joan B. Culla and moved her deeply.
Sent to Ethiopia leading a force of British and fierce local guerrillas, dressed like a Baptist missionary, compulsively eating onions, reading Pride and prejudice and carrying, in addition to a rifle and grenades, a cumbersome alarm clock because he did not trust wrist watches, Wingate played an essential role in the victory over the Italians and the restoration of Selassie, who viewed him with a certain amazement and joked that His subjects would not know which of the two was the emperor. For his part, Wingate valued the “lion of Judah” that he was a descendant of Solomon. In the Ethiopian campaign, where he had Wilfred Thesiger under his command (who also spoke highly of Wingate to me when I visited him so many years later in his flat in Chelsea, and Lo and behold, Thesiger found it difficult to say anything good about anyone who was not Bedouin), Wingate began to put into practice the concept of long-range raiding that would reach its fullest expression in Burma. He arrived there somewhat unexpectedly (he wanted to lead Jewish special forces against the Nazis in the Libyan desert, we all have our manias) and after a Salgari-style suicide attempt in Cairo (cutting his throat) caused, he justified, by the hallucinations caused by malaria attacks.
In Burma, invaded by the Japanese, Wingate set it up in a big way: he launched his commando columns with Chindits (the word, coined by him, is the corruption of chinthe, the name of a mythical Burmese creature that looks like a griffin), regular forces with the addition of Gurkhas and local guerrillas, in sensational massive operations (Longcloth and Thursday) far behind Japanese lines. Wingate had a premature death, as we could consider Joan's, when the B-25 Mitchell bomber in which he was traveling to visit his scattered units in enemy territory crashed on March 24, 1944. The impact was so brutal that the bodies of Wingate and the crew were mangled and mixed up in such a way that it was impossible to identify them separately and they were all buried together (they are in a grave in Arlington Cemetery).
Joan would have liked to read this chronicle, I trust, although she knew everything about her admired Order Wingate. But perhaps he was unaware of one detail: his hero and mine, Wingate and Almásy, were about to embark together on an expedition into the desert, deep in the Sea of Sand, in search of the legendary oasis of Zerzura (they both did in the end). alone, none found it). I love to think that one day Joan and I might have accomplished what our heroes didn't, united in the brotherhood of curiosity and love of the noble (and somewhat extravagant) things that make life worth living. We will always have the Chindits, Joan. With lots of love, hayedid.
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