@@CHAP@@ Introduction
‘Sir Wilfred, how did it feel when you first killed a man?’
‘Killed a man? I’ve never killed a man.’
‘But in your book…’
‘Oh, I see – well of course I’ve killed men from long distance with a rifle…’
‘Sir Wilfred,’ another student asked, ‘what did it feel like to go alone into the terrifying Danikil country and meet the young ruler who was celebrating by hanging the testicles of his dead enemies around his neck?’
‘He seemed very pleased.’ Thesiger paused, apparently searching for an analogy. ‘As though he had just been awarded his First Field Colours.’
This was my first meeting with Wilfred Thesiger. He was six foot two, broad-shouldered, with a deeply lined face, a large nose broken three times in a boxing ring, and he was as tough as he looked. In 1932 he was the first European to make it alive through the country of the notoriously violent Danikil in Ethiopia, recording in the process the direction of a major river system. He travelled astonishing distances through the Sahara and in the Sudan, he hunted lions, standing his ground as they charged – one got close enough to knock him over before he killed it. He developed a reputation for courage while serving with Wingate’s Gideon Force in Ethiopia and won the DSO for capturing a fort together with 2,500 Italian soldiers. He was then recruited into two of the most famous wartime units: first SOE, where he was trained to be a secret agent in Cairo, and then the SAS, with whom he fought behind enemy lines in the desert.
When I first met him, however, he was wearing a three-piece tweed suit and lecturing to students in an old-fashioned upper-class growl. Many in the audience who had apparently come expecting to meet a deeply sensitive mystic, a second Lawrence of Arabia, were shocked by his apparent pomposity. One whispered to me disapprovingly that he ‘was a product of his age and class’, as though an English gentleman born in 1910 was predestined to be an aristocratic fop or a colonial nabob. In fact, of course, the modernist revolutions in art, science and politics were underway before his birth. Picasso, Proust, Einstein, James Joyce and Mao were all old enough to be his father. While Thesiger was lion-hunting in the Sudan, his fellow Etonian George Orwell was fighting in the Spanish Civil War. When Thesiger was living with the Marsh Arabs, another fellow Etonian, Aldous Huxley, was experimenting with gurus and LSD in California.
If Thesiger seemed old fashioned this was in part his conscious choice. His answers to the students were deliberately camp and provocative. He was aware that most of the audience had no idea what First Field Colours were (they are awarded to the best performers in the Field Game – a sport played only at Eton). These comments, like his clothes, were part humorous, part nervous, part pompous, and sat awkwardly alongside his real achievements. They have always filtered our impressions of him. It is impossible, however, to doubt his physical courage.
As Arabian Sands records, between 1946 and 1948, while the world struggled with genocide, colonialism, revolution and modernity, Wilfred Thesiger crossed and recrossed the 250,000 square miles of the Empty Quarter, the largest sand desert in the world, in the area of modern Yemen, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Oman. The routes he chose were threatened by warring tribes and so desolate that many Arabs refused to accompany him. He was in his late thirties and had worn shoes all his life but he walked barefoot so that every step in the desert burned or cut his soles. On one part of this journey, he travelled 2,000 miles over seven months, rationing himself and his companions to only two pints of water a day and eight pounds of flour a month, about a third of a normal diet. They were thirsty and hungry almost all the time and they were pursued by raiding parties determined to kill them.