Adrian Carton de Wiart

I was looking through a list of notable Victorian generals, which mentioned the usual--John Nicholson, Garnet Wolseley, James Hope Grant, etc--plus one I'd never heard of before: Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, VC. Fought in the Boer War and both World Wars; wounded seven times, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and so forth and so on.

In his memoirs he wrote, "Governments may think and say as they like, but force cannot be eliminated, and it is the only real and unanswerable power. We are told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I know which of these weapons I would choose."