Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 26

We lost the general.

—GERMAN RADIO TRANSMISSION, MAY 1944, intercepted by British intelligence

CHRIS WHITE was true to his word: a few months after refusing to show me Paddy’s escape route, he agreed to show me Paddy’s escape route.

“You think I can handle it?” I asked.

“I’m sure Paddy wondered the same thing,” Chris replied, or something to that effect; I didn’t jot it down because I was already hurriedly clicking through the calendar to see how much prep time I had. On the one hand I was relieved; it meant I must have passed the White Brothers’ selection process during our first hike across the island three months earlier. On the other, I knew we’d be pushing into tougher and more remote terrain than anyplace they’d taken me before. That was Paddy’s game plan from the start; his only hope of pulling off the abduction was to run and hide through no-man’s-land, going places where German troops, even Alpine forces, wouldn’t think to follow.

Chris was eager to get back on Paddy’s trail, because he was starting to believe he knew where Paddy went better than Paddy did. That actually made sense. Paddy and Billy were fleeing through the dark, led by outlaws to places only outlaws knew. It would have been tricky enough if the escape had gone well, but from the moment the general stepped out of his car, things began going wrong. From that point on, every day was an exercise in improvisation. Any route Paddy had in mind had to be scrapped and reinvented, instantly and on the fly, to dodge the Butcher’s pursuit. Paddy once got so turned around that later, when he described peeking out of a cave as sunrise lit a mountain, he named the wrong mountain. It wasn’t surprising; when you’re being chased by seventy thousand armed men and a war criminal nicknamed the Butcher, you’re more worried about who’s behind than what’s ahead.

Chris had done an extraordinary job of connecting the lost dots, thanks in no small part to help from Tim Todd, the retired Oxford detective turned Sherlockian war historian, and two adventurers with a unique hobby: Christopher Paul, a London attorney, and Alun Davies, a retired Welsh Regiment major, who specialize in retracing wartime escapes. One winter, they churned across the North Sea to follow in the footsteps of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian commando of We Die Alone who swam through Arctic waters, cut off nine of his own gangrenous toes, and survived snowblindness, frostbite, and starvation to finally escape the Germans and make it to freedom in Sweden. In 2003, Christopher and Alun were on a similar re-creation in Iran when an avalanche swept them hundreds of meters down the mountain. Battered and freezing, they survived the night by breaking into a hut for shelter. The following year they were hit by another avalanche, this time in Turkey on Mount Ararat. Alun and his climbing partner disappeared beneath tons of snow. Their teammates began frantically probing and digging. After twenty minutes, they managed to locate Alun and pull him out alive. His Scottish expedition mate, Alasdair Ross, wasn’t so lucky.

“We decided that if we went anywhere else, it would have to be warm,” Alun told me when I met him and Christopher one evening in London. They took me to Paddy’s old club, the Travelers, and showed me the map over the fireplace of Paddy’s walk across Europe as a teenager, signed with Paddy’s trademark doodle of a flock of flying birds. Tracking Paddy across Crete, they said, turned out to be more than they’d reckoned on. “You look at the maps that are available. They’re not accurate at all,” Christopher said. “And even if you’re shown where to go, it’s quite hard to find your way. We went looking for a particular cave and were told we were right in front of it. For the life of us, we couldn’t find it.”

They also learned to tread lightly around the Cretans: xenía still ruled, except when loyalty was at stake. “When the police went to arrest someone in Anogia while we were there, they were stopped on the edge of town by machine-gun fire and had to turn back,” Christopher Paul said. The entire village was ready to go to war—including the clergy—if the police tried arresting a local boy. “We met a Greek priest with a Glock under his cassock,” Christopher added. “He pulled it out of his sock.”

Alun and Christopher had battled through plenty of rough stuff before, but they’d never dealt with the rocks that ripped the boots off one of their teammate’s feet in their first six hours on the ground. They arrived lean, fit, and well-provisioned (unlike Paddy and Xan, who survived on local forage), but still found themselves burning weight to the tune of nearly twenty pounds in two weeks. “Anytime you’re on an expedition like this, the unexpected will find you,” Alun advised. “That’s the question that’s always intrigued me: How strong does your character have to be to deal with disaster?”

Fortunately, I had two advantages before seeing what Chris and I would find—or what would find us—on Paddy’s route: I had a six-month head start, and access to my own Hero School.

The school I had in mind was born, as Alun Davies would have expected, from one man’s reaction to a nightmare. During the first week of May 1902, a twenty-seven-year-old French naval officer named Georges Hébert was stationed on the warship Suchet off the coast of Martinique, “the Paris of the Caribbean.” For days, Martinique’s Mount Pelée had been spraying up bursts of sparks, but no one was really concerned. The volcano had been dormant for more than a century, and both the island’s governor and the mayor of the capital city, Saint-Pierre, insisted there was nothing to worry about. Posters were nailed up all over Saint-Pierre encouraging everyone to rest easy and enjoy the free fireworks. Even when the sparks were joined by a plume of dark smoke and the stench of sulfur, Martinique remained unevacuated and largely unconcerned.

By May 7, everything was calm again. “The sun was now shining out nice and bright,” steamship captain Ellery Scott noted in his ship’s journal, “and everything appeared to be pleasant and favorable.” So pleasant, in fact, that there were plenty of seats available on the last steam ferry of the day; it left the island barely one-third full. The sparks had died down and the volcano had gone back to sleep….

Until early the following morning, when pent-up gases tore the top off the mountain. Two explosions boomed—one seven miles straight up in the air, the other a cannon of burning gas and fiery rock pointed right at Saint-Pierre. Sizzling lava gushed down the slope, launching swarms of fleeing vipers and crazed animals. People ran from their homes, only to be pelted by red-hot boulders, choked by ash and smoke, slashed by venomous snakes, and buffeted by 120-mile-per-hour winds. Darkness descended; superheated volcanic gas blanketed the city in a dark cloud broken only by flames and blasts of lightning. Rain fell, scalding hot. Screams, explosions, earth-shaking crashes, a riot of agony and panic …

And into this nightmare plunged Georges Hébert. The Suchet tried to approach port on a rescue mission, but blistering heat and furious winds churned the sea and threatened to crash the ship into the rocks. Hébert helped lower a launch and set off with a small band of seamen. While everyone else in Saint-Pierre was running away from the horror, Hébert and his crew were fighting their way toward it. They’d be among the very few who looked straight at the nightmare and lived to remember. For hours, Hébert and his crew fought to stay afloat while pulling scorched survivors from the water and rowing them to safety on the Suchet. More than thirty thousand people were in the city. More than twenty-nine thousand died.

“One of the greatest calamities in history has fallen upon our neighboring island of Martinique,” President Theodore Roosevelt would lament. Beyond the body count, the tragedy had a morbid fascination: it seemed so puzzlingly avoidable. How much warning do people need to outrun a volcano? Have our survival instincts decayed so badly that even when fire flares into the sky, we don’t pay attention? But one question in particular needled Georges Hébert: how many people were betrayed by their own bodies? They weren’t killed—they died, frozen and uncertain, when they could have been running, crawling, jumping, and swimming for their lives.

Years later, a young British writer would reflect on Martinique in the same way. Paddy Leigh Fermor was so fascinated by the eruption, he made it the subject of his first and only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques. In Paddy’s depiction, Martinique has two types of survivors: a few dumb-but-lucky Europeans, and canny natives saved by their own strength and skill. “They were the descendants of the cannibal savages that inhabited the archipelago long before the whites or blacks arrived,” Paddy writes. “Some unconscious or atavistic wisdom had prompted them to escape, just as it had prompted the iguanas and snakes and armadillos, while the black and the white intruders had received, or at least, had taken, no hint of the disasters ahead. These primitive men had an inborn knack of survival when dealing with their ancestral problems which was lacking in everybody else.”

The Caribs’ “inborn knack” was really nothing special; it was just the same familiarity with their bodies and the natural world that humans have relied on for most of our existence. The Caribs were quick enough to get to the water and strong enough to stay afloat when their dugout canoes were capsized by scorching chunks of flying rock. The Caribs are what Homer had in mind when he created Odysseus, his ultimate unsinkable hero: not superstrong, just smart and sinewy enough to adapt to any jam. “Once the heaving sea has shaken my raft to pieces,” Odysseus declares, “then I will swim.”

Can that inborn knack be reborn? Georges Hébert chewed the problem over during the journey home to France. He was greeted as a hero, but he felt his real rescue operation had yet to begin. We’ve been living a lethal fantasy, Hébert realized. We’ve lulled ourselves into believing that in an emergency, someone else will always come along to rescue us. We’ve stopped relying on our own wonderfully adaptable bodies; we’ve forgotten that we can think, climb, leap, run, throw, swim, and fight with more versatility than any other creature on the planet. But how many of his fellow Parisians, Hébert wondered, could pull themselves up on a ledge, leap a three-foot chasm, carry a child to safety? Could he? He couldn’t remember the last time he saw any grown-up crawl, climb a tree, somersault to cushion a fall, or even sprint.

Which was strange, because until recently you weren’t an adult until you could rescue someone. Rites of passage for most cultures were based on sheer physical usefulness: you counted as a person only when you showed you could be counted on. Some proved it in blood, like the Spartans and the Zulu impi; the impi had to stomp barefoot on thornbushes to demonstrate they were ready to race into any situation without flinching, while Spartan teenagers were handed a dagger and sent off into the countryside to secretly stalk and murder the boldest local peasants “in such a way,” according to Thucydides, “that no man was able to say, either then or afterwards, how they came to their deaths.” By ruthless Spartan logic, this krypteia was the perfect multipurpose path to citizenship: it kept insurrection at bay and turned young Spartans into masters of stealth and survival.

Speed and strength weren’t just a young man’s game. The Navajo kinaaldá and Apache na’ii’ees were coming-of-age ceremonies for young women that focused on speed, endurance, and a lifetime of muscular fitness. The young women set off on daily morning runs into the rising sun and had their arms and backs massaged in hopes they’d always be strong and supple. The stronger the women, both tribes believed, the stronger the community. “Throughout most of na’ii’ees, the girl’s power is used to benefit herself,” one anthropologist notes. “However, immediately after the ceremony, it becomes public property and is available to everyone.”

So Georges Hébert had to wonder: What went wrong? Why did we turn our backs on this tradition of strength and allow ourselves to become so helpless? But even as he was asking the question, a machine-shop worker in Philadelphia already had the answer.

Edwin Checkley was born in England in 1855, right at the teeter point when the Industrial Revolution was shifting from radical innovation into unstoppable juggernaut. It was the end of the era of the amateur, a time when everyone had to be a bit of everything. You helped your neighbors build their homes, fight their fires, raise and butcher and preserve their own food. You knew how to repair a weapon, pull a tooth, hammer a horseshoe, and deliver a child. But industrialization fostered specialization—and it was fantastic. Trained pros were better than self-taught amateurs, and their expertise allowed them to demand and develop better tools for their crafts—tools that only they knew how to operate. Over time, a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched.

Checkley straddled the two worlds: he landed a factory job as a machinist but soon left to travel with his own tumbling act. He was nineteen when he immigrated to the United States, in 1874, and spent the next few years as a human tornado: he studied medicine at Long Island College Hospital, trained and taught at a gym in Brooklyn, and moonlighted weekends at a machinist’s shop in Philadelphia. It was all propelling him toward a masterpiece: in 1890, Checkley released an explosive little book titled A Natural Method of Physical Training: Making Muscle and Reducing Flesh Without Dieting or Apparatus.

Critics’ reactions were weird and rather frenzied: everyone loved it, without knowing exactly what it was. Science reviews excerpted it; so did literary journals, women’s magazines, fitness publications, even coffee-table flip-throughs like Ladies’ Home Journal. The only people who hated Checkley’s book, it seemed, were the ones he was writing about: gym owners and exercise scientists. Because the one thing wrong with the fitness industry, Checkley proclaimed, was everything.

Barbells? Forget it.

Weight machines? Waste of time.

Women are sweet, men are sweaty? Ridiculous.

Diets, exercise circuits, resistance training? Hopeless, useless, and unnatural.

Look at every other creature on the planet, Checkley urged. They don’t binge and starve, or heave and strain to make one part of their body bulge. They don’t sit on a bench and lift a weight to their nose over and over again. Why would they? You’d never do that in the real world, so why do you do it in training? All you’re creating is “hard muscle” and “stiff strength,” as he put it—the exact opposite of true fitness.

“You pull this and push that so many times a day and you get to be a little amateur Samson,” Checkley wrote. “You already feel the muscles expanding. Those biceps especially draw attention, as if they were the synonyms of health and strength. The strength of the man so trained has no reliance on itself. It is superficial—only skin deep, as it were—and will not ‘stay put.’ The truth is that there can be no proper training that does not educate the whole system of the man.”

Wait—make that the whole system of the human. This idea that women were fragile little flowers was a farce that Checkley wanted to end. “The ‘weaker’ sex would occupy no such position of relative weakness if natural laws were followed,” Checkley argued. “If women must, as is so freely complained, remain physically short of man’s strength, there is no reason why the disparity should remain so great as it often is. Where women lead an active life their strength and endurance comes remarkably close to the strength and endurance of the other sex, and in the control of their own systems may readily under development excel the other sex. In other words, tradition has more to do with the ‘weakness’ of women than has nature.”

Conventional exercise advice was so bad, Checkley believed, you were better off doing nothing at all. At least you’d know you were doing nothing—instead of being duped into thinking that feeling bored, sore, and swollen was the same as being fit—and with luck you’d eventually get disgusted and do the right thing.

And the right thing was?

Natural training.

Natural training, as one of Checkley’s disciples testified, gave him everything: “shape, speed, strength, suppleness, endurance, abounding health, and every blessed physical advantage a man can have.” Checkley’s method involved no repetitions, no weights, and no fussy food restrictions. It was based on fun and play, and was apparently remarkably effective: business was booming at the Edwin Checkley Gymnasium, in Philadelphia, and even well into his fifties Checkley himself looked carved from marble. After studying under Checkley, the founder of a barbell company publicly declared he’d been wrong all along about weights.

So what exactly was “natural training”? Well, you wouldn’t find the details in Checkley’s book, which was more manifesto than manual and gave only the raw basics. Checkley was trained as both a performer and a businessman, so he knew how to build an audience and control trade secrets. First, he’d whet appetites and win converts; then, over time, he’d feed the faithful with future books. It was an excellent marketing plan, taking into account all but one thing: the leaky gas pipe in his home. Before Checkley could write a second book, he died in 1921 from gas poisoning.

When Georges Hébert set out to create his own French version of natural training, he picked up where Edwin Checkley had fallen short. Hébert wouldn’t just make people healthy. He’d make them heroes. Because if you do it right, Hébert suspected, they’re the same thing. That’s the math at the foundation of every heroic tale from the Odyssey to the Old Testament to Xena: Warrior Princess:

Health = heroism.

Heroism = health.

Heroes are protectors, and being a protector means having strength enough for two. Being strong enough to save yourself isn’t good enough; you have to be better, always, than you’d be on your own. The ancient Greeks loved that little interlocking contradiction, the idea that you’re only your strongest when you have a weakness for other people. They saw health and compassion as the two of the chemical components of a hero’s power: unremarkable alone, but awe-inspiring when combined.

What you’re aiming for is the hero’s holy trinity: paideia, arete, and xenía: skill, strength, and desire. Mind, body, and soul. Overload on any one of the three, and you’ll unbalance the other two. You can charge into action with the noblest xenía intentions, but you’ll get nowhere without the know-how of paideia and the raw arete arsenal of fists, agility, and endurance. That’s what made Odysseus, trickster and semi-scoundrel though he was, the greatest Greek hero. Odysseus wasn’t the best fighter: he was actually a draft-dodger who tried avoiding the invasion of Troy by pretending he’d gone loopy and was too addled to leave home. One of his fellow warriors saw through that scheme, however, because Odysseus was well known for slipping out of a scrap if he didn’t like the odds and only using his spear if he couldn’t deploy guile instead.

But as a hero he was one of a kind, as even a superstar warrior like Achilles would admit. When Odysseus visits the underworld during his journey home from Troy, the ghost of Achilles tells him enviously, “I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and above ground than king of kings among the dead.” Achilles went down in battle, but Odysseus remained alive and scrapping. And why? Because his paideia and arete were balanced by xenía—his loyal heart. Nothing will stop Odysseus from getting home to protect his wife and son—not storms, not vanity, not a Cyclops, not even a magical sex goddess. Mind, body, and soul: that’s what made Odysseus “the best of the Acheans.”

Georges Hébert grasped that, which is why he could see what was missing from Edwin Checkley’s notion of “the whole system of the man.” Checkley’s natural training was dynamite when it came to strength and skills, but where was the higher purpose?

“Exercise only with the intention to carry out a physical gain or to triumph over competitors,” Hébert believed, “is brutally egoistic.” And brutal egoism, Hébert believed, just isn’t human. We like to think of ourselves as masters of our own destinies, as lone wolves in a dog-eat-dog world, but guess what: Dogs don’t eat dogs. They work together. As do most species. As do we. In fact, when it comes to wolf-pack tactics, humans are even better than wolves. We’re the most communicative, helpful species that’s ever existed. If anything, we overshare. We share every idea, every tool, every belief. Even when we fight, we do it as a team; in war, we unite in fantastic numbers.

So forget brutal egoism, Hébert argued. That’s not our real strength. The single greatest moment of his own life came when he plunged that little boat into the seething cauldron off Martinique and began pulling burned, frightened survivors into his arms. Young Georges Hébert wasn’t out there because of ego. He was out there because it was natural; because being a god on earth is a natural human desire, and saving someone else is the closest we’ll ever come to achieving it. All Greek mythology and every major religion that followed has really been devoted to that single premise: the hero who leads the way is half god and half human, fueled as much by pity as by power.

Hébert, consequently, came up with the strangest mission statement ever devised for getting in shape. He called it Méthode Naturelle—the Natural Method—and it would be ruled by a five-word credo that had zero to do with getting ripped, getting thin, or going for the gold. In fact, it had zero to do with “getting” anything; Hébert was heading the opposite direction.

“Être fort pour être utile,” Hébert declared. “Be fit to be useful.” It was brilliant, really. In those final two words, Hébert came up with a complete philosophy of life. No matter who you are, no matter what you’re seeking or hope to leave behind after your time on the planet—is there any better approach than simply to be useful? “Here is the great duty of man to himself, to his family, his homeland and to humanity,” Hébert wrote. “Only the strong will prove useful in difficult circumstances of life.”

Now that he had his purpose, Hébert needed a method. Luckily, he had the perfect case studies right under foot: his kids. When children play, he realized, they’re really role-playing disaster scenarios. Turn them loose and they’ll run, wrestle, hide, roll around, kick-fight with their feet, and leap off anything they can climb—exactly the skills that could keep them alive in a real emergency. Natural training should spring from nature, Hébert decided, so kids’ play would be his starting point. It didn’t take long to realize that most roughhousing is a selection from three basic menus:

Pursuit—walk, run, crawl.

Escape—climb, balance, jump, swim.

Attack—throw, lift, fight.

With his list of “10 natural utilities” in hand, Hébert went looking for guinea pigs. The French navy stepped up and agreed to let him experiment with a class of new recruits. Hébert began by testing the young seamen in basic rescue and evasion maneuvers. Could they climb a tree, a rope, a pole leaning against a wall? Lift a slippery log, a lumpy human body, a heavy stone? Throw with range and accuracy with either hand? Hold their breath, tiptoe along a narrow ledge, fend off two attackers throwing punches?

Next, Hébert set to work on an outdoor training facility. Gyms, he believed, are a joke. What’s invigorating about being cooped up in a room full of foul air and clanking metal? What’s the point of practicing real-life skills with artificial equipment? Gyms benefitted one person, Hébert believed: the gym owner. No, the Natural Method should be open-air all the time, “in rain and dark and beating snow.”

Hébert created a giant adult playground, equipping it with climbing towers, vaulting horses, sandpits, and ponds. Scattered about were rocks and logs and long poles to be used for throwing, vaulting, balancing, shinnying up, passing from hand-to-hand while running, or anything else an athlete dreamed up at the moment. All you had to do was pick a combination of challenges, combine them into an obstacle course–like sequence, and have at it. “One can select a few exercises from each group, ideally all of them if time permits,” Hébert said. “There should be little or no rest between exercises.”

Hébert had one firm rule: No Competing. Ever. That meant no championships, no world records, no races. You didn’t get belts, medals, or rankings. To be honest, Hébert had little regard for competitive sports, which he dismissed as artificial “entertainments.”

“An individual who is satisfied with performing in exercises or sports of entertainment such as these games—soccer, tennis—but ignores the art of swimming, self-defense, or fears vertigo, is not strong in an useful manner,” he argued. “A weightlifter or a wrestler who cannot run nor climb, or a runner or a boxer who doesn’t know how to swim, or cannot climb, is not strong in a complete manner.”

Competition perverts true fitness, Hébert believed. It tempts you to cheat; to overdevelop some talents while ignoring others; to keep tips for yourself that could be useful to everyone. It’s a short cut; all you have to do is beat the other guy and you’re done, but the Natural Method is a never-ending challenge for self-improvement. Besides, competitive sports focus on rivalry and class divisions. The Natural Method was all about collaboration; every teacher was a student, every student was a teacher, bringing fresh ideas and new challenges. Raise the bar, but help the next guy over it—paideia and arete.

What’s most fascinating about Hébert’s theory is that it extends far beyond fitness and into every aspect of life. Hébert believed natural training would make people more noble, intelligent, resourceful, generous, successful, and happy. Why? Because every day, you practice problem-solving under extreme conditions, and once you’ve figured out how to carry a hunk of timber through a swamp in your bare feet, nothing at work will stress you. Natural training makes you introspective, not combative; you see conflict as something to be resolved with force and dexterity, not violence and its brother, fear.

In 1913, Hébert astounded the International Congress of Physical Education with the results of tests performed on 350 navy recruits who’d been trained in Méthode Naturelle. On a rating system that scored performance according to strength, speed, agility, and endurance, French sailors were performing on a scale with world-class decathletes. The French Ministry of War assigned a team of colonels to study under Hébert, and Natural Method “playgrounds” were soon being installed at eight military bases across the country.

Unlike Edwin Checkley, Georges Hébert was eager to open-source everything he’d discovered. He published a monumental work—L’Éducation Physique, ou, L’Entraînement Complet Par la Méthode Naturelle—that crammed together more than five hundred pages of theory, practice, photos, training sequences, and muscular anatomy. But the whole thick stack, Hébert admitted, could be summed up in a single sentence: “Teach your boys to walk, to run, to jump, to box, and to swim, and leave those artificial extension movements, which mean nothing, alone!”

The time had come to take Méthode Naturelle to the world. Hébert handpicked an elite team of trainers and prepared to deploy them throughout Europe, Asia, and America. Right before they scattered, Hébert captured the moment on film; in the photo, he and his Natural Method team are stripped down to rather alarmingly loinclothy shorts, and they look fantastic. They’re of all ages and sizes, but they share the same body; to a man, they’re lean and carved, looking lithe and powerful as a pride of lions. None of them are flexing, because none of them have to; their true strength, they know, lies beneath their muscles, in the knowledge that whatever challenge arises, they’re ready.

That photo was snapped in late 1913. Months later, German troops were tromping through Belgium and Luxembourg on the way to France. The men of Méthode Naturelle joined the fight, and because of their superb physical conditioning and dedication to service, many were leading front-line charges in the Great War. Four years later, every one of them—along with nine million other combatants—was gone.

Georges Hébert was heartbroken, but not surprised. He was a realist, and he understood that no matter how skilled you were, being useful could sometimes be lethal. The Natural Method was never about trying to live forever; the goal was to make a difference before you died. Hébert barely survived his own wounds; he’d spend the rest of his life struggling to regain the ability to walk and talk. He’d be honored as a Commander of the Legion of Honor, but it was like laying a wreath over a sinking ship; Hébert’s noble dream of heroic health was swept away by a world that was sick of danger and wanted to pretend that it was gone forever.

The Natural Method was all but forgotten. Until many years later, when a guy selling glow-stick bracelets on a Corsican beach came across an old paperback and began to read….