Lieut. Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle, retired, sometime of the Royal Artillery, First The Royal Dragoons, and Eleventh Hussars, is a small, furious, ramrod-straight man who wears a monocle and believes in taking things into his own hands. Through his one good eye he views the world with the wary and defiant air of a man who suspects the worst, and expects to deal with it. Last week he was in jail and proud of it. The charge: forcibly taking the pants off an elderly solicitor.
For 57 years, Wintle has been fighting his one-man war against enemies of his choice. He fought the Germans in World War I, lost three fingers of his left hand and his left eye. He fought Pathan tribes men in India, Irishmen in Ireland, his own superior officers wherever they blocked him. He fought slackness in his men, sometimes seemed even to consider death a kind of slackness. Halting at the bed side of a soldier critically ill with a mastoid infection, Wintle snapped: "It is an offense for a dragoon to die in bed. You will get better at once. And when you do, see that you get your hair cut."
Wintle's War. He fought his superiors in World War II when they tried to fob him off with draft duties instead of action. "He became a little bit of a nuisance," admitted Field Marshal Sir Edmund Ironside. When France tottered, Wintle became exasperated at official in action; he called an airfield, told them he was speaking for the Air Ministry, and ordered a plane readied to fly him to Bordeaux. His plan: to get his French mili tary friends to fly the French air force out to Britain. Hauled up before an air commodore for this escapade, Wintle whipped out his revolver and declared: "If it will help you to realize that I am perfectly serious, you have only to say the word and I will blow this stump of my finger off." Said the air commodore: "If you do it, don't make a bloody mess." Upshot was that Wintle was clapped into the Tower of London, where the admiring Scots Guards on duty plied him with whisky, cigars, and duck in aspic. But Wintle refused to let them clean his boots and uniform. "Much as I admire the Guards," he said coldly, "I do not feel they quite understand how to look after a cavalry officer's kit."
Let off with a "severe reprimand," Wintle was packed off to a staff job in the Middle East. But soon he was turning up at the bar in Cairo's Shepheard's Hotel, sipping a favorite gin concoction called "Suffering Bathwater," sporting an impressive beard, and dropping remarks like "Lovely weather on the Riviera last week." He had launched a career as a spy, impersonating a Vichy officer in occupied France. Caught and jailed in Toulon, Wintle sharply ticked off his guards for their slovenly appearance. He went on a 14-day hunger strike until they agreed to shave. On his third try, he escaped.
Wintle's Peace. At war's end, Wintle subsided into Kent to write novels and memoirs. He reappeared briefly in the public eye, accused of kicking a ticket collector at Victoria Station—unable to find a seat in the train, he had planted himself in the engine driver's cab, refused to move until they found him one.