When you hear the word "adventurer", the person you're visualizing is a British officer named Frederick Spencer Chapman. Greenland explorer, mountain-climber, war hero, (also, less glamorously, ornithologist, filmmaker, photographer and writer), and the man who wrote the book on jungle survival.

Chapman visited Greenland first as part of the Gino Watkins expedition of 1930-31, which went to set up a weather station on the Greenland ice cap. They had so much fun that they came back a year later to cross it. In 1936 Chapman climbed mountains in the Himalayas, then joined a British diplomatic mission to Tibet. All of this he wrote books about, the kind of books that boyhood dreams are made of.

He then spent three years during World War 2 as a guerilla fighter in the Malayan jungle. Part of a small and hastily improvised Stay Behind-force, Chapman sabotaged Japanese railroads, trained Chinese Communist guerillas, fought malaria and other diseases, was captured by bandits, was captured by Japanese soldiers, and somehow came out of it all alive.

His role in the war was minor, but hinted at lost opportunities: The British command found the idea of a Malayan Stay Behind-force ridiculous and defeatist, (they felt about Singapore as an earlier generation had felt about the Titanic), and did not give it much support. Otherwise Chapman and his team might have done real damage behind the Japanese lines. As it was, they killed a couple of hundred Japanese soldiers in early 1942, after the fall of Singapore and Malaya, before running out of supplies and joining the Communists. Many of them died, but Chapman emerged from the jungle two years later to escape on a British submarine.

The product of these experiences was his 1948 The Jungle is Neutral, a classic work on jungle warfare and survival. The Jungle is Neutral was a bestseller in its time, and is still in print. (I found it by accident, dusty and second-hand, and read it unprepared - I love when that happens.)

If you were one of the many foreigners who over the following decades came to fight wars in the South-East Asian jungle, you would have wanted to read The Jungle is Neutral beforehand. And then you might have wanted to find a way out of going. About the title, Chapman writes:

My experience is that the length of life of the British private soldier accidentally left behind in the Malayan jungle was only a few months, while the average N.C.O., being more intelligent, might last a year or even longer. To them the jungle seemed predominantly hostile, being full of man-eating tigers, deadly fevers, venomous snakes and scorpions, natives with poisoned darts, and a host of half-imagined nameless terrors. They were unable to adapt themselves to a new way of life and a diet of rice and vegetables; in this green hell they expected to be dead within a few weeks - and as a rule they were. The other school of thought, that the jungle teems with wild animals, fowls, and fish which are simply there for the taking, and that luscious tropical fruits - paw-paw, yams, bread-fruit and all that, drop from the trees, is equally misleading. The truth is that the jungle is neutral. It provides any amount of fresh water, and unlimited cover for friend as well as foe - an armed neutrality, if you like, but neutrality nevertheless. It is the attitude of mind that determines whether you go under or survive. 'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' The jungle itself is neutral.

The quote is from Hamlet, who was rephrasing the Stoics. Stoicism is reflected not just in Chapman's philosophy of jungle survival but in the way he tells his story: Matter-of-fact and understated. There's no fancy literary cleverness here, and only hints of emotion. No fuzz. No darkness. No horror. Just "and then we had malaria again for three weeks, and one of us died", and on with the next event. Chapman doesn't brush over bad episodes, and he writes well, but the language is so subdued that it borders on deception. "Stiff upper lip" is a phrase that comes to mind, but maybe "Imperial British" describes the style better. You get a sense that empires were built by people like this. Alternatively that people who read books like this went out to build empires.

There are amusing episodes, drily reported but you can tell that he's smiling. At one point, Chapman argues with his Chinese Communist comrades for the right to smoke:

Some of the [Communist guerilla] camps voluntarily decided to give up smoking: though I am not by any means a heavy smoker, I felt so strongly about this interference with the rights of the individual that I made an impassioned speech in Malay (having carefully learnt all the necessary words beforehand). My main argument, I recall, was that Stalin and Churchill both smoked, whereas Hitler did not: therefore smoking was a good democratic habit. [..] I am glad to be able to record that the smokers won the day.

(60 years later, the debate is still raging.)

He is apparently tricked into becoming a cannibal:

At this meal there was a meat dish about which there seemed to be some mystery. I found it very good, being less rank than monkey though not so good as jungle pig. After the meal I was told that I had been eating Jap. Whether this was true or not I do not know, but in several of the camps I had been told that they sometimes ate the heart and liver of Japs who had been killed in skirmishes at the jungle edge. Though I would not knowingly have become a cannibal I was quite interested to have sampled human flesh.

Don't you love the tone here? Huh. I ate human flesh. Regrettable, but most fascinating. I wonder if it's true, or if they were just pulling the foreigner's leg. It wouldn't be the strangest thing to happen in that war.

Chapman has an expression that I like, which he uses about some of the Communists. He respects the regular soldiers, but some of their leaders and intellectuals have been "educated beyond their intelligence":

The guerilla bodyguard, hand-picked by Chen-Ping from neighbouring camps, consisted of about twelve assorted Chinese under the leadership of one Ah Yang - a bulky, bespectacled student who took life far too seriously and had no sense of humour. He was unbelievably erudite, having read - amongst many other books - all Marx, Engels, and Shaw; but he had been educated far beyond his intelligence and lived in an unreal world of his own so that it was difficult to meet him on common ground and we were never at our ease in his company.

How wonderfully condescending. "Educated beyond their intelligence" describes some people I can think of. I wish I could use that expression one day, but I'm too polite to.

The Chinese guerillas Chapman refers to in the book belonged to the large Chinese minority in Malaya. Strongly anti-Japanese, (wouldn't you be?), they formed the bulk of the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army, the Communist-led guerilla movement Chapman fought with, and the only significant anti-Japanese force in the country. After the war, the Malayan Communists turned against the British, who stupidly thought they could return as colonial masters. Britain actually had better luck suppressing Communist guerillas than the French and Americans had in Vietnam, but it wasn't pretty: One of their counterinsurgency measures was to forcibly relocate half a million people. The war lasted ten years, until Malaya's independence in 1957. (Malaya later joined with parts of Borneo to form what today is Malaysia.)

One British soldier who fought in this conflict, Keith Swift, does not agree with Chapman that attitude is everything in jungle warfare: "I once read a book called The Jungle is Neutral, but the jungle was never neutral for me. It was hell on earth, particularly for people brought up in towns and cities. It was a horrific experience. A few of the men died of jungle fever and one guy was killed by lightning. The fighting was all about night ambush and being eaten alive by mosquitoes and white ants." I think some Americans and French might agree.

Chapman would have replied that this proves his point - people who are too used to city life don't have the right attitude to survive in the jungle. Maybe. Frederick Spencer Chapman shot himself in 1971. I don't know why he did it, everyone has a different opinion, but many of those opinions point to war-related illnesses and memories. I wonder what it really felt like to live at life's edge in a jungle war zone for three years, or what it was like to bring the memories of it back to a normal life afterwards. I don't think it was quite the jolly good adventure he makes it out to be.