ARMLESS MAN

Waipa Post, Volume 52, Issue 3705, 10 January 1936, Page 10

ARMLESS MAN

WRITES WITH HIS FEET. Herr C. H. Unthan, the Russian author of “ The Armless Fiddler ” (Allen and Unwin, London), in which he tells the story of his remarkable career, wrote his book with his feet, as he was born without arms. His birth took place in the agricultural village of Sommerfeld, in East Prussia, 87 years ago. His father was a school master, with a very small income. As a child he owed much to his mother’s tender affection, but for his future as a man he owed more to his father’s dictum that he was not to be pitied, and he was not to be helped to do the things which by striving he might succeed in doing for himself. As a baby he instinctively tried to do with his toes what he saw his elders do with their fingers, and his accomplishments included in the course of years sharpening a pencil with his toes, writing with a pen, using a typewriter, turning the pages of a book and shaving himself. He experimented with a violin, and was given lessons on the instrument, and eventually mastered it sufficiently to appear in concerts. A travelling showman offered him an engagement, and as a vaudeville artist he travelled in many parts of the world. He learned to ride, holding the reins in his teeth, and sixty years ago he crossed the Andes on a mule. A sure-footed mule, accustomed to carrying loads that might be caught by projecting rocks, preferred the exextreme edge of the mountain paths, and this made the armless rider a little nervous. “ When we skirted a precipice the beast I was riding insisted on walking on the outermost edge of a narrow path, as though it knew how terribly a man without arms suffers from dizziness,” he writes. “ When I dismounted I had a hard task to coax it back, so that I could get out of the saddle without flying down a precipice of five or six hundred feet. Horses and dogs usually appeal to the better side of their master's nature; the mule turns

him into a hypocrite.” The author played a part in the Great War on the German side by instructing wounded soldiers who had lest their arms. He lectured to them on the value of legs as substitutes for arms, and argued with medical men about the advantages of well-trained legs over artificial arms. He was offered a captain’s pay by General Mackensen, but declined it on the ground that it would weaken his influence with the maimed. The career of Herr Unthan serves to recall that of Arthur Kavanagh, who was born with only short stumps for arms and legs. He was an Irishman, a Protestant and a Conservative, and he was a -memberof the British House of Commons for fourteen years. He was the third son of Thomas Kavanagh, Borris House, County Carlow, Ireland, by his second wife, Harriet Margaret le Poer Trench, a daughter of the second Earl of Clancarty. His father sat for Kilkenny in the last Irish Parliament before the Union, and in three successive British Parliaments.