We set off at an easy jog, winding through the trees until we emerge on a serene half-moon of beach just as the first slants of morning sun slash across the waves. We have it all to ourselves—until a gang of men emerges from the trees behind us.
“Mais uma vítima!” shouts a tattooed bruiser who looks like he just escaped a prison yard. “Another victim!”
Erwan glances around. He spots a bowling-ball-size rock on the sand. With a quick crouch, he scoops it up and snaps it with a sharp, two-handed throw straight at the bruiser’s chest. Instead of diving out of the way, the guy catches the rock like it was a basketball, tosses it aside, and comes right at Erwan, raising his fist and growling like a grizzly. They lock arms around each other’s necks, then break apart, grinning.
“He’s no victim,” Erwan says in Portuguese, jerking his head toward me. “He’s a work in progress. Like you.” Erwan introduces me to his buddy Serginho, a burly jiu-jitsu instructor who moonlights as a spearfisherman. The other seven guys are stripping off shirts and kicking off flip-flops, ready to get down to business.
Erwan wandered here from his home near Paris more than a year ago and quickly realized Itacaré had all the natural training apparatus that Georges Hébert would have loved, plus the perfect band of collaborators: a small community of Brazilian fighters who support themselves by moonlighting as surfing instructors and spearfishing guides. It’s an ideal alliance: the fighters help sharpen Erwan’s grappling and swimming skills, while Erwan dreams up new ways to frustrate the hell out of them.
Zuqueto can attest to that. Zuqueto is a two-time jiu-jitsu world champion and a free diver who once killed a shark using only a scuba knife and a lungful of air. But the afternoon before, Zuqueto had met his match. Erwan had lashed a long bamboo pole between two trees, forming a bouncy balance beam about eight feet long and as high as my head. Erwan swung himself up, then beckoned Zuqueto to join him.
“What are you waiting for?” Erwan taunted. Zuqueto grabbed the pole with two meaty fists, muscled himself up like a swimmer getting out of a pool, and … lost his balance and fell back to the ground. He leaped again and again, while Erwan amused himself by hopping from foot to foot. When Zuqueto finally stepped back, his chest heaving in fatigue and frustration, Erwan hopped down. He grabbed Zuqueto by both shoulders and gave him a friendly, tousling shake.
“This guy is in amazing shape,” Erwan said. “He’s strong and has great endurance. But what happened here? All he had to do was get on top of this pole, and he couldn’t. I can do it. Zuqueto’s great-grandfather could probably do it. At one point in time, just about every man alive could do it. But Zuqueto can’t. And why? Because his body isn’t smart enough.”
A “smart body,” Erwan explains, knows how to convert force and speed into an almost endless menu of practical movements. Hoisting yourself atop a pole may seem trivial, but if you’re ever caught in a flood or fleeing an attacking dog, elevating your body five feet off the ground can make all the difference. “I meet men all the time who can bench four hundred pounds but can’t climb up through a window to get someone out of a burning building,” he continued. “I know guys who can run marathons but can’t sprint to anyone’s rescue until they put their shoes on first. Lots of swimmers do laps every morning but can’t dive deep enough to save a friend, or know how to carry him over rocks to get him out of the surf.”
Erwan was talking with his back to the pole. Without warning, he pivoted and launched himself into the air. He caught the pole on the fly, arched under it to gain momentum, and then, just before his mount, he slowed enough for us to follow his moves. He twisted his hips and knees, rising like a surfer catching a wave. He hopped down, light as a cat, and mounted the pole two … three … six more times, using his elbows, ankles, shoulders, and neck to create new climbing combinations.
“Being fit isn’t about being able to lift a steel bar or finish an Ironman,” Erwan said. “It’s about rediscovering our biological nature and releasing the wild human animal inside.” He stepped back so Zuqueto could try again, and grinned with satisfaction as Zuqueto maneuvered himself up and found his balance, pumping his fist in the air like he’d won his third world championship.
This is what I came to find: the Natural Method in its natural habitat. Georges Hébert had made some pretty powerful promises about what it could do, and if he was right, it might just explain how Paddy and the other Brits on Crete accomplished something that most of the other dirty tricksters couldn’t: seeing their next birthday.
In the operation’s first year alone, more than half of Xan and Paddy’s fellow members of the Special Operations Executive on the Continent were killed, captured, or otherwise eliminated. One SOE agent was assigned to infiltrate the Riviera’s casinos but mysteriously vanished—along with a briefcase full of cash—before he could lay a bet. In Holland, an SOE radioman was captured by the Gestapo and forced at gunpoint to send messages that lured other agents to their death. In Austria, one of the SOE’s top men—Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard, the best “mathematical brain of his age in England” and son of a legendary army sniper—hiked into the mountains and never hiked out. “This is no place for a gentleman,” he messaged before disappearing. In France, Gus March-Phillipps revealed a spectacular talent for sneaking up on solitary German soldiers and hauling them back to Britain as prisoners. “There comes out of the sea from time to time a hand of steel which plucks the German sentries from their posts with growing efficiency,” Churchill raved in a radio broadcast—but said nothing when, soon after, the Hand of Steel met a blaze of bullets.
Yet on Crete, a man trap prowled by subs and crawling with enemy troops and informants, British undercover ops hadn’t lost a single man since John Pendlebury was killed during the invasion. You can’t chalk it up to their training, woeful as it was, or their raw ability; with their taste for sword-sticks and poetry, with their tendency to describe German harbor mines as “about the size of a jeroboam of champagne,” the Cretan crew seemed more at home with cocktails than combat. At best they had, as Antony Beevor put it, “a rather dashing and eccentric amateurism, what might be expected from a mixture of romantics and archeologists.”
But once on the Sliver, they didn’t just learn; they learned fast. Georges Hébert knew the reason, though maybe not the modern term: it’s likely they were aided by biophilia, or “rewilding the psyche.” We’re all familiar with the way the human body evolved, the way our backs straightened and our limbs lengthened as our ancestors left the trees and adapted to life on the ground as long-range hunter-gatherers. But natural selection didn’t just affect the way we look; it also shaped the way we think. We’re living proof that our ancestors—those puny, furless, fangless wimps—developed a superb ability to read the trees, air, and ground. They lived or died by the element of surprise, which meant they had to detect danger before danger detected them, and track their prey by interpreting the faintest scents, scuffs, and rustles.
That’s why we’re still attracted to what eco-psychologists call the “soft fascinations” of the natural world—moonlight, autumnal forests, whispering meadows—and aren’t too surprised when we hear that certain prime ministers and ex-presidents feel the compulsion to paint, over and over, mountain ranges and grazing horses. Winston Churchill began painting during World War I and relied on it the rest of his life to keep the “black dog” of depression at bay, while George W. Bush picked up the brushes immediately after his two-war presidency and has been turning out a stream of landscapes and kitten and puppy portraits ever since.