SAS hero CAPTAIN LOUIS RUDD describes how he overcame agonies to become the first Briton to cross the desolate Antarctic wastes alone - in honour of the friend who died trying

When explorer Henry Worsley died after attempting a solo unsupported crossing of Antarctica in 2016, Princes Harry and William were among those who paid tribute to the man they described as being ‘of great courage and determination . . . a source of inspiration to us all’. The same can certainly be said of his fellow SAS soldier Louis Rudd. In a gripping new book, he describes how he became the first Briton to accomplish the record-breaking challenge that eluded his friend, an epic trek involving several brushes with death. He is the only person to have skied across the Antarctic landmass twice.

For four long days I had been trapped in a whiteout, unable to see the sky above or the ice beneath my feet. The only sound was the endless crunching under my skis as I hauled along my pulk — the sledge tethered to my waist.

It was Day 27 of my attempt to complete a 920-mile, solo unsupported traverse of the Antarctic landmass — something no one had achieved before without food re-supplies or wind assistance from a kite. I was relying on muscle power alone and the difference was like between sailing across the Atlantic and rowing across.

After 25 years in the SAS, serving all over the globe, I had faced many tricky situations and physical challenges. But few had tested me like cutting a trail alone through this field of sastrugi, towering waves of ice, some as big as cars, created when winter winds sweep across the continent at 120mph. The Great White Queen was seeing how far she could push me and suddenly I felt the ice disappear beneath my skis as I went into freefall.

I had reached an invisible 8ft-high ridge and stepped straight off into a void before face-planting into the granite-hard ice below.

The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth and I was seriously winded. It was like an uppercut to the ribs from a heavyweight boxer and the sucker punch came as my pulk crashed down on the back of my legs.

As pain drilled up through my crumpled body my mind went into overdrive. I assumed my legs were broken and even if I got to my satellite phone before I passed out, I would be dead by the time rescuers arrived, entombed in ice, another soul lost to the Antarctic.

I slowly shuffled out from beneath the pulk, expecting at some stage to see a bone sticking out of my thigh or some other horrendous injury. Then gradually, as I came to my senses, it dawned on me that I had dodged a bullet again, just as I had during tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

My pride and chest were heavily bruised — nothing more — but every bit of my body ached and as I slowly moved forward again, I couldn’t stop the doubts creeping in once more.

How did I come to be here? How much more of this could I take?

My fascination with Antarctica began the day a friend and I were given the cane at Spalding Grammar School in Lincolnshire, after messing around in a maths class. Then aged 12 or so, I heard the thwacks on my friend’s behind as I waited my turn outside the headmaster’s office and in an attempt at distraction I browsed a nearby bookcase.

One title jumped out, a small Ladybird book whose heavily thumbed pages recalled how Captain Scott had reached the South Pole in January 1912, only to discover that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten him there by a month.

Then came the return journey, with Scott’s team battling the elements, starvation and gangrene, and Captain Oates, close to death, sacrificing his life in the forlorn hope that the rest of Scott’s party might survive.

Empowered by reading about men who had faced death in the most horrendous of circumstances, I did not feel in the least bit scared of the cane and that night, as I studied the red welts on my backside in my bedroom mirror, I vowed that I would one day travel to Antarctica. It was an obsession I shared with Henry Worsley MBE, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the SAS and one of the toughest people I knew.

You could say that Henry had the Antarctic in his DNA. He was distantly related to Frank Worsley, the New Zealand captain of the Endurance, the ship in which Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed south when attempting the first land crossing of the continent in his expedition of 1914–16.

In 2011, I was part of Henry’s team when he organised a race to the South Pole to mark the centenary of the Scott-Amundsen expeditions. Four years later, Henry returned to attempt the first solo and unassisted crossing but physical and mental exhaustion forced him to abandon it 120 miles from his finish point. Two days later, he died of multiple organ failure during emergency surgery on an infection in his abdomen.

At the time I was organising an Antarctic traverse of my own. Known as SPEAR (South Pole Expedition Army Reserves), this saw me lead five reservists on a 1,100 mile crossing.

Life was so frenetic I barely had time to make sense of Henry’s death and I only fully realised what a friend I had lost when, towards the end of our traverse, we held a memorial service for him.

This was at the head of the mighty Shackleton Glacier, a five-mile-wide highway of pure blue ice leading down towards the Ross Ice Shelf in the far distance.

The stunning panorama was like the physical embodiment of Henry’s spirit and, although surrounded by good friends, I felt adrift, as if I had lost a brother.

Soon people were asking if I was going to attempt a solo crossing and, after getting the go-ahead from the ‘long-haired general’, as my wife Lucy is affectionately known, I won the blessing of Henry’s widow Joanna to try to crack a journey that belonged to him.

With only two weeks to go, I heard that Colin O’Brady, a 33-year-old American endurance athlete, was attempting the traverse at the same time as me.

I suppose I felt somewhat as Captain Scott must have done a century earlier, when Amundsen changed his plans last minute to focus on the South rather than the North Pole. But our two expeditions were very different.

Colin was a professional adventurer and this was his full-time career whereas I was a soldier first and very much an amateur in the world of polar travel, much as Scott and Shackleton had been.

I wanted to connect with Antarctica like I had on previous trips and I could not do that if my focus was pushing as hard as possible so I refused to be drawn into a race.

On November 3, 2018, a ski-plane belonging to the support organisation Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions (ALE) dropped us a mile apart at the start point on the Ronne Ice Shelf, a vast blanket of snow and ice 1,000ft thick that has lain undisturbed for aeons.

Our route involved climbing 200ft or 300ft feet a day until we reached the polar plateau, a high central area of the continent, which encompasses the South Pole at 9,000ft feet. From there, it would level out before a steep descent down the Leverett Glacier took us on to the Ross Ice Shelf, some two months away.

During one whiteout in the days that followed, we were skiing in parallel just 20 or so yards apart but, by Day 6, Colin was little more than a far-off speck.

If he wanted to charge off — good luck to him. I was determined to stick to my plan and to enjoy the expedition. To reduce my pulk’s weight, I’d cut away extraneous metal from the cooker and removed the tent’s zipper pulls and all the labels from my clothes.

I’d also emptied all of my dehydrated meals from their foil packets into freezer bags — that alone saved me 6kg — and I had no luxuries like books. Instead I downloaded around 5,000 songs and 35 audio-books on to my iPhone.

After a medical, a doctor had suggested having my appendix removed in case it burst during the expedition. It had been fine for the past 49 years, so I elected to keep it, although I suppose it would have saved more weight.

Although I had trained hard, dragging a Land Rover tyre over countless miles through long grass, nothing replicates pulling a 130kg pulk across soft, unbroken snow.

It was a killer. With each slide of my ski and tug of the pulk, I felt the energy drain from my body and it became a battle of wills: mine against Antarctica’s. I’d wondered how I would manage the solitude with nothing to keep me company except the voice inside my head.

But there was plenty to occupy me, including the nightly blog which I always finished with the salutation ‘Onwards’, just as Henry had done.

Another important motivator was the chocolate pudding at the end of each ten-day pack of food.

Like all my freeze-dried meals, each had to be rehydrated, a laborious process since every five-litre kettle of snow I melted produced only an inch of water. But every time I reached one, it meant that my pulk would be around 15kg lighter from food and fuel consumed over the ten days.

Such is the life of an Antarctic traveller: it’s all about the little things and joy can be replaced by sheer misery in a matter of moments as on Day 20 when my pulk was sinking in soft snow and I was bending double over my ski poles every 100 yards or so and gasping for breath. I decided to divide the load, burying half my kit in the snow and marking its location with a spare ski before returning to collect it after I had skied forward for a couple of miles with the other half.

This worked well until my ski tracks disappeared in a whiteout and I couldn’t find my way back.

I had left behind my tent and sleeping bag, a potentially life-threatening error.

For an hour and a half my heart was in my mouth but finally I spotted my upright spare ski through a fleeting gap in the snow. Dropping to my knees, I vowed never to make such a stupid mistake again.

The one positive was that it was a chocolate pudding day. There’s always a silver lining if you look hard enough.

I thought I’d learned my lesson, but Day 21 saw me once again questioning my decision-making.

By mid-afternoon, the wind was hitting me head on and instead of putting my tent up while I still could, I gambled that it would drop later and skied on to make up for the time I had lost the day before.

Within a few hours the wind had reached 45mph and I only just managed to get the tent up before I risked dying of exposure.

I was pushing my regimental motto ‘Who Dares Wins’ to the limit and soon came Day 27 and my survival of the plunge from that ice ridge.

Somewhere, I thought, my guardian angel was on watch and three days later I was praying for a few miles of relatively flat going when I saw a stunning white bird around the size of a dove with a jet black beak. It was flying at head height about 15ft away and staring almost directly at my face.

I wondered if I was hallucinating. I was very close to the centre of the most inhospitable place on earth and had never seen or heard of any wildlife this far into the interior — yet there it was.

Although soon gone, it had a profound, almost spiritual effect upon me. I am usually totally sceptical about ghosts. But the chances of that encounter were so rare that I still believe to this day that it was Henry’s spirit, letting me know that he was watching over me.

That was a turning point. From that moment on I never doubted myself but still Antarctica looked for chinks in my mental armour.

By Day 33, with the altitude making breathing increasingly difficult, I was finally on the polar plateau and a week later one of the observatories which form part of the South Pole station came into view.

As I approached the two small tents belonging to ALE, the staff came out to greet me.

For my expedition to count as unassisted, they were not allowed to offer me food or drinks, but they were allowed to hug me, which was also a subtle way of checking how much weight I’d lost.

After a very brief photo session at the South Pole marker and a quick chat, during which I learned that Colin had passed through the day before, I said my goodbyes and pushed on.

The hard work was now mostly behind me but, with temperatures as low as minus 40c, the extreme cold badly ulcerated my mouth.

With my lips welded shut by the ooze seeping from the sores as I slept, my first action of the day was to prise them open, ignoring the agony as my eyes smarted and my mouth felt like it was on fire.

Almost from the day I skied away from the South Pole, my body began to deteriorate. I had lost more than 10kg in weight and began wondering whether I was capable of completing the final 300 miles.

Eventually, with 100 miles to go, I decided to raid my reserve rations. My body was now craving food all the time and I never felt satiated, even after a large meal.

At night I would think about steak and chips, curry and roast potatoes. Knowing that it was beyond my reach made it all the more desirable.

On Day 54, I called home just as my family back home in Hereford were about to sit down for Christmas dinner. When we spoke, I could hear the emotion in their voices.

It was tough and on Boxing Day I learned that Colin had finished, completing the final 72 miles in an impressive 32-hour push, but I had no regrets about not racing. Finishing just two days behind a professional athlete, 16 years my junior, who undertook these huge expeditions for a living, wasn’t so bad.

Skiing off the Leverett Glacier the next day I spotted Colin’s red tent in the far distance and reached it at around 4.20pm.

We hugged and began talking about all that we had both been through and it was only then that it began to sink in. After 56 days of skiing, without a single rest day, and hauling and battling my way through almost impenetrable fields of sastrugi and deep, soft snow, it was finally over.

My biggest emotion was relief that I hadn’t failed, but for me it had been about far more than completing my goal.

It was about the privilege of being alone to marvel at the scale and raw beauty of Antarctica, about surviving in an environment that could take your life in an instant.

This is a place where it seems as if humans are just not meant to be, but I know that it’s only a matter of time before I once again answer the siren call of the Great White Queen.

Onwards.

Endurance by Louis Rudd, © Louis Rudd 2020, is published by Macmillan at £20 on June 11.