Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

LOOMING LARGE

- Gentlemen without oxygen

Name of the Book: Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest

Writer: Wade Davis,

Publisher: The Bodley Head

Pages: 655

Price: Rs 699

From the outset, the British adopted a proprietory attitude towards Mount Everest, particularly after the Great Trigonometrical Survey revealed it to be the world’s highest peak. This persisted after World War, or the Great War, as Wade Davis — the author of this dense, packed, but fascinating book — insists on calling it. Britain’s successful record of exploration in the 19th century had been challenged by Robert Peary reaching the North Pole (1909) and Roald Amundsen (1911) its opposite. Amundsen’s vastly better organized expedition beat the national hero, Robert Scott, whose incompetent leadership resulted in his death and those of his companions — but who then became a hero in glorious failure. (1912 is the centenary of Scott’s death).

Davis does not make this point, but the iconic figure of George Mallory, whose walk into mountaineering myth with his untrained companion, Sandy Irvine, seems just another glorious failure celebrated for the manly virtues of the English upper-middle class, sought to be inculcated in its single-sex public schools. But Davis is not out to simply recapture an era when exploration was supposedly more “pure” or “untainted” by commercial concerns. He has focused on the first three expeditions — 1921, 1922 and 1924. In his view, the quest for Everest may have begun as a “grand imperial gesture” to redeem the failure to reach the Poles, but it became a national exercise to assert national pride after the carnage of the Western Front.

Of the 26 climbers on the first three expeditions, 20 had seen service in the war. Six had been severely wounded — John de Vars Hazard’s wound had never healed completely, which severely limited his usefulness on the mountain. Others had lost siblings and close friends. Three as army surgeons had had to deal with the horrific consequences of sustained artillery fire and poison gas. Among them, Arthur Wakefield lost his religious faith, while Howard Somervell spent the rest of his life in a mission hospital in South India. To the mountaineers, Davis writes, Everest was “a sentinel in the sky, a place and destination of hope and redemption, a symbol of continuity in a world gone mad”. Davis chooses to begin with the memorial service on Great Gable, for climbers lost in the Great War — ironically on the same day that Mallory and Irvine disappeared — and that sets the tone for the rest of the book.

There may have been a search for some sort of transcendence, but Davis does not neglect the less elevated aspects of the expeditions, relating them to the social milieu, the attitudes and the human frailties of the day. What comes across is just how badly prepared and poorly equipped these expeditions were, for the technical and physical challenges that climbing Everest presented. (The discovery of Mallory’s body in 1999, clad in tweed, wool and hobnailed boots, with a hemp rope around his waist, only underscored this point.) There was a question of whether it was “gentlemanly” to use oxygen, with Arthur Hinks — dominant figure of the Everest Committee, with no climbing experience — arguing against its use. (Mallory eventually came round to its use, and most climbers use it today.) Still worse were the xenophobia and snobbery that deprived George Ingle Finch — arguably the best ice climber of his day — of a place on the final expedition because he was an Australian, outside the public school climbing fraternity, and because of his complicated private life. Climbers like Frank Smythe, one of the great figures of the inter-war period, were left out (he would climb Kamet and re- discover the Valley of Flowers). Men like Harold Raeburn, physically and mentally unfit, were included.

What add both length, but also human interest, to the story are the detailed biographies of the members of each expedition, particularly those who had lived with the constant threat of death during their war service. These potted biographies are included, the first time one of the major players enters the scene. The war becomes the unspoken backdrop. These men had seen so much of death that “life mattered less than the moments of being alive”. True to their upbringing these men never spoke of the war, but it was always present.

Inevitably, Mallory looms large, both because of what Davis calls his “unprecedented level of athleticism” and “a mental focus utterly modern in its intensity”. According to Geoffrey Keynes (brother of John Maynard Keynes), Mallory had a premonition of death, but could not resist the lure of the mountain. Yet he could be untidy, forgetful and technologically incompetent — his decision to take Irvine on his last climb rather than the more experienced Edward Norton or even Noel Odell, may have been because of the young man’s technical expertise with the oxygen cylinders.

Other figures, who have had a somewhat shadowy existence in the literature of the period come to life in this telling. Wade Davis is partial to Oliver Wheeler, a fellow Canadian, who later became surveyor general of India. It was Wheeler, the competent and gritty surveyor who found the northern approach to Everest, while Mallory simply flailed about on the first expedition. Davis is rightly critical of Mallory’s rather superior attitude towards this “colonial”, as he is about the outlook displayed by many of the sahibs towards the sherpas. Here, too, there were differences. For Mallory, Tibet was “a hateful place”; Somervell grieved at the death of the sherpas in 1922, and saw the beauty of the landscape (he was a talented artist).

The book’s subtitle gives a sense of its scope. Davis has succeeded in bringing together a vast amount of disparate material, although some may feel overwhelmed by its wealth of detail. (Among the many things that this, somewhat overlong, book explores is the culture of the public school and the homo-erotic atmosphere of early-20th-century Cambridge, the Bloomsbury group, Jallianwala Bagh, and the Younghusband expedition.) The book ends with an annotated bibliography, which is well worth reading. He is sceptical of claims that Mallory and Irvine reached the summit. But, in his words, “they did on that fateful day, climb higher than any human being before them….That they were able to do so, given all that they had endured, is surely achievement enough.”

DAYITA DATTA

Published on January 13, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120106/jsp/opinion/story_14966157.jsp