The Ice Soldier (7 page)
Only those who do not climb mountains ask why people climb them. For those who climb, the answer is both obvious
and almost impossible to explain. Perhaps the simplest answer is that life is infinitely simplified when you are climbing. The everyday concerns of livelihood, of social standing, of overdue bills and futureless romances all fall away before the vast and overwhelming absolute of the mountain. Aside from an ice ax, a few carabiner loops, and a length of rope, there is nothing to rely on but yourself and those with whom you climb. On the precipice not only of the world but of your own existence, you look back with a mixture of pity and contempt at those who fuss away their time on the wheel of the working day.
and almost impossible to explain. Perhaps the simplest answer is that life is infinitely simplified when you are climbing. The everyday concerns of livelihood, of social standing, of overdue bills and futureless romances all fall away before the vast and overwhelming absolute of the mountain. Aside from an ice ax, a few carabiner loops, and a length of rope, there is nothing to rely on but yourself and those with whom you climb. On the precipice not only of the world but of your own existence, you look back with a mixture of pity and contempt at those who fuss away their time on the wheel of the working day.
“But it doesn't accomplish anything,” my father would say. “Not for the common good, I mean. What you stand to lose is completely out of proportion to what you have to gain.” And he was right. I didn't know how long I could just keep mountaineering and have everything else exist as a means to do more mountaineering. But my knowing he was right didn't change how I felt about it. Obsession, since this was what it had become, did not require the cumbersome baggage of reason.
For the first two summers, the six of us made our way back to Chamonix. We climbed the Grandes Jorasses, Mont Blanc, the Petit Dru, and the Grands Charmoz.
We formed what seemed to me a perfect team, each with his own talent which benefited the group as a whole.
Whistler could fix anything, especially the fiddly stoves and camera equipment we brought with us.
Forbes was our cook, piously minding the soup kettle and the rationing of food.
Armstrong spoke the languages of the Alps, not only French and German but Italian as well. And when these failed, he spoke in Latin. Without him, on our first trip down, we would probably have misunderstood the directions offered to
us by a variety of train conductors, and would have ended up on the other side of Europe.
us by a variety of train conductors, and would have ended up on the other side of Europe.
Sugden was our most aggressive climber. The few times we were forced by weather or an impassable route to turn back, he took it as a personal insult. There was no doubt in my mind that if it had not been for the moderating effect of the rest of the group, Sugden would have killed himself simply in refusing to accept defeat. He was absolutely without fear, and so intolerant of fear in others that there were times when, if it had not been for Stanley, we might have pressed ahead with climbs which we should more sensibly have abandoned.
The only one of us who regularly stood up to Sugden was Stanley. Whereas the rest of us did our best to avoid argument, Stanley seemed to revel in it. What annoyed Sugden most about these confrontations on the mountainsides was that Stanley was quite simply a better mountain climber than anyone else in the group. With his natural agility, it was taken for granted that Stanley would be in the lead when we came up against stretches of any serious technical difficulty. So when the route ahead began to look unclimbable and Stanley started making noises about turning back, the rest of us knew that this time the mountain had beaten us.
Sugden, who hated giving in to anything, hated even more that Stanley's judgment in these matters carried more weight than his own.
Once we climbed above the tree line, it was always left to me to make the final choice. This role had evolved without any debate or argument. The very lack of argument was perhaps the thing that decided it. Neither Whistler, Forbes, nor Armstrong had any wish to lead. They shared among themselves a certain quietness of character which did not jibe with taking charge.
Stanley didn't care for leading either, except when it came to the actual climbing. He disliked giving orders almost as much as he disliked taking them from anyone else.
Sugden would gladly have led us, but most probably to unmarked graves on some unclimbable peak, simply because the concept of turning back was so repugnant to him. So he could not lead, because the rest of us would not have followed him. Sugden knew he was wrong for the job, although his pride would never have allowed him to admit it. Nevertheless, he seemed constantly on the alert for any opportunity to exert control over the rest of us.
So it fell to me to make decisions when decisions had to be made. Up on the mountainside, someone had to choose what route we took, when we stopped to rest, where we camped, and, ultimately, when neither Sugden and Stanley could agree, if reaching the summit was worth the risk involved.
Among the three who could have taken charge, it was no great boast to say I was the only choice. Despite the fact that this role came to me more or less by default, much as the teaching did later on, I found to my surprise that I was suited for it. It was one of the more helpful realizations of my life to learn that, just because something had come along unexpectedly, that did not mean it was any less important than the plans I'd worked out in advance. In preparing for our mountaineering trips, I discovered that I had a seemingly inexhaustible energy for sorting out the little details which drove people like Stanley to distraction. And, unlike Forbes and the other non-leaders of our group, I did not mind the burden of decision making. Finally, when difficult choices had to be made, I found I could think clearly and calmly, while Sugden spat and swore and raged at the mountains which beat us, as if they had done it on purpose.
As we descended from the glacier fields, I would cajole Sugden and Stanley to set their differences aside, since even on successful climbs they managed to find things to argue about. Knowing them both as well as I did, and resorting to silly games I invented, such as asking each person to name three things he could not live without, I was usually successful. By the time we returned to civilization, Stanley and Sugden would be as close to friends again as they had been before we'd left.
I played my part with such sincerity that the others took to calling me “Auntie,” a title I pretended to despise. And if I was sometimes not entirely successful in my diplomacy, fatigue usually stepped in to finish the task.
Coated with the white dust of dried sweat and the gray dust of the scree slopes, we pitched our tents at campsites like the Boule d'Or, where we were regulars and where Madame Thibodeaux would hold a place for us each year. We were also known at the nearby Piton café, where we drank ice-cold “demis” of Stella Artois and lingered over bowls of white-bean cassoulet. At the end of our third summer, the owner of the Piton, Monsieur Rancourt, took our picture in front of the café, framed it, and hung it above the bar, along with the pictures of other climbing teams who had made Chamonix a second home.
As time went by, we spent less time in Chamonix, and grew tired of the incessant booming of mini-cannons, which the hotels would fire off when their guests had summitted Mont Blanc. These guests, when they reached the top, would signal with bright scarves or flashing mirrors to people waiting on the hotel balconies, bottles of Bouvier at the ready. The town had become a magnet for the kind of tourist known to local Chamoinards as “Pioux-Pioux”: people attracted to the
trendiness of mountaineering rather than the climbing itself. One could see them gathered outside the Hotel Tremblay, late in the summer mornings, by which time any serious climbers would long since have set out. The Pioux-Pioux wore the latest mountaineering fashions and were content to let their guides lug their gear. Even with the loads they had to carry, which sometimes included birds in cages and dogs in miniature copies of the tweedy hiking clothes worn by their owners, these guides were to be pitied more for the humiliation they endured than for the physical exertion of their jobs. Most of the Pioux-Pioux halted at the first patch of ice, drained the contents of their whiskey flasks, and retreated to town.
trendiness of mountaineering rather than the climbing itself. One could see them gathered outside the Hotel Tremblay, late in the summer mornings, by which time any serious climbers would long since have set out. The Pioux-Pioux wore the latest mountaineering fashions and were content to let their guides lug their gear. Even with the loads they had to carry, which sometimes included birds in cages and dogs in miniature copies of the tweedy hiking clothes worn by their owners, these guides were to be pitied more for the humiliation they endured than for the physical exertion of their jobs. Most of the Pioux-Pioux halted at the first patch of ice, drained the contents of their whiskey flasks, and retreated to town.
In the summers that followed, we did our best to follow in the footsteps of mountaineers like Mummery, Stephen, Whymper, and Tyndall, whose well-thumbed memoirs we carried with us everywhere. This brought us to places like Grindelwald, Murren, Kleine Scheidegg, and Zermatt, where we camped above the town in a small forest called the Erikawald. There, in August, dozens of camps would spring up and the woods would echo with the sounds of every language in Europe. We were students, most of us, and in a shingle-roofed shrine to the Virgin Mary, erected at a crossroads in the wood, abandoned textbooks from the universities of Freiburg, Oslo, Warsaw, Paris, and Verona lay stacked. They were used either for reading material on rainy days or for starting fires, depending on the quality of the book.
It was here that we heard stories of more distant mountain ranges. The Rockies, Patagonia, the Himalayas. Our nights were filled with plans for future expeditions.
Back at Oxford, with finances a continuing problem, I made a wise switch from selling blood to writing about our expeditions in the
View,
the
Climber's Gazette,
and other Alpine
journals. The publications didn't pay much, but with the articles we began to establish ourselves as a mountaineering team worthy of following in the footsteps of earlier climbers, as well as their guides; men like Emil Boss, Melchior Anderegg, and Jean-Baptiste Aymond, whose names were almost too sacred to be spoken aloud.
View,
the
Climber's Gazette,
and other Alpine
journals. The publications didn't pay much, but with the articles we began to establish ourselves as a mountaineering team worthy of following in the footsteps of earlier climbers, as well as their guides; men like Emil Boss, Melchior Anderegg, and Jean-Baptiste Aymond, whose names were almost too sacred to be spoken aloud.
We became known as the Lucky Six, after the old dice roller's expression. This was because of the way we seemed, to others, to be gambling with our lives. But it was also because of the way that our luck was holding out, since we had never suffered any mishap. This luck we did not take for granted. In the summer of 1938, climbers were dying at a rate of two a week on the slopes around Chamonix.
Our good fortune came to an end when war broke out in September of 1939. By January of the following year, I and the rest of the Lucky Six had been called up.
We went our separate ways.
Whistler and Sugden went into the navy, Forbes joined the merchant marine, and Armstrong became a sniper in the army. Stanley, engaged in his “vital war service,” went into his father's Bully Beef factory. Having authored several articles on mountaineering, I was appointed as a climbing instructor for the Royal Marines at the Achnacarry barracks in Scotland. Achnacarry was used mostly for the training of commandos, and later for American Rangers. There, I lived a spartan but relatively safe existence until August of 1944, when I was asked by the commanding officer at Achnacarry to assemble a handful of men skilled in mountaineering for an unspecified task in Europe.
The commanding officer's name was Sholto Lindsay. He had cavernously dark eyes, spiky gray hair, and usually wore a kilt, both on and off duty. Lindsay owned the land on which the
Achnacarry base had been built. In exchange for the use of the land, the army had put him in charge of running the base, a task he performed with humorless efficiency.
Achnacarry base had been built. In exchange for the use of the land, the army had put him in charge of running the base, a task he performed with humorless efficiency.
On the day he asked me to assemble the team, Lindsay and I were out on the training ground beside a twenty-foot-tall wooden fence, off which soldiers were jumping into a pit of mud. The point of this exercise was that they should emerge from their fall with their rifles ready to shoot. We lost at least one man a week during training on this fence, from broken legs, dislocated hips, and damaged spines. Several had refused to jump at all. When this happened, their lockers were cleaned out and their mattresses rolled up and tied to the squeaky black frames of their beds. They were sent away and their names were not mentioned again. They were not pitied or envied. They simply vanished, as if they had never existed.
We stood beside the mud pit, and as each soldier landed, a wall of cold slime sprayed across our uniforms.
“You can take a week to sort out a list,” said Lindsay. Oblivious to the dirt that spackled his face and clothes, he puffed on a small-bowled pipe, speaking to me with the pipe stem gripped between his teeth.
“I don't need a week, sir,” I replied. “I can give can you the names right now.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. The pipe jerked upwards as he clenched his teeth. “Can you indeed?” he replied.
I gave him the names of the Lucky Six.
“Right, then,” said Lindsay. “You'd better start tracking them down.”
The only one who refused the offer was Stanley. “I can't,” he said when I called him on the telephone. “I'm sorry. I just can't. I refuse to get involved in this madness.”
“What madness?” I asked. “This mission?”
“No, William. The war. That madness.”
Stanley's refusal to join us came as no shock to me, although I knew there was more to it than he was telling me just then. I could not bring myself to be angry at him, but that did not stop the others when they heard about it, especially Sugden. For the rest of us, the chance to climb again and the importance that was being attached to this task, whatever it was, gave us all a sense of purpose which we had not felt since we were last together as a group.
For myself, I wondered if my father might at last find some meaning in the path I had chosen to follow.
It took two months, but by the end of that time the five of us were assembled at Achnacarry.
In the weeks ahead, we went on daily marches, for distances ranging between ten and twenty miles, carrying fully loaded Bergen rucksacks. These were very similar to the ones we had used on our own before the war. The only difference was that in addition to our regular gear, each pack was weighted down with two parcels. Each parcel contained four bricks wrapped in canvas. As part of the training, we were also given instruction in low-level parachute jumps. We started out by jumping off towers wearing parachute harnesses attached to ropes, but we quickly moved on to actual jumps from the side door of a Dakota transport plane flying only three hundred feet above the ground. For this, we wore the heavy rimless helmets of the Royal Parachute Regiment and Dennison jump smocks, with their green-and-brown camouflage pattern which seemed to have been applied by a monkey with a paintbrush. Once I got used to the idea of hurling myself into space, the jumps weren't actually that difficult, since the chutes were the static-line type and opened of their own accord as soon as we leaped from the plane.
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