The Crossway

by Guy Stagg

  In 1931 Maurice wrote a letter to the abbot of a nearby monastery, asking to join. The monastery was built at the highest point of the Great Saint Bernard Pass and had provided shelter to pilgrims crossing the mountains for centuries. Maurice found it hard to explain his calling, telling the abbot that he wanted to withdraw from the world, to be ‘stripped of myself’.

  The young man was accepted, and that August he travelled to his new home. His school uniform was swapped for the black gown hanging in the corner of the museum – a crumpled item, dulled with age. Other panels showed pictures from Maurice’s time at the monastery, my favourite featuring nine novices on a hiking trip, wearing aprons and sunglasses, puttees and cloth caps, and posing like a band with instruments improvised from camping gear. One bowed a frying-pan violin, a second banged a cooking-pot drum, while a third played a piece of tenting as though it were a flute. Maurice stood at the rear of the group, lifting a flag to the camera.

  There were more relics in the other cabinets: a chalice, a breviary and a pipe with a crooked bit. There were more photographs too, which showed a grinning boy grown into a stern man with sunken cheeks. The rest of the panels explained how this Swiss shepherd ended up preaching the Gospel in Tibet – but that part of the story would have to wait. It was time for me to follow Maurice Tornay onto the Great Saint Bernard Pass.

  Outside, the snow was coming down in gusts. I stood in the church doorway, unsure which way to turn. On my left was the road to the pass, on my right the bus stop for the tunnel. Two hours from now I could be strolling off the mountains into Italy.

  I looked south. In the distance the clouds were parting and the snow lay bright on the ridgeline. Pulling tight my rucksack straps, I started walking towards the sky.

  As I went higher the weather lifted and the forest thinned, until only a few trees pierced the slopes, like splinters on pallid skin. By early afternoon everything looked clean, pointed. Liddes was a lonely village at 1,346 metres, Bourg-Saint-Pierre a stone hamlet at 1,632 metres, and Bourg-Saint-Bernard a deserted restaurant at almost 2,000 metres. The road disappeared here, one half burrowing into the tunnel, the other half hidden under several storeys of snow. The hidden half continued up a steep-sided passage with a penny-dreadful name – La Combe des Morts, the Valley of Death. This was the final ascent to the Great Saint Bernard Pass.

  There was a clearing by the tunnel entrance, where three or four cars had parked. A couple with fair hair and silver jackets were putting on skis – the man called Alex, the woman Françoise. When I asked if they were skiing to the pass, Alex nodded.

  How long would it take?

  ‘Two hours, no problem.’ He indicated the rising ramp of snow where the road ended. Plastic pennants signalled from the mountainside at thirty-metre intervals, marking a route for skiers. ‘You go with the flags, right to the top.’

  I watched the couple slip-step onto the ramp. ‘Try to catch us!’ Françoise called as they glided off.

  Lengths of cirrus hung from the summits, but otherwise the day was clear. Two hours to the top? Of course I would have a go. I smeared my face with Vaseline, ate a block of Kendal Mint Cake, fastened Fr Jean-Michel’s snowshoes, and approached the ramp.

  The flags curved round a corner and mounted the Combe des Morts. Between each one the powder was worked into ruts – fresh tracks from Alex and Françoise, and frozen tracks from whoever had skied this way before. I moved slowly, clumsy in snowshoes, stopping every ten minutes to rest. By the first stop my lungs were tight and I felt a plucking pain in both legs. By the second my water bottle was iced shut. Yet I grew more determined with every step: a cheerful certainty that the walk was almost done.

  Half an hour later I caught the skiers. Alex had a stitch and Françoise a problem with her binding. They sat on the snow and blinked, as if waking from a nap. I offered to help, but Alex shook his head.

  By this point the peaks were hustled with cloud. When I asked whether it was safe to keep going, Françoise took my hand in her silver glove.

  ‘You are the leader now,’ she said. ‘Promise we don’t get lost.’

  I pushed on. The plastic pennants levelled and lifted again. To my right were the rugged walls of the Col des Chevaux, to my left the broad base of the Becs Noirs. A few times I looked back, but the skiers never moved, until I could not see them any more, until I could see nothing of the landscape below. The wind had risen and cloud was pouring into the valley. It was grey, ashen, black, and streaked with a violent blue. The slopes above were the same, the ridgeline coming apart.

  I ran for the next flag, my feet paddling. Snow streamed off the mountain and powder filled the air. When I tried to breathe, swollen flakes caught in my throat. When I stopped breathing, I heard a flocking sound like a thousand flapping wings. Then the sky dimmed and the storm dropped.

  I reached the flag, but the route ahead was rubbed away. Turning round, my route this far had also vanished. The route, the range, the arcing corridor of the Combe des Morts – the whole world spinning into white.

  I watched the snow wipe clean the last of my footprints and then sat on my heels and wondered what to do. I was tempted to laugh at my own naivety, and the confident way I had marched into disaster. Instead I crouched down low, wrapping my arms around my chest and gasping hard in disbelief.

  The Great Saint Bernard Pass was always the most dangerous part of the Via Francigena. Although a monastery was built at Bourg-Saint-Pierre in the ninth century, pilgrims often died during the final ascent. Pilgrims such as Aelfsige, an archbishop of Canterbury who vanished here in the year 959. Perhaps he was lost in a storm, perhaps he fell to his death, or perhaps he was killed by pirates.

  For much of the tenth century the Pennine Alps were home to a roving band of Saracens. They sailed from Córdoba, the Islamic kingdom in Spain, seized the port of Fraxinet, close to present-day Saint-Tropez, and then charged into the mountains on the hunt for treasure, plundering the Abbey of St Maurice and sacking the monastery at Bourg-Saint-Pierre.

  In 972 the pirates kidnapped Majolus, Abbot of Cluny, as he crossed the Alps on his return from Rome. The most senior monk in Christendom was ransomed for a thousand pieces of silver. Cluny paid the sum, but also lobbied the Count of Provence to clear Fraxinet. Within weeks the pirate port was under siege, and by the end of the year their Alpine Tortuga had been razed.

  A new monastery was founded in 1049 at the highest point of the pass. Its founder was called Bernard of Menthon – another Bernard, born a century before the Abbot of Clairvaux. Since then the Great Saint Bernard Hospice has always hosted travellers. The monks also provided a rescue service, skiing out after avalanches to search for survivors. If they found a corpse – with the help of the famous mountain dog – it was taken to the morgue, for the ground was too hard to dig graves. In the cold the corpse’s features remained perfect, until the whole thing crumbled. Frozen figures also lined the route to the pass, a grim sight used in a novel by Dickens, a poem by Longfellow and a series of sketches by Turner. Imagine! Pilgrims like statues, their bodies whole but their souls snuffed out, forming an avenue of martyrs on the road to Italy.

  Each year one or two monks suffered the same fate. To the young Maurice Tornay they seemed heroic figures, risking their lives to rescue strangers. On joining the monastery he wrote to his sister Anna that, ‘the more I live the more I am convinced that sacrifice [. . .] alone gives meaning to these days.’

  Initially Maurice worried that he would feel trapped on the mountain pass, snowed in for six months of the year. However, he told his parents that he had never known such freedom. Yet it was not enough. In 1933 the Paris Foreign Missions Society asked the Abbot of the Great Saint Bernard Hospice if he could send some priests to Yunnan Province in south-west China, to evangelize the Tibetan borderlands. By September 1935 Maurice Tornay had made his vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and within months he departed for Yunnan.

  Before leaving, he asked his family to pray for him to become a saint. ‘I w
ant to use myself up in the service of God,’ he wrote. ‘I will never come back once I have gone away.’

  I thought I could understand the young man’s wish, yet when I tried to concentrate, the idea faded from me. Maurice was twenty-four when he left for China, the same age as Thérèse of Lisieux when she died. What was it he wrote? Death is the happiest day of our lives [. . .] our arrival in our true homeland. St Augustine again. I thought I could understand – but no, it was gone, and I was alone once more, squatting in a storm, and everything was white, everything havoc.

  A few times I glimpsed one of the flags ahead of me, but never in the same place, and if I kept looking it would tatter into hundreds of pieces. A mountain mirage, perhaps. I also glimpsed a figure dressed in silver skiing through the blizzard. ‘Alex!’ I shouted, ‘Françoise!’ – but my voice strayed in the wind and the figure disappeared. Another mirage. Not to worry. Safer to stay here. Stay where you are.

  The feeling was bleeding from my hands and feet. Footage from survival shows played in my mind, yet I had forgotten if I was supposed to pitch a tent, or get into my sleeping bag, or set fire to my rucksack, or dig a snow cave the size of a coffin. Or maybe I was meant to lie down. Lie down on the softened ground and sleep until the storm raged itself out. Sleep until the monks find me.

  Stop it. Wake up. You have to wake up.

  I opened my eyes. What time was it? The snow was dark and the daylight almost spent. Four? Four thirty? I needed to start walking, though my legs were seized and the route ahead still buried. If I kept waiting, I would doze off again.

  Crouching a second time, I cleared the powder round the flag. As I brushed the fresh flakes away, my fingers pressed onto a seam where the snow was frozen in grooves. It was an old ski track. Whoever skied this way must have been guided by the flags. Keep with the track, and it would lead me to the pass.

  I kept going, bending every few paces to dig for the frozen seam. The cold was like liquid, seeping through my clothes, seeping into my skin. My knees sored and went senseless. The wind bruised my face.

  Eventually I saw the next flag flailing ahead of me, and the next one, and the next. By now my joints were stiff and my muscles biting. The higher I climbed, the heavier the snow, pelting against my jacket, my hood, and cymbal-smashing in my ears. The incline was getting steeper, slower – but then the ground began to flatten and there were no more flags.

  In the distance I could make out the hull of a huge building, like some forgotten ski resort. Moving towards it, I saw a fracture of light from the front door. A man stood in the doorway, with a wooden cross at his neck. When I asked if I could come in, he laughed and laughed. The door had never shut, he said, not in a thousand years.

  I was given a room on the top floor, a dormitory with eighteen bunk beds and a cupboard of blankets all to myself. Its walls were more than a metre thick, and the heat was turned high on the radiators. As the sensation returned to my fingers and toes, what I felt was something deeper than warmth – a padded comfort very close to consolation.

  The room was boarded in pine, the corridors also, and that night the storm pressed against the windows, until it seemed I was bobbing below deck on an ocean liner. When I woke in the morning my legs listed as if too long at sea. Listed, and then buckled.

  At midday I hobbled downstairs to have lunch with the dozen pious ski bums who volunteered here during the winter. They told me that, ever since the tunnel was dug under the pass fifty years ago, the order had been in decline. From ninety priests in the middle of the last century, there were now just three running the hospice, a few more serving the local churches, and no new vocations in a decade.

  I was not the only guest. A group of skiers were also stuck on the pass. They sat around in the dining room, playing card games and staring at maps. It would have made for a promising whodunit: a doctor from Chile with a fondness for Kierkegaard, a Canadian defence analyst who made cryptic comments about Cold War Two, and a French entrepreneur who spent his twenties training to be a Jesuit, until one Wednesday morning he left the seminary and never went back. When I asked why, he mimed zipping his lips together. I liked to think that he had been hiding on the mountain ever since – not trapped but simply suspended, as if time were weaker here. I expected to see Alex and Françoise too, but they must have returned to their car before the storm set in. All the same, I spent many hours in the cellar where the ski gear was stored, searching in vain for a pair of silver jackets.

  I also spent a long time in the hospice museum. It contained a dingy mock-up of a monk’s cell, an antique printing press with twenty-seven leather-bound books, the wooden sleigh used for carrying pilgrims’ corpses, and various sizes of wooden ski. The photos on the walls showed life at the monastery in the 1920s and 1930s. I hoped to spot Maurice Tornay among the brothers, but I could not recognize him. Perhaps he was already in China.

  Maurice arrived in Yunnan Province at the end of 1935. Within two years he was ordained and teaching at a town by the Tibetan border called Weixi, where he remained throughout the Second World War. When Japan invaded China there was famine in the region, and Fr Tornay – as Maurice was now known – had to beg for food, eating berries and bracken root so that his pupils would not starve.

  In 1945 he was moved to Yerkalo, a village on a high plateau inside the Tibetan border. Three hundred Christians lived in the surrounding hamlets, but the nearest parish was eight days’ walk away, over the border in China.

  Tibet was one of the great prizes of Christian evangelization, and missionaries had been attempting to convert the country for centuries. Because of repeated efforts by Franciscan and Jesuit priests during the Age of Exploration, in the mid-eighteenth century it was closed to Christians. However, by the second half of the nineteenth century Tibet was under the supremacy of the Chinese emperors, and an 1860 treaty between France and China allowed Catholic priests to travel to the Chinese interior, prompting the Paris Foreign Missions Society to found a parish in Yerkalo. However, according to Tibetan authorities, the ban on missionaries remained.

  In 1940 the priest at Yerkalo, Fr Nussbaum, was killed by a gang of monks. Within six years his successor, Fr Burdin, had also died – this time of typhoid fever.

  Maurice Tornay was chosen to replace him.

  Fr Tornay made his way to Yerkalo in the summer of 1945. The local headman, Gun Akio, immediately tried to seize his church’s land. Some months later thirty armed men attempted to ransack his presbytery. Finally, in January 1946, a platoon of soldiers marched Fr Tornay from Tibet with a gun to his neck, warning him never to return.

  The priest spent his exile in the border town of Weixi. Merchants kept him informed about the congregation he left behind. Some had been forced to renounce their faith, others to donate their children to the lamasery.

  Thirteen years after leaving the Great Saint Bernard Hospice, Fr Tornay decided to travel to the Dalai Lama and beg tolerance for Tibetan Christians. He shaved his beard, put on a kurta and baggy trousers, and joined a caravan of merchants making the two-month trip to Lhasa.

  In early August the caravan entered Tibet. After a few days it halted at Tunto, where the merchants were searched and Fr Tornay ordered back. When he attempted to join the caravan a second time, soldiers escorted him from the country. He escaped the soldiers and began trekking towards the Mekong Valley, hoping to reach the mission house at Weixi. While he walked he recited a rosary, each footstep the line of a prayer – Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu – a clearing in the forest, close to the Choula Pass – Priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs – four men, five men, the last one carrying a gun – Maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort – the guide killed first, and, as the priest knelt to perform the last rites, two shots.

  He was hit once in the stomach and once in the temple. His body was stripped and left by the roadside. Three weeks later the Abbot of the Great Saint Bernard Hospice received a telegram. It read: Tornay massacred.

  When I left the museum a bell was chiming for evening pra
yer. I went down to the crypt chapel and sat near the door. The chapel roof was pricked with lights, the altar hidden in darkness. No one here yet, so I closed my eyes and waited.

  Sitting there, my mind filled with questions. Why was I haunted by these martyrs’ stories? By Benoît-Joseph Labre, patron saint of pilgrims? By Maurice Tornay, the Swiss shepherd boy? Why, though I could not share their conviction, did their deaths make sense to me? Was it that they had freed themselves from society? Or given up responsibility for their lives? Or did I understand their fear at the wild freedom of the world? Did I feel it too?

  In 1950 all Christian missions were expelled from Yunnan Province and the church at Yerkalo was abandoned. But Fr Tornay was not forgotten, and in 1993 he was beatified by Pope John Paul II. The Pope praised the former priest, who, ‘in the spirit of his order, in which everyone risks his life to save people from storms, tried every means possible to rescue these pilgrim Christians in the Asiatic Alps’.

  Walking through France and Switzerland, I kept encountering the idea of religion as sacrifice: in the monks at Clairvaux who died to the world, in the Jura hermits who made their homes in the mountains, and in the Theban legionaries buried beneath Saint-Maurice. They were all martyrs of a sort.

  And they were almost all young men. There was an impatience to their faith, an adolescent recklessness, that I recognized. Take Maurice Tornay. As a student he was bewitched by the thought of dying for belief. As a missionary he travelled willingly into danger. He wanted to test his devotion, to prove it. Then he pushed himself so far from safety that he had little choice but to trust in God. Here was an opportunity found in no other context except war – to show courage, to show endurance and abandon himself to a single cause. More than that, Maurice Tornay wanted to tear down the veil between this world and the next, to reach out his hand and touch Paradise. A similar ambition moved me to walk in the depth of winter. I was drawn by the blank promise of the infinite. I wanted to test my recovery, prove it, to collapse the leap between faith and fact. Then I pushed myself so far from safety that I had little choice but to be well. However, though I was trying to walk free from my sickness, its memories still haunted me. And, travelling alone in the winter cold, I was helpless to defend against them.