by Wade Davis
They were killed very near to us, and the news came slowly and fatally. The toll of tragic loss, and not only among climbing friends, kept mounting. Dearest of all, Wilbert Spencer at La Bassée, Kenneth Powell the classic athlete, Nigel Madan a close friend, Werner of Kings, cousins John and Horas Kennedy. On other fronts, C. K. Carfrae, Guy Butlin, the brothers Rupert and Basil Brooke, Julian and Billy Grenfell … Gilbert Hosegood, very fair and tall, came to me in excitement because he had met his brother by chance as he marched with his company through Ypres; and he walked beside him in talk all down the Menin road. Not long after, I drove him south down the front to visit his brother’s grave, a lovely spot, and Guy du Maurier, his brother’s colonel, was more than kind to us. We were hardly returned to Ypres when news of du Maurier’s death also reached us. Hosegood joined up soon after, to take his brother’s place he said; he too fell.
YOUNG HAD BEEN AT ZERMATT climbing with Herford during the soft summer of 1914, when all of Europe glowed with weather so beautiful and fine that it would be remembered for a generation, invoked by all those who sought to recall a time before the world became a place of mud and sky, with only the zenith sun to remind the living that they had not already been buried and left for dead. Stunned by a mix of emotions—horror, incredulity, morbid anticipation, fear, and confusion—Young returned to London to find “the writing of madmen already on the wall.” He recalled, “I attended the peace meeting in Trafalgar Square, the last protest of those who had grown up in the age of civilized peace: and then the dogs of war were off in full cry.” Forty years later, near the end of his days, he would write, “After the hardening effects of two wars it is difficult to recall the devastating collapse of the structure of life, and all its standards, which the recrudescence of barbarous warfare denoted for our generation.”
He had been born to a privileged life, the second son of Sir George Young of Formosa Place, a stately eighteenth-century house of gardens and roses perched on the banks of the river Thames. His mother was Irish, a splendid storyteller and a great hostess, and their home regularly welcomed such luminaries as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts and the hero of Mafikeng; the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist and enigmatic champion of human rights who would be knighted in 1911 for exposing the atrocities in the Belgian Congo, only to be hanged for treason in 1916. Of his three siblings, he was closest to his younger brother, Hilton, who would lose an arm in the war. His childhood was one of action and fantasy, endless days outside in all weather and all seasons, among the bitter cherries and silver beeches, the weeping willows and ancient yews of a country setting that inspired within him a love of color and nature, rivers and the wind, mountains and rain. He never practiced religion in an orthodox sense, but all of his life was infused with a celebratory quest for the wonder of beauty and friendship, the sheer vitality of being human and alive.
At Marlborough, a school that would send 733 boys to die in the trenches, he was known for his good looks, his poetry, and his remarkable athletic abilities. At Cambridge he became a climber, of both mountains and the Gothic rooftops of the university colleges. His impish side penned anonymously The Roof Climber’s Guide to Trinity, thus beginning a long tradition of illicit midnight scrambles over slate and lead and gargoyles. Following graduation in 1898, he went abroad, living for three years in France and Germany and becoming fluent in both languages. His true affection was for Germany; he translated the ballads of Schiller and the devotional poems of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In 1902, he returned to England to take a teaching position at Eton; there he met the young John Maynard Keynes, who would later join him on climbing trips to the Alps.
Young first encountered George Mallory in 1909, at a Cambridge dinner. At Easter he invited Mallory to Pen y Pass, and the following summer the two went off, at Young’s expense, to the Alps, where they were joined by Donald Robertson, a close friend and peer of Hilton Young’s. They climbed a number of peaks, none more dramatic than the southeast ridge of the Nesthorn, where Mallory nearly died. He was leading at the time, inching his way across fluted ice, seeking a route around the third of the four great towers that blocked the way up the ridge. Young would later recall his sudden astonishment: “I saw the boots flash from the wall without even a scrape; and, equally soundlessly, a grey streak flickered downward, and past me, and out of sight. So much did the wall, to which he had clung so long, overhang that from the instant he lost hold he touched nothing until the rope stopped him in mid-air over the glacier. I had had time to think, as I flung my body forward on to the belayed rope, grinding it and my hands against the slab, that no rope could stand such a jerk; and even to think out what our next action must be—so instantaneous is thought.” Miraculously, the rope held and Mallory was uninjured.
In another book, On High Hills, Young would remember and praise his companions on that dramatic climb: “To both of them life was a treasure of value; but it was also a talent to be reinvested for the profit of others. Neither hesitated to risk the loss of his share in it, if by doing so he could help to keep the great spirit of human adventure alive in the world.” Robertson would die a year later, on a rock face in Wales. A chapel would be built in his memory, and a monument erected within sight of the cliffs where he fell, and a trust established to bring English youths to the hills. Such were the sensibilities in the years immediately before the war, a time when powerful and virile men could speak of love and beauty without shame, and sunsets and sunrises had yet to become, as the painter Paul Nash would write, “mockeries to man,” blasphemous moments, preludes to death.
AT THIRTY-EIGHT, Geoffrey Young was too old for active service in 1914. But within a week of returning from Switzerland on July 28, and two days before Britain formally entered the war on August 4, he was on his way to France as a war correspondent for the Daily News. By then five German armies, more than a million men, had advanced into northern France and begun a broad enveloping sweep through Belgium, with Paris as the goal. To the south the French had fallen into a German trap, launching their armies east toward the Ardennes and Alsace, hundreds of thousands of troops dressed in bright red trousers and electric-blue coats moving boldly over open ground as if on parade. The result was a slaughter unlike anything previously known in the history of warfare. In the Battle of the Frontiers, France suffered the loss of more than 300,000 men in a fortnight. In three days beginning on August 20, while Young reported from Namur, on the Belgian Front, some 40,000 French would die, 27,000 on August 22 alone. By Christmas, after but four months of war, with four years to go, France would suffer nearly a million casualties.
While the Germans attacked with 87 divisions, and the French countered with 62, the British Expeditionary Force mustered only 4, which were hastily flung into the line at Mons, in Belgium. There, amid the slag heaps and pit heads of the coalfields, 100,000 British regulars, outnumbered three to one, took on the entire German First Army. Obliged to retreat, the men walked blood-shod, their feet so swollen that boots once removed could not be put back on, fighting constantly as they retreated 170 miles with scarcely a rest.
As the British fell back, fighting an epic rear-guard action at Le Cateau, the German commander, Helmut von Moltke, lost his nerve and ordered his three northern armies to turn south, abandoning the effort to envelop Paris from the west, and thus exposing his flank to the French before the Marne River. The French attack on September 5 brought more than two million men into battle. Each side would suffer over half a million casualties. The German assault was stopped but not shattered, and thus began the so-called race for the sea as the armies moved north and west, each constantly trying to outflank its enemy and turn the battle line, which, with each passing day, became more deeply inscribed into the body and soil of France. A final desperate German bid to reach the channel ports of Dunkirk, Boulogne, and Calais was thwarted by the British at the medieval town of Ypres, in a battle that the Germans would remember as Kindermord zu Ypren—the Massacre of the Inno
cents.
The frontal assaults on the British began on October 20 and did not stop until the third week of November. The line held, but at a tremendous cost. By the time the rains of winter, the wettest in forty years, drowned out the guns, the British Expeditionary Force, virtually the entire regular army of the empire, had ceased to exist. A third of its 160,000 men were dead. Battalions that had embarked for France in August with 40 officers and 1,000 men had, on average, been reduced to 1 officer and 30 men. The 7th Division, which arrived in France in October with 400 officers and 12,000 men, would lose 9,000 soldiers in eighteen days.
In a strategic and tactical move that would seal the fate of many tens of thousands, the British at Ypres took up defensive positions on a series of low, gentle hills that enveloped the town to the east, thus creating a bulge in the line, a salient that would be dominated throughout the war by German artillery securely positioned on higher ground on three sides. Defending the Ypres Salient, never larger than four miles deep and twelve wide, would over the course of the war cost the British 90,000 men killed and 410,000 wounded. Another 89,880 simply vanished, swallowed by the mud or vaporized by shell fire. German losses were comparable. In four years, an area of shattered ground one could walk around in a day would see no fewer than 1.7 million casualties. Cradled within this cauldron of death, the old medieval center of Ypres, with its noble buildings and great Cloth Hall, would vanish, blackened by fire, battered by artillery, reduced to crumbing ruins and shell-shattered streets; there civilians and soldiers alike lived a subterranean existence in cellars where rain, oil, and blood ran together to dampen any memory of peace.
Thus over the last weeks of 1914 came into being the topography of Armageddon. The trenches ran some 460 miles from the Swiss border to the English Channel. The British sector contained some of the worst and most indefensible terrain. The low fields of Flanders were flat, water-soaked, with no feature rising more than two hundred feet above sea level. The slightest hill took on strategic importance, and thousands would bleed and die for a height of land that in Surrey, with its rolling downs, would go unnoticed. The actual British trench line was astonishingly short. From Ypres to the channel was held by Belgian forces. To the south, the French controlled the front from Picardy and the Somme all the way to the Swiss frontier. The British sector, anchored by the towns of Armentières, Arras, and Albert, ran from Ypres south and slightly east into northern France, through the mines of Lens, past Vimy Ridge, across the Scarpe River near Arras and down to the Somme. For much of the war it was a mere 85 miles in length, and at no time did it exceed 125 miles.
Indeed, the entire British zone of operations, in which millions of men lived, trained, and died, measured but 50 by 60 miles, roughly the size of the English county of Lincolnshire. To the west was the sea, never more than 50 miles to the rear, and the great staging ports and bases of Étaples, Le Havre, and Rouen. To the east were the Germans. To supply and defend roughly 100 miles of war front, the British would dig more than 6,000 miles of trenches. The normal wartime provision of shovels for the army was 2,500; in the mud of Flanders, more than 10 million would be needed. No fewer than 25,000 British coal miners would be engaged around the clock to tunnel beneath the enemy and set charges, which detonated with blasts that could be heard in London.
“The stories of madness are frequent,” Young confided to his diary in February 1915. “The strain no man seems able to support, under accurate shell fire. In one British trench all the men were dead when at last relieved after four days. One surviving subaltern had made himself drunk on the men’s brandy, to endure it, after having pegged out his senior, who was mad, with bayonets to prevent him shooting himself.”
Young lived in Ypres from November 1914 through the end of July 1915. His dispatches, collected in the book From the Trenches, were among the first and finest eyewitness accounts of a conflict unlike anything that had ever been known. This was not war, he wrote; it was the monstrous inversion of civilization. To call it war was to imply that something of the sun remained, when in fact all that existed was a bruised sky in a bitter night of cobalt rains. He recalled, “Time and again in the blackness ahead the votive candles on the wayside shrines fell dazzlingly across the road. Once I stopped the car and through the sudden silence, a woman’s voice called unemotionally, ‘Is that death?’”
Streams of human misery, refugees fleeing the German terror, flooded the roads of Belgium. In the remnants of the town wandered wounded and stunned British soldiers, caked in mud, crawling and choking through the shell-blistered streets. Beyond the front the leprous earth was scattered with the swollen and blackened corpses of hundreds of young men, and hovering over everything was the appalling stench of rotten carrion.
“In the half-exposed remnant of what may have been a vestry,” Young wrote, “a young RAMC surgeon was working alone, at hurricane speed, on the wounded being carried or led in, or lying on the bloodstained, shattered floor. His face was a mask, his blue eyes like hard steel. The precision with which he cut garments, dressed wounds, bandaged limbs and passed silently on to the next was as remarkable as his speed. All inside was a jostle and a carnage; the noise outside was distracting; the hot dust covered us from the shrapnel bursting above the ruined walls. The bearers bringing or supporting the wounded had been often wounded themselves as they came. I marveled—how could any man stand it, and for hours, and alone?”
Overwhelmed by the suffering, shamed into action by the desperate need for more medical support for the troops, Young abandoned journalism to serve in an ambulance unit of his own creation, flaunting his social connections shamelessly to keep his men close to the front, where lives could be saved. First in Flanders, and later in Italy, Young and his colleagues would rescue more than 100,000 wounded soldiers before he himself would be cut down. Ypres was the inspiration. He was there still on April 22, 1915, when the Germans attacked using poison gas for the first time.
“The bombardment,” he wrote,
seemed heavier and more menacing … I walked uneasily through our wards and offices. A wounded soldier, in the half coma we knew later as shell shock, was being tended and was muttering continuously ‘White faces … the moonlight … white faces’ … I went out. I could see figures running back, the yellow pale of cloud was higher, and again dots of figures in khaki were hurrying forward across the fields out to the north-east of us … The wounded began to pour in … the first poison gas sufferers. This horror was too monstrous to believe at first … But when it came, far as we had traveled from our civilized world of a few months back, the savagery of it, of the sight of men choking to death with yellow froth, lying on the floor and out on the fields, made me rage with an anger which no later cruelty of man, not even the degradation of our kind by the hideous concentration camps in later Germany, ever quite rekindled; for then we still thought all men were human.
ARTHUR WAKEFIELD had followed his own path through agony and despair. He began the war a man of deep religious faith, a devout Anglican who never drank and never failed to attend Sunday service. As Geoffrey Young remembered, at five foot eight, 160 pounds, with a thirty-one-inch chest, he was ferociously strong, a champion boxer and rower at university, with brilliant blue eyes and a penchant for adventure that led him, in 1900, to suspend his medical studies and sign up as a cavalry trooper and sharpshooter with the 70th Company 1st Imperial Yeomanry, destined for service in the Boer War. A year on the South African veldt fired his imagination with the glory of empire, and the duties and obligations of a Christian man and nation. Upon completion of his medical training at Edinburgh and Heidelberg, he joined the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, which led to his meeting Sir Wilfred Grenfell, who had established a series of remote missions along the rocky shores of Newfoundland and Labrador, the first and oldest British possession in an empire upon which the sun famously never set.
Wakefield arrived in Newfoundland in 1908, a time when cod still blackened the sea and the capelin runs were so abundant that th
eir spawn softened the rocks and greased every shoreline with roe. For six years he lived a life of considerable hardship: intense cold in winter, clouds of mosquitoes in summer, a diet of little but flour and grease, molasses, tea, caribou meat, and salted fish. Traveling sometimes by dog team, sometimes by horse or reindeer, on foot or by skiff, he patrolled the entire length of Labrador, a broken coastline of nearly five thousand miles. One of only two qualified doctors in the entire land, Wakefield treated everything from beriberi and tuberculosis to bear maulings and bullet wounds. On one memorable day he extracted no fewer than 149 teeth. Dedicated to God and king, impervious to physical suffering, possessed of medical skills that seemed wizardly to the scores of people he saved, Wakefield became one of those stalwart colonial figures that loomed over the wild frontiers of the British Empire. A photograph from the Wakefield family album shows him perched on an iceberg in his skivvies, about to leap into the dark ocean for his morning constitutional.
The war came to Newfoundland in the summer, as the entire country was at sea fishing for cod. When word of the hostilities reached Labrador, Wakefield left immediately for St. John’s, the capital, sailing in a small rig named the Amber Jack. He was present on August 10 for a high-level government meeting. Wakefield, who retained the rank of captain, had a place at the table because he had been active in the creation of a Newfoundland arm of the Legion of Frontiersmen, an empire-wide militia that had originated during the Boer War. Using family money, he had personally equipped the entire local force.