by Wade Davis
Altogether 810 men of the Newfoundland Regiment went over the top that morning. Only sixty-eight emerged from the battle physically unscathed. Every officer was lost, including three who should not have been in the attack at all. Only the commander and his adjutant survived to hear the praise of the General Staff. “It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour,” one of Haig’s staff officers told the Newfoundland prime minister, “and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further.”
After the disaster of July 1, 1916, Haig could not call off the Somme attack without admitting failure on a scale so vast as to be murderous. Thus he redefined the goals of the campaign and declared that attrition rather than military breakthrough had always been his intent. The Battle of the Somme would go on for 140 days, and at a cost of 600,000 wounded and dead, the British line would advance six miles, leaving the Allies four miles short of Bapaume, which Haig had planned to take on the opening day of the campaign. Thirty million shells would be fired, 600,000 Germans would be killed or wounded, and after four months the battlefield, a few score square miles, would be covered in layers upon layers of corpses, three and four deep, bodies bloated, bones sticking up randomly from the ground, faces black with bluebottle flies.
ON OCTOBER 12, 1916, while the Battle of the Somme still raged, Wakefield’s time was up, and after two years in service he was decommissioned to return to Canada. At Boulogne on October 21 he slept in a bed for the first time in a year, and after a week in London, he sailed on SS Ionian, a battered vessel with decks still stained with blood from its service in Gallipoli, arriving in Montreal after a stormy passage on November 13. He did not stay home for long. Two days before Christmas, he enlisted in the Canadian army, and for the next year he served first on the hospital ship Letitia, and later on the Araguaya, sailing back and forth across the Atlantic, from Liverpool to Halifax. Wakefield’s letters from 1917 have been lost, and are believed by his family to have been burned. But the official accounts of these voyages tell of hundreds of young men, stacked in cots, suffering from grievous wounds. Wakefield was in charge of the most severely injured: stretcher cases, amputees, men with shattered minds and broken spirits bound down by necessity with leather straps in wards reserved for the mentally insane. The routine was numbing, endless rounds of the wards, examining men without memory, blinded by gas, maimed beyond recognition. Breakfast at 8:00 with the ward officers, a noontime meeting followed by luncheon, return to the wards until tea, deck exercises before dressing formally for dinner at 6:00.
With each transatlantic passage, Wakefield suffered some erosion of the spirit. He was still capable of great deeds; he personally orchestrated the rescue of the wounded on August 1, 1917, when, ten days out of Liverpool and only ten miles from the safety of Halifax harbour, the Letitia ran aground in the fog. But what haunted him were incidents that went largely unnoticed, such as when, on the afternoon of September 19, one of his patients, an invalid driven mad by the war, jumped overboard. “The sea was very rough,” Wakefield recalled, “with waves coming over the boat. Two life buoys were at once flung over by the aft lookout man, one of which fell beside him, but he sank and did not appear again.”
Wakefield remained in service on the Araguaya until December 12, 1917. Two weeks later, he was in England and on December 29 traveled to Kent to visit the home of a good friend, a lad named Leggett, who was the only survivor of four sons. Three had died in France. As the year turned, Wakefield was forty-two years old. He had served since the beginning of the war and was free at any time to return home. Instead he joined up again and by February 1918 was back in France with the Canadian Field Hospital, first at its reserve base by the sea, and later at Outreau, close to the front. By 1918 his hatred of Germans was evident in his letters. In his diary he wrote of children shot while helping a starving prisoner, of a doctor’s wife tied to her house by her hair, of dozens of deeds real and imagined of a people he condemned as the “bestial boches.” He looked forward to victory as a chance to make accountable all those he held responsible for the war: the German nation, every man and woman untouched, as he saw it, by the pain and consequences of their deeds. No amount of vengeance would be enough. On December 4, 1918, he wrote from Thounnen, on German soil, “The Boche does not know what war means. It’s up to us to teach him. I assure you that I’m doing my best.”
SIX YEARS LATER found Wakefield on the top of Great Gable as the mist lifted and, in the words of a local reporter, “yielded to golden rays,” prompting the assembled congregation to slip out of their rain slickers and lift their eyes to the sun. Geoffrey Young stepped onto a rock above the commemorative bronze and, at Wakefield’s cue, slowly began to speak. His voice was deep and strong, and in the spacious silence it carried far. Climbers who had reached only the top of Green Gable, across Windy Gap, said afterward that they heard every word, ringing as clear as the trumpet that attended in the memorial service. “They had asked for verse,” Young later recalled, “but I knew it must be prose. Of course I had Gettysburg in mind. As I spoke it, I felt the inspiration of the words welling up.”
Upon this mountain summit we are met today to dedicate this space of hills to freedom. Upon this rock are set the names of men—our brothers, and our comrades upon these cliffs—who held, with us, that there is no freedom of the soil where the spirit of man is in bondage; and who surrendered their part in the fellowship of hill and wind and sunshine, that the freedom of this land, the freedom of our spirit, should endure …
By this symbol we affirm a twofold trust: That which hills alone can give their children, the disciplining of strength in freedom, the freeing of the spirit through generous service, these free hills shall give again, and for all time.
The memory of all that these children of hills have given, service, and inspiration, fulfilled, and perpetual, this free heart of our hills shall guard.
Following the oration, a party of cadets from the St. Bees School led the hymns “Lead, Kindly Light” and “O God Our Help in Ages Past.” The weather came in once more, and “in the swirling mist,” reported the local correspondent of the Advertiser, “the singing was most impressive. Mr. Godfrey Solly read the psalm ‘I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from when cometh my help’ and the Rev. J. H. Smith read the dedicatory prayers.”
All the time clouds moved over the mountains, and cast shadows across the faces of the host. Wakefield did not pray or bow his head. Never again would he speak of God or attend religious service. His children would never in his presence know the inside of a church.
The ceremony on Great Gable ended with the singing of “God Save the King.”
CHAPTER 2
Everest Imagined
GEORGE NATHANIEL CURZON, 11TH VICEROY of India, suffered from a congenital curvature of the spine that in time would condemn him to an iron corset and bring pain to his every step. But this did not stop him from traveling on foot and horseback halfway across Asia on several occasions. He began in 1887 with a slow circumnavigation of the world, by sea and rail, west to Canada and beyond to Japan, Hong Kong, India, Aden, and home. A year later he penetrated the khanates of central Asia, traveling overland from Moscow, crossing the Caspian Sea, moving by rail to Bukhara and Samarkand, and thence by horse-drawn cart to Tashkent and the Black Sea. In 1889 he traversed Persia, riding as much as seventy-five miles a day through searing desert sands, his precise observations filling hundreds of pages of notebooks that in time would yield a definitive two-volume account, Persia and the Persian Question, published to acclaim in 1892. His eye was that of a spy. Nothing, it seemed, escaped his notice.
In 1894, following a second journey around the world, Curzon traveled alone to India and, after a stubborn effort, secured permission from the Raj to embark on a diplomatic mission to visit the newly instated emir of Afghanistan. His route of approach was deliberately circuitous. He marched north from Gilgit to the Pamirs, beheld the savage beauty of Hunza, and continued northward to become the first West
erner to trace the Oxus River to its source in Russian Turkistan, a feat of exploration for which he would be later awarded the coveted Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. When finally he entered Kabul, he did so in style, having arranged with a theatrical costume designer in London to outfit him with a dazzling uniform, complete with massive gold epaulets, a row of glittering medals and decorations, and a giant curved sword. The entire getup was a purely constructed fantasy, given meaning and power by the audacity of the man.
Moving through life with cold certainty, his awkward gait concealed by what one peer described as an “enameled self assurance,” Lord Curzon in many ways embodied the essence and contradictions of British rule in India. The scion of a seven-hundred-year-old aristocratic dynasty, he was the son of a distant father and the product of a sadistic nanny who once forced him to write the family butler to order a cane to be made with which he might be properly thrashed. At Eton and Oxford he acquired an air of “ineffable superiority.” In London society his libido was said to rival his intellect. He inherited lands and titles, but found wealth in marriage to a beautiful American heiress, Mary Leiter. His family seat in Derbyshire, Kedleston Hall, had inspired the architecture of the regal palace in Calcutta, and thus he slipped readily into the role when finally, in 1899, just short of his fortieth birthday, he achieved his political dream and became viceroy of India.
Like the entire British adventure in India, Curzon was at once pompous and vain, earnest, ruthlessly enterprising, and rigidly devoted to a mission of moral superiority. He wrote books on Indian carpets, restored the glory of the Taj Mahal, and preserved the Pearl Mosque of Lahore, the Mandalay Palace, and the temples at Khajuraho. He sought justice in the abstract and demanded accountability from the army, punishing entire regiments for the violation of a single Indian woman, even as his government stood idle while famines swept the land and the cadavers of children fed growing packs of jackals and wild dogs. Like his queen, whose only knowledge of India was derived from her dispatch box and the behavior of her servants—Victoria, empress of India, never visited the jewel of her realm—Curzon believed that he had a special feel for the real Indians, the colorful and quaint villagers, who were so unlike the educated classes he disdained. “There were no Indian natives in the Government of India,” he once observed, “because among all 300 million people of the subcontinent, there was not a single man capable of the job.” It was the idea of India, not its reality, that fired his imperial imagination.
As viceroy he sat alone at the pinnacle of a cadre of a mere 1,300 British men of the Indian Civil Service that ruled fully a fifth of humanity. The Indian Army was strong and well trained, but it numbered only 200,000, and only a third were British regiments, and these were dispersed from Siam to Persia. In much of the subcontinent, British authority resided solely in a single district officer, who spent each day in the saddle, moving from village to village, adjudicating disputes, levying taxes, enforcing the rule of law, and maintaining order across thousands of square miles with populations sometimes measuring in the millions. Mercantile zeal, severe military reprisals, and the subversion of local elites all played a role in the maintenance of the Raj. But what really held it together was the very audacity of the venture, the sheer gall of a small island nation that had never set out to rule the world, and yet did so with such flair.
The entire British presence in India, as Curzon fully understood, depended on the presumption of power, which in turn was reinforced on a daily basis by ten thousand acts of domination and will intended to inculcate in the Indian people a sense of their own inherent inferiority. This was the essence of colonialism. Image counted for everything. The summer palace at Simla employed three hundred domestic servants and no fewer than a hundred cooks. In a typical season, the viceroy would hold court at a dozen grand dinners for fifty, in addition to twenty-nine somewhat smaller affairs, which flanked the summer’s truly important events: the state ball, a second, equally sumptuous fancy dress ball, a children’s ball, two evening parties, two afternoon garden parties for a thousand, and six dances with 250 invited guests. A stickler for ritual detail and protocol, Curzon insisted that his servants dress in livery, white breeches and silk stockings, and he took precise measure of the length of the red carpets unrolled before him on ceremonial occasions.
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, in 1898, was the most expensive event ever staged in the history of humanity, but for color and exotic opulence it was no match for the 1902 Durbar orchestrated by Curzon in celebration of the coronation of her son Edward VII. With the new king unable to attend and represented in Delhi by his brother, the Duke of Connaught, the entire two-week extravaganza became, in fact, a tribute to the viceroy, just as Curzon had anticipated. His moment came on New Year’s Day as a million Indians lined the streets of Delhi to behold the imperial procession as it moved from the city to the plain above, where five miles of railroad had been laid simply to handle the flow of the invited guests, who numbered 173,000. A great amphitheater had been constructed, and along the axis of the approach were magnificent pavilions containing the largest displays of Indian art ever assembled—acres of carpets and silks, pottery and enamels, priceless antiquities. Every region of India had its camp, identified with glorious silk banners that shone in the sun through the dust of the parade.
Flanked by a peacock array of ambassadors from some fifty princely states, the viceroy received all the native rulers of India, as prayers and hymns celebrated the investiture of scores of men and women being honored for their fidelity and service to the Raj. A yellow haze spread over the fields as the first of some sixty-seven squadrons of cavalry and thirty-five battalions of infantry, artillery, and engineers trotted or marched past in a military review that lasted for three hours. Finally a mounted herald approached the dais and throne and, with appropriate flourishes, proclaimed the coronation of the new king. The imperial salute of 101 guns still resounded as Curzon moved front and center to summon the multitudes in their loyalty to the unchallenged supremacy of the British Crown. “There has never been anything,” he would later write, “so great in the world’s history as the British Empire, so great an instrument for the good of humanity.”
THE BRITISH had indeed transformed the face of India, building thousands of miles of canals and railroads, bringing into being entire cities. But at a deeper level, the British presence was but an ephemeral veil over the body of a land that was more a state of mind than a national state, a civilization that had endured for four thousand years as an empire of ideas rather than territorial boundaries. India had yielded time and again to the onslaught of invaders, but had always won in the end, absorbing foreign impulses and, through the sheer weight of its history, prompting mutations that inevitably transformed every novel influence into something indelibly Indian.
At the same time, India was itself a British invention, an imagined place defined by the ever-changing and expanding boundaries of political and commercial interests, which, in turn, were woven into reality by the mathematicians and technicians of the Survey of India. Maps were the key to the very notion of India. They codified in two dimensions the geographic and cultural features of a subcontinent, even as they created the rationale for occupation. India the imagined landscape became concrete and meaningful when reduced to a map sheet. Thus it was not by chance that the greatest scientific undertaking of the nineteenth century was the literal measurement of India, or that through this endeavor would be discovered the highest mountain in the world.
GEOGRAPHERS HAD LONG SUSPECTED that the earth, flattened at the poles, was not a perfect sphere. But the extent of the distortion, of critical importance to science and cartography, was unknown. The Great Trigonometrical Survey set out in 1806 to solve the mystery by calibrating with a precision previously unimagined the true shape of the planet, the curvature of the globe, by measuring an arc of longitude across the face of India. The basic idea was rather straightforward: if one can establish three visible points in a landscape, and if one k
nows the distance between two, one can measure at each of these the angle to the third, unknown point and, with trigonometry, determine its distance and position. Once the third point has been thus established, it can form with one of the known points the base of a new triangle from which the coordinates of a new reference point on the horizon, often a mountain or other prominent landmark, can be established. Thus, over time, a chain of triangles was created, a Great Arc that ran sixteen hundred miles south to north over the length of the subcontinent.
Distance was determined with calibrated chains and measuring rods, which implied teams of men hacking through jungles, crossing swamps, climbing across the face of glaciers. To measure the angles with the requisite precision required the finest of instruments, enormous brass theodolites that weighed as much as a thousand pounds and needed a dozen men to be carried. Essentially elaborate telescopes that could pivot both vertically and horizontally to measure all angles in a plane, these theodolites had to be mounted, erect and perfectly immobile, on a circular platform bolted to the top of a thirteen-yard-long spar, which itself was dug into the ground and secured by long stays. A second platform, complete with scaffolding, had to be built alongside so that the observer might take the measurements. The slightest movement of the theodolite would render the calculations useless.