by Wade Davis
Even to live through Loos was to suffer a thousand small deaths. In the wake of the battle Roland Leighton sent a letter to his fiancée, Vera Brittain, a nurse who had already lost her brother and her two best friends, and in time would lose Roland as well. “The dugouts have been nearly all blown in,” he wrote,
the wire entanglements are a wreck, and in among the chaos of twisted iron and splintered timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of simple men … Let him who thinks war is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking honour and praise and valour and love of country … Let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realize how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all youth and joy and life into a fetid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that victory is worth the death of even one of these?
This was an intimation of something that would haunt the nation for a generation, the impossible chasm between those who had been to war and those who remained at home to revel in its imagined glories, spouting idle rhetoric, struggling to retain a sense of normalcy, dreaming old dreams of a world the very memory of which had been obliterated in the trenches. In England the newspapers dutifully recorded the names of the dead—four full columns of print in the Times in the aftermath of September 25 alone—even as they lied about the soldiers’ fate. “Two real victories at last,” proclaimed the Daily Mail on September 29, five days into the battle. Within a week, with the consequences of the disastrous attack undeniable, the paper would temper its optimism with a new set of deceptions. The men in the trenches knew the truth and found such rhetoric hateful.
The enlisted soldiers coped with the insanity in their own way. They read in these same newspapers of work stoppages in the munitions factories, initiated for the most trivial of reasons, yet resulting in literally millions of hours lost, time that might have been spent manufacturing shells. Soldiers who faced death for a mere shilling a day had little sympathy with union rules that cloistered those left behind. Men who knew their fate was a firing squad should they desert their posts had little patience with workers who went on strike only to return to the comfort of their families. Leave for the enlisted man was rare. The average soldier got ten days for every fifteen months of field service, but as late as 1916 many men in the trenches had not been home in twenty months.
For the officers, it was different. Leave came more frequently, but with it an ever-deepening realization of how absurd their existence had become. The writer Paul Fussell later called it “the ridiculous proximity of the Front,” the fact that just sixty miles from the trenches awaited the comforts of England, a trivial distance that both belied and deepened the psychological rift the war had created. London to Ypres was a mere 130 miles. The guns could be heard in Kent. For those safely ensconced in England, the only link to the front was the army postal service, which by 1916 was processing over eleven million letters a week and sixty thousand parcels a day, all dispatched into a void in which loved ones could be addressed only by name and regiment. In dugouts rotten with putrescence, young officers received scented letters from home, and by subscription the latest issues of Country Life and Tatler, the Spectator and Sphere, along with gift parcels of gingerbread, pâté, chocolates, and cherry brandy specially packaged for the troops by Harrods and Fortnum & Mason. Granted a fortnight’s leave, these same young officers would abandon the mud and degradation of the trenches in the morning and by evening be dining with their wives or parents at Claridge’s in London, en route to the theater or a private club.
Such encounters, as Robert Graves wrote, could be sheer agony, for the families at home had no idea what youth had endured. The temptation to scream was ever present, yet almost always muted. Conversations remained trivial, the truth concealed not only out of concern for loved ones but because words did not exist to describe the reality, and thus any attempt to do so was pointless. Still, the relentlessly upbeat rhetoric, the patriotic banter, the illusion of normalcy clung to so desperately by mothers and fathers and wives who saw the stranger in a soldier’s eye left the men hollow and often angry.
This chasm between those who knew and those who only imagined would be a defining reality of British life in the immediate years after the war, a current of memory and distinction flowing beneath the survivors, never spoken about and never forgotten. The war itself had ended in stunned disbelief. In the fall of 1918 the German home front had collapsed, the nation on the brink of starvation and revolution. But German armies still controlled the field, and there was not a single Allied soldier anywhere near the approaches to the Rhine. The carnage continued until the end. With the German Spring Offensive in March 1918, the fighting had reached new levels of violence. In the Allied counteroffensive that won the war, the British lost 300,000 men in less than three months. The guns fired literally until the eleventh hour. When, on November 11, word of the Armistice spread up and down the line, it was greeted with relief and jubilation leavened by numb exhaustion, like the slow fading of a long and violent hallucination. The British had been preparing for another two years of war; many simply thought it would go on forever.
The old men who had talked their nations into a war they could not escape had no idea what they had wrought. Nearly 1 million dead in Britain alone, some 2.5 million wounded, 40,000 amputees, 60,000 without sight, 2.4 million on disability a decade after the end, including 65,000 men who never recovered from the mental ravages of shell shock. For the moment it seemed a tremendous victory, despite the terrible losses. Germany and its allies lay prostrate, Russia convulsed in upheaval and revolution, France bled white and reeling from losses from which it might never recover as a nation. The British emerged from the conflict with the most powerful army in the world, its navy supreme, its empire enhanced by a surge of colonial acquisitions that would not end until 1935, when it would finally reach its greatest geographical extent.
That the war had destroyed the prosperity of a century of progress was not immediately evident to the average Englishman still marching to the rhythms of tradition. That it had birthed the nihilism and alienation of a new century was a thought impossible to anticipate. During the war there had been sacrifices, even for the wealthy. Cricket and racing were curtailed, and the wearing of evening dress to the theater was deemed poor form. Food was rationed for everyone and became so scarce that it was made illegal to throw rice at a wedding, unlawful to feed pigeons or stray dogs. The rationing of coal left people cold all the time, most especially in the dreadful winter of 1917, the most severe in a century. By a regulation that echoes to this day, pubs were closed during midday working hours to foment sobriety in the munitions plants. Irritations to be sure, but hardly deprivations of a sort to match what the men in the trenches endured.
The men who had fought in the trenches encountered peace on very different terms. While those at home had remained safe, and in many cases had profited from the crisis, the veterans had lost years of their lives and endured unspeakable hardships, only to return to a nation that wanted to forget everything about the war. They, too, wanted to forget. Robert Graves and T. E. Lawrence famously made a pact never to speak of it. What they wanted was quiet. But for Graves at least, as for many, it was impossible to escape the memories. There was always the night, waking to a pool of sweat, nightmare visions of bayonets and blood.
Graves, who was Mallory’s student at Charterhouse, and for whom Mallory would serve as best man at his wedding, had enlisted at nineteen in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers at the outbreak of the war. On July 20, 1916, in a reserve trench awaiting an attack on High Wood at the Somme, his battalion was caught by German artillery fire that left a third of the men dead, and Graves seriously wounded. A metal splinter split his finger to the bon
e. Another metal shard went through his thigh, near the groin. Yet a third piece of shrapnel pierced his chest, slicing a hole through his body, and destroying his right lung. Unconscious, he was carried to a dressing station and left among the dead. Notice of his passing reached his mother four days later, on what would have been his twenty-first birthday, and his name appeared in the “Honour Roll” of the Times. But Graves, in fact, had survived the first night, and when the burial detail came by on the morning of July 21, he was found to be breathing. In agony he was carried to a casualty clearing station, where, because of the sheer numbers of wounded, he lay on a stretcher in the summer heat for five days before finally being evacuated to a hospital at Rouen, and then by ship and train to London. Two days later, he arrived at Victoria station, the Gate of Good-bye, where the living and the dying crossed paths, and crowds gathered throughout the war to herald the wounded home from the front.
Such an experience left him mentally unprepared for peace. Graves remained, as he wrote, nervously organized for war. Shells burst above his bed as he slept. Strangers in the street assumed the faces of friends lost at the front. He could not use a telephone. Train travel made him ill. To encounter more than two people in a day cost him his sleep. He could not walk in a field without reading the lay of the land as if on a raid. The sound of thunder made him shake. A sharp retort of any kind—the backfiring of a car, the slamming of a door—flung him face-first to the ground. The smell of cut lumber recalled the blasted pines and the corpses suspended from broken snags. His marriage dissolved, and he left England for Majorca, never to return to live in his native land.
Of the war he remained mute, as did so many of his generation, simply because language itself had failed them. Words did not exist to describe what they had endured. After the war, as John Masefield wrote, one needed a new term for mud, a new word for death. Only the wordless, said Virginia Woolf, “are the happy.” And only those who had fought understood. “The man who really endured the War at its worst,” wrote Siegfried Sassoon, “was everlastingly differentiated from everyone but his fellow soldiers.”
With the peace, two million parents in Britain woke to the realization that their sons were dead, even as the first of some three million veterans returned to a land socially and politically dominated by those who had not served. “I simply could not speak to such people,” recalled Captain Herbert Read, who lost a brother in the last month of the war and was himself awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order for valor, “much less cooperate with them. It was not that I despised them, I even envied them. But between us was a dark screen of horror and violation; the knowledge of the reality of war. Across that screen I could not communicate. Nor could any of my friends who had the same experience. We could only stand on one side, like exiles in a strange country.”
JOHN NOEL’S AUDIENCE that evening at Aeolian Hall embodied the divide that now marked a nation. Douglas Freshfield had been born in 1845, Farrar and Collie a decade or so later, Holdich in 1843. Dr. Kellas had been deemed too old for active service and had spent the war working with Professor John Scott Haldane at the Air Ministry, continuing his studies on high altitude and oxygen deprivation, research that had taken on a new urgency as pilots of the Royal Flying Corps pushed their planes to heights unimaginable at the outbreak of the conflict.
Sir Francis Younghusband had spent the war as a propagandist, rallying the British public to the cause. His mission began in the heady days of August 1914, when the war still seemed sublime and glorious. The spiritual impulse he had brought away from Lhasa, together with his mystic sense of patriotism, came together in a new calling, service in a national movement called Fight for Right. “For we will fight,” stated the organization’s manifesto, “not for the Highest but for a Higher than the Highest—for the sky beyond the mountain top! We mean to see to it that the code of the gentleman and not the custom of the barbarian shall be the rule among nations.” The country was fighting “the battle of all humanity,” and Younghusband took it upon himself to rouse all men and women for service in the sacred cause, and to sustain those already at arms and ready to die. The intention of the movement, announced a widely circulated pamphlet, was to stage on Sunday afternoons throughout the country a series of meetings “of a definitely spiritual character,” at which time men and women inspired by the Fight for Right would through music, song, and speeches share their inspiration with others and thus buck up the national morale.
Such rallies, the first of which took place on November 7, 1915, in this same Aeolian Hall where the RGS was now gathered, were small comfort for the men returned from France, but they served the needs of a government increasingly concerned about unrest and discontent on the home front. As early as the end of August 1914, the foreign secretary, Edward Grey, and David Lloyd George had established the Secret War Propaganda Bureau, the goal of which was to promote British war aims, both at home and abroad. On September 2 of that year a meeting held at Wellington House, Buckingham Gate, brought together Britain’s most prominent writers, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Masefield, Rudyard Kipling, G. M. Trevelyan, G. K. Chesterton, and J. M. Barrie. The previous day Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, had described the conflict in the Times as a holy war, a conviction heralded in a manifesto that appeared in the newspaper two weeks later, signed by each of these well-known writers. Within months several of them, including Masefield and Conan Doyle, were on the government payroll. Within a year the Propaganda Bureau had produced and distributed 2.5 million copies of books, pamphlets, and speeches. Robert Bridges wrote only three poems during the war; his time went into editing an anthology of English verse, The Spirit of Man, which deliberately avoided the subject of war. Intended to inspire the public after the disasters of 1915, it was poetry as propaganda. Curiously, it was this book that Mallory carried with him to Everest, and from which he read aloud to his companions while camped in the ice and snow at 23,000 feet on the flank of the mountain.
In 1917 the Propaganda Bureau was taken over by the Department of Information. It was headed by John Buchan, who, as a friend of Cecil Rawling’s, Tom Longstaff’s, and Francis Younghusband’s, had been recruited to help with the media and publicity for the proposed 1913–15 Everest expeditions that had been aborted by the outbreak of the war. By 1917, as Prime Minister Lloyd George wrote, the “terrible losses without appreciable results had spread a general sense of disillusionment and war weariness throughout the nation.” John Buchan’s mandate was to quell and counteract pacifist sentiment and maintain the fantasy that the war remained something honorable, even as serious statesmen in all nations began to call for a negotiated end to the slaughter. “If the people really knew,” Lloyd George told C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian in December 1917, “the war would be stopped tomorrow.”
Buchan’s task was to ensure that they did not know. In this, his closest allies were the Harmsworth brothers, Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Times and the Daily Mail, and Lord Rothermere, who controlled the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Pictorial, and the Glasgow Daily Record. Together they set the tenor of the British media, controlling, as they did, the most important of London’s thirty-seven daily newspapers. Censorship left journalists at the mercy of their imaginations. Anything might be written as long as it vilified the enemy and propped up morale. “So far as Britain is concerned,” recalled Buchan, “the war could not have been fought for one month without its newspapers.” The truth itself became a casualty. “While some patriots went to the battle front and died for their country,” wrote A. R. Buchanan, “others stayed home and lied for it.”
As John Noel read his address at the Aeolian that evening, slipping in and out of memory, recalling the view of Everest over the crest of the unknown range, the standoff with the Tibetan dzongpen and his troops, his frustration at being unable to secure an image of the mountain due to the ferocity of the winds, he could see John Buchan in the front row, seated between Younghusband and Farrar. Buchan had been recruited
by Younghusband to handle the media for the new Everest effort. It was already anticipated that the sale of the expedition accounts and progress reports, in the end negotiated by Buchan as an exclusive arrangement with the Times, would provide a significant percentage of the expedition’s budget. Buchan would later wax eloquent about the purpose of the Everest mission. “The war,” he wrote, “had called forth the finest qualities of human nature, and with the advent of peace there seemed the risk of the world slipping back into a dull materialism. To embark on something which had no material value was a vindication of the essential idealism of the human spirit.” These words, which could only have been written by someone who knew nothing of the reality of the war, nevertheless reveal the sentiments that led a desperate nation to embrace the assault on Everest as a gesture of imperial redemption.
Noel might parrot such phrases, but as he looked around the hall he also saw the faces of comrades who had known the war, and for whom survival had been reward enough. Of the fifteen men elected to the Royal Geographical Society that evening, ten were officers, seven with the rank of captain. Their duties at the front had included writing the letters that notified the families of the death of a son. These were gentle missives, quiet lies intended to soften the pain. They spoke of courage and valor, glorious charges and heroic stands. As the war went on they became ever more sadly abstract, the language as predictable as that of the precensored postcards issued to the troops, with boxes to be checked off: am well, am wounded but well, am sick but recovering. The truth was reserved for entries in private journals, such as that written by Captain Theodore Wilson on June 1, 1916: “We had to collect what had been a man the other day and put it into a sandbag and bury it, and less than two minutes before he had been laughing and talking and thinking.”