Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  His army career, however, came to an end in 1912, soon after he inherited Belvedere, a vast estate on the shore of Lough Ennell in the Irish county of Westmeath. With the land and the main house, built as a hunting lodge in 1740, came an astonishing collection of Italian art, including works by Titian and Raphael. At the age of thirty-one, Howard-Bury had become a very wealthy man, and he soon resigned his commission to devote his life to travel. In 1913, with his one constant companion, his beloved dog Nagu, he went overland from Siberia to spend six months exploring the Tien Shan, the Mountains of Heaven, a range far older than the Himalaya that traverses western China and forms the northern wall of the Tarim Basin where the Silk Road skirts the forbidding dunes of the Taklamakan Desert. Howard-Bury was drawn to the oases, and the spiritual resonance of an ancient trade route where Taoist thought had encountered the wisdom of the Buddha and the religious insights of Greece and Persia informed the faith of the Mongols. He spent his time collecting plants, taking notes, and living a life of freedom and whimsy.

  At Omsk, in Russia, he filled his railway carriage with wild lilies of the valley, purchased for a penny a bunch from the ragged children on the platform. Later he would plant acres of the same flower at Belvedere in memory of the Russian children killed in the revolution. In a local market, he bought a baby bear, which he named Agu. He nursed and protected the cub throughout his expedition, carrying it with him on his horse, and eventually bringing it home to Ireland. Agu grew to seven feet and lived out its life in the arboretum at Belvedere. Wrestling with a mature bear from the Tien Shan would be, for Howard-Bury, a favorite form of exercise. He also brought back from central Asia a large number of mountain larks with the hope that their beautiful songs might always remind him of the lands that had so inspired his heart.

  He was not a man ready for war, and yet when it came he returned immediately to his regiment. Like Rawling, he was at Hooge, in the Ypres Salient, in July 1915 when the Germans attacked for the first time with flamethrowers; he bore witness to the slaughter at Loos in September and spent the cruel winter of 1915 in the trenches at Arras. The summer of 1916 brought the Somme, which, like a vortex, drew nearly every unit of the British army to the battlefield. Howard-Bury was there by August 10, a day that broke to a drizzling rain and a visit from the king, as well as news of the slaughter of the entire 16th Battalion at Delville Wood, a place the British soldiers knew as Devil’s Wood. Five days later was his birthday; it passed uneventfully until the evening, when he was ordered to lead a work party of three hundred men to dig a communication trench five hundred yards through Longeuval to the very sector where the battalion had perished, the bloodied remnants of Delville Wood. It was more than six miles to where the work was to begin, and in the darkness the men, each laden with a rifle and ammunition, a pick and a shovel and sandbags, struggled through the mud and mire, not reaching their destination until 10:30 p.m. They had until dawn to complete the work, a task that three other divisions had declared to be impossible, for the entire route of the trench to be dug lay exposed to a German artillery barrage. Howard-Bury wrote of the experience in the regimental diaries:

  I have never seen any country to equal the sense of desolation: there was not a blade of grass to be seen anywhere, the ground had been so shelled and shelled that all the shell holes overlapped, some were enormous, some were quite small and through this we had to dig a trench. The latter part lay through orchard and ruined houses of which there was nothing left. The stench was too awful. We kept up digging corpses. They were lying everywhere, ours and Boche dead, heads, arms, limbs in the most advanced state of decay crawling with maggots were to be seen and smelt on all sides. The horror of the place is almost impossible to describe and the revolting sights were almost beyond belief. Barely had we started digging before six or seven large shells landed within a few yards of us and hit two men: never have I seen men dig so quickly after this, within half an hour they had buried themselves and then began to join up the holes to make a trench.

  Howard-Bury remained at the front throughout the war, fighting at the Somme until the November rains, taking part in the attacks on the Hindenburg Line in the spring of 1917, and in the subsequent struggles at Arras. Every day brought a new indignity and horror, which he recorded in his diary: wounded men cowering in the mud and filth, a soldier with his feet blown off in a trench on a cold January morning, a young officer white with fear crying like a child and carried from a trench, his lower body burned beyond recognition. On April 11 he was ordered to lead his men on a charge that in the circumstances, with an adjacent hilltop German position untouched, was sure suicide. He protested to the divisional staff, safely secure ten miles behind the line. Not one of the staff officers responsible for the order had scouted the ground. They insisted that the attack proceed. British shells landed among his men. Those who managed to climb out of the trenches were immediately mown down by enfilade machine gun fire, just as Howard-Bury had predicted. In the snow and ice the wounded lay all day. Within forty-eight hours the Germans had abandoned the promontory and the British walked to what had been their objective. The entire attack had been a waste, caused by the stubborn idiocy of the staff officers, who, as Howard-Bury bitterly wrote, “remained in safety and comfort far behind; for this they will no doubt get many DSO’s and foreign decorations.”

  As the war went on, battle after battle, the heroism of his men betrayed by the folly of the generals, a slow corrosion of spirit tempered his diary entries and letters. By 1917 the word “depression” had no relevance, no meaning. On May 15 Howard-Bury wrote, “Went round the trenches at 4 a.m. The smell is horrible. Many bodies lying out in front and also buried in the parapet.” On August 18, writing from Ypres on the eve of Passchendaele: “The ground that I had been over in 1914 was absolutely unrecognizable. The country was ghastly, not a leaf or a blade of grass anywhere but shell holes full of water. Horrible smells and sights.” Four days later British tanks came close to crushing his men, who trembled in trenches as the water rose to their waists. One sentry was blown to pieces before his eyes, another burned beyond recognition by phosphorous. Fragments of arms and other body parts lay scattered amid the corpses disinterred by the shells. “What an existence this is,” he wrote in despair. “It is only the politician and staff that wish to prolong the war.”

  By 1918 the ranks of Howard-Bury’s command, the 9th Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, had been replenished so often that only memories and shadows remained of the original force of 1914. That he had survived was statistically a miracle. Mauled once again at Passchendaele, the battalion was finally taken out of the line in the spring of 1918 and sent south beyond Saint-Quentin to take over from the French what had been a quiet sector of the Western Front. But at 4:30 on the morning of March 21 he was aroused by a sudden and terrific bombardment up and down the line, north and south, a cacophony of guns louder than anything he had heard in the war. He went to inspect the wire only to encounter in the darkness a fog so thick it was quite impossible to see three feet in any direction. Communication with the rear was cut by the bombardment, and with the fog came the scent of poison gas.

  As it happened, Howard-Bury and his men were about to endure the brunt of the most powerful German attack of the war, the Spring Offensive of 1918. Desperate to end the struggle on the Western Front before American forces in the millions might join the fray, the officers of the German high command elected to commit their entire strength in a final effort to defeat the Allies. With the collapse of Russia, they shifted their armies to the west, bringing their total strength to 192 divisions. The Allies had only 169, and these were spread out from Switzerland to the sea. The bombardment that awoke Howard-Bury was the most intense and concentrated of the war. The Germans had assembled 730 aircraft, 3,500 mortars, and 6,600 guns, which fired over a million shells that first night alone. On the initial day of the attack they captured more ground than the British had taken in the 140-day battle of the Somme. By the end of the third day, XIX Corps could
muster only 50 men of the eight battalions that had held the line; 7,950 men had been killed, wounded, or captured, including all those who fought alongside Howard-Bury.

  The fog had allowed the German storm troopers to infiltrate the British positions, and when it lifted, around 11:00 a.m., Howard-Bury realized that his battalion headquarters, with its small garrison of fifty men, was completely surrounded. He sent off a passenger pigeon to alert the rear that they were holding on. The Germans brought to bear trench mortars and a hail of machine gun fire. Flamethrowers swept the British line. The handful of survivors, including Howard-Bury, overwhelmed in a final assault that came from all sides, surrendered around 3:30 p.m. For him the war was over. Immediately he turned his attention to the wounded, and helped carry several men to a nearby dugout where the Germans had established an aid station. As he was escorted to the rear, he was astonished to see German staff officers, close to the front, orchestrating the attacks. He knew that the outcome of the war hung in the balance, even as he began the long march on foot and by train to the POW camp at Fürstenberg.

  ONE OF THE PECULIAR and unexpected outcomes of peace was the desire of many veterans to go anywhere but home. For those who survived, as Paul Fussell writes, travel became a source of irrational happiness, a moving celebration of the sheer joy of being alive. For these men England offered only a memory of lost youth, betrayal and lies, the residue of “four years of repression, casualty lists and mass murder sanctioned by Bishops.” The poet and composer Ivor Gurney, gassed and wounded, died in 1937 still believing that the war raged and he was part of it. Before his descent into madness, he had a moment of clarity. Returning from the front, and before he was institutionalized, he set out from Gloucester on foot to find a ship, any ship, that might take him away. H. M. Tomlinson, who nearly froze to death at Ypres, and whose memory was haunted by shell fire splintering the marble earth of winter, escaped as soon as he could to bask in the Caribbean sun and write exquisite elegies of the tropics. Maurice Wilson, who earned the Military Cross at Passchendaele and later had his arm and chest ripped open by machine gun fire, a wound that never healed, wandered the South Pacific for a decade before conceiving a wild scheme, long after Mallory’s death, to climb Everest by fasting and mystic levitation. He bought a Gipsy Moth, learned to fly, and managed by air to reach Darjeeling, where he sold his biplane and, accompanied by two Sherpa guides, began the walk that would lead to his solitary death on the ice of the mountain approaches.

  From his diaries there is no evidence that Howard-Bury shared such obsessions and afflictions. A month to the day after the Armistice, a train carried him and his fellow officers from the Clausthal prison camp to the coast, where a Danish vessel awaited to transport them to Copenhagen. There, in an atmosphere of joy and gratitude, they feasted on fine food and freedom for four days before shipping out on a British ship, which landed them at Leith a week before Christmas, “thankful,” as he wrote, “to find ourselves once more on British soil.”

  Still, it is curious that a man who had been at war for four years, a captive prisoner for an additional nine months, who owned and was responsible for a beloved estate in Ireland, an island at the time convulsed in upheaval and revolution, with terror bombings and acts of arson threatening all the landed gentry, would volunteer within ninety days of his liberation to travel at his own expense to India with the goal of securing the connivance of the Raj for an approach to the Tibetan authorities, all with the dream of obtaining permission to have a go at Everest. But this is precisely what Howard-Bury proposed in an unsolicited letter to Arthur Hinks, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, on March 19, 1919, one week after Noel’s tour de force at Aeolian Hall.

  In the letter Howard-Bury outlined a plan to visit both Shigatse and Gyantse, with the goal of obtaining an audience with the Panchen Lama. If rebuffed by the Tibetans, he would proceed to Kathmandu to seek the cooperation of the maharaja for an expedition through Nepal. In either event he would meet with India’s director general of flying and arrange for an aerial reconnaissance to photograph the mountain at close quarters. All of this he would endeavor to do with his own resources. It was this last offer that most certainly caught the attention of the notoriously parsimonious Arthur Hinks; he immediately contacted Younghusband, who enthusiastically welcomed Howard-Bury’s participation. Unfortunately for all of them, the government of India remained completely opposed to any effort to insert a team of explorers into Tibet and quite unwilling even to raise the prospect of an Everest expedition with the Lhasa authorities. Younghusband, though infuriated by this bureaucratic recalcitrance, reluctantly concluded that a Howard-Bury mission to India would be premature.

  NEARLY A YEAR LATER Younghusband wrote to Howard-Bury at the Grand Hôtel Nice, on the French Riviera, and enticed him to return to London from his meanderings in northern Italy and the Dolomites to attend, on April 26, 1920, a private meeting of key representatives of both the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society. By this time Younghusband, ten months into his tenure as president of the RGS, had made Everest his mission in life. “I want to get the idea enshrined in the very heart of the society,” newspapers throughout the country quoted him as saying. “We refuse to admit that the highest mountain in the world cannot be scaled. The man who first stands on the summit of Mount Everest will have raised the spirit of countless others for generations to come, and given men a firmer nerve for scaling every other mountain.” The climbers would lead the way, he believed, and the soldiers, political officers, lowly geographers, and all the myriad functionaries of the Raj, not to mention the common workingmen and -women of Britain, would be inspired by their example. As media interest grew, and the mountain emerged as a powerful distraction from the reality of the times, one senses the hand of John Buchan at work, spinning the story, building interest and momentum, drawing the public in ever-increasing numbers toward the embrace of a climbing expedition that would become the ultimate gesture of imperial redemption.

  In the short term, the April 26 meeting resulted in a number of specific resolutions that defined the parameters of the Everest effort. The approach to the mountain would indeed be through Tibet, not Nepal. The RGS would be responsible for the preliminary negotiations with the British, Indian, and Tibetan governments, and a formal deputation led by Younghusband would immediately seek the support of the secretary of state for India. A joint committee representing both the RGS and the Alpine Club would begin work on the organization and planning of an expedition to extend over two seasons. The climbers would be British. Cooperation with foreign elements would be neither sought nor tolerated. To make all of this possible, the committee formally solicited the assistance of Colonel Howard-Bury, and granted him the mandate to go out to India and set in motion the very initiatives that he had first proposed to Hinks in his unsolicited letter of March 19, 1919.

  A month later, on May 31, 1920, Younghusband used the occasion of his inaugural address to the anniversary meeting of the RGS to herald a new era of geographical exploration, one in which mere material pursuits would be transcended by a new aesthetic of the spirit and the earth would no longer be seen as “a magnified billiard-ball but as a living being—as Mother Earth.” In florid language that anticipated his later metaphysical writings, he boldly claimed that the characteristic of the world most worth knowing was its natural beauty, a universal force that grows in power and resonance “the more we see of it and the more of us see it.” The RGS under his leadership, he continued, would demand a new standard of exploration, with every geographer expected to bring with him into the field the eye of a poet, the sensitivity of a painter.

  On a night when the RGS recalled the heroics of Sir Ernest Shackleton in Antarctica and celebrated a presentation by General Sir Frederick Sykes on the “air routes of empire” in the wake of the war, “a topic of the highest Imperial interest,” it is difficult to know how Younghusband’s summoning of the spirits went over with the assembled fellows. But it did provide him with an opening
to address those critics who had questioned the purpose of risking human life to reach the summit of Everest:

  If I am asked: What is the use of climbing this highest mountain? I reply, No use at all; no more than kicking a football about or dancing or playing on the piano or writing a poem, or painting a picture … But if there is no use, there is unquestionably good in climbing Mount Everest. The accomplishment of such a feat will elevate the human spirit. It will give men a feeling that we really are getting the upper hand on the Earth, that we are acquiring a true mastery of our surroundings … If Man stands on Earth’s highest summit he will have an increased pride and confidence in himself in his struggle for ascendancy over matter. This is the incalculable good which the ascent of Mount Everest will confer.

  The day after his inaugural address, which was widely reported in the papers, Younghusband once again wrote to the secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, urging him to support the Everest expedition. A month later a deputation that included Younghusband, Howard-Bury, Farrar, and Charles Bruce, on leave from India, gathered at 4:55 p.m. in the waiting room of the India Office in London. As the prime minister had summoned the secretary of state unexpectedly, they met with Lord Sinha, the undersecretary, and a number of his staff. With Howard-Bury scheduled to sail for India in two days, it was highly desirable, if not essential, that he embark with the tacit support of the India Office and Whitehall. After reviewing the history of their efforts, the outline of the various approaches, and the challenges of the mission, Younghusband dramatically unveiled a panoramic photograph that captured the entire northern flank of the Himalaya from Kangchenjunga, in the east, to Everest, in the west. A composite of images taken by the geologist J. Hayden during the Younghusband Mission and forwarded to the RGS by Lord Curzon, the image was stunning, though its scale was deceptive. It suggested, as Younghusband told Lord Sinha, that access would not be problematic. “There is a fairly even slope on this northern side,” Younghusband noted, “so that it looks comparatively easy … Compared with other peaks of the Himalayas its form, at any rate, promises well. Another point in its favour is that it stands back from the monsoon influence. Certainly during the three months of July, August and September that I was up there I could see Mount Everest pretty nearly every day.”