by Wade Davis
Not all of the members of the expedition felt so moved as Mallory. Or, to be fair, they may have lost the very capacity to be touched by something as commonplace as death. Wheeler’s entire diary entry for the day of Kellas’s burial reads: “Abdul Jalil and a local man go to Phari to send news of Kellas and to change rupees to tonkas—so everybody took the opportunity of sending in letters. Temperature in tent at 6:30 a.m. 36 (sun not on tent). I spent the day developing—and got some fair results. I seem to be underexposing my Kodak pictures—so must raise the normal factor from 200 to 100 for a trial. The Survey ones are more or less ok. Kellas was buried during the morning. I did not know—as it was originally timed for the afternoon and so missed it. I was sorry not to be there—but I do hate funerals.”
“WHEELER CAN be a bore in the colonial fashion,” Mallory confided to Ruth in a letter written from Phari seven days before Kellas’s death, “but I don’t dislike him.” Oliver Wheeler was not an overly complicated man, and if Canada more than fifty years after its confederation remained in Mallory’s view a British colony, perhaps some part of his comment to Ruth was true. But a bore, Wheeler most certainly was not, and of death he knew more than Mallory would want to imagine.
Keen since youth to be a soldier, Wheeler had entered the Royal Military College, Canada’s equivalent of Sandhurst or West Point, in the summer of 1907, the top qualifying candidate in his class. For each of his three years at RMC he ranked first in every category, and upon graduation in June 1910 he won twelve of the thirteen prizes given to the matriculating class, including the coveted Sword of Honour. At five foot ten, with dark hair and deep brown eyes, he was, like Mallory, a superb athlete, excelling at tennis, hockey, boxing, football, riding, and gymnastics. A fine actor and a highly skilled mathematician and topographer, he would in time be appointed to lead the Survey of India. Promoted to brigadier general in 1941, he was knighted by King George VI in 1943. His work as surveyor general resulted in the publication, during the Second World War, of 20 million maps a year, a vital contribution to the Allied war effort. As much as any other single man, Wheeler was responsible for foiling Japanese plans to invade India after Japan’s conquest of Burma in 1942.
But as a young officer, fresh out of RMC and stationed for two years at Chatham in England for training, Wheeler was known simply as a brilliant prospect with a pleasant and engaging disposition. Dispatched to India in 1912, he served for two years as garrison engineer, first at Dehra Dun and later at Meerut. Then came the war. A young subaltern of twenty-four, he was posted to the 3rd Field Company, 1st King George V’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners, and attached to the 7th Meerut Division. Ordered to mobilize on August 9 and directed to Karachi on August 23, Wheeler sailed with the first transport of Indian troops destined for France, embarking on September 16 on the H.T. Pundua. Their convoy entered Suez on October 4 and steamed into Marseille ten days later. In less than a week, 45,000 Indian troops, for the most part men from tropical climes ill equipped for European weather, entrained for northern France.
By the end of the month they were in the trenches at Richebourg, having relieved the devastated British II Corps on a line that reached from Givenchy past Neuve-Chapelle to Fauquissart. The day before Wheeler himself came into the line, four companies of Indian troops had attacked an enemy salient, covering seven hundred yards of open ground and driving out the Germans after fierce hand-to-hand fighting. The Germans had counterattacked with devastating force. By the end of the day the Indians had lost, killed or wounded, every officer and a third of their men. “It is not war,” wrote a sepoy from France, “it is the ending of the world.” In only two months at the front, the India Corps lost 9,579 men, and this at a time when Indian soldiers were not permitted to dine with other imperial troops or to be medically treated by white nurses.
As sappers and miners, Wheeler’s command had two primary duties: protecting and reinforcing the Allied trenches—which included laying wire, defusing bombs, reinforcing dugouts and traverses—and doing whatever was necessary to destroy the trenches and defenses of the enemy. The work was done at night, and almost always under enemy fire. In November 1914, when Wheeler was stationed near Festubert, it became clear that the Germans were systematically digging saps, trenches extending at ninety degrees from their line and reaching dangerously close to the British defenses. The order went out to eliminate these saps and in a manner that would make the Germans reluctant to repeat the tactic. On November 16 sentries in Wheeler’s sector noted that two such enemy saps had been pushed within thirty feet of the front held by the 107th Pioneers. The following night 125 sepoys under the command of a Major P. H. Dundas, supported by Wheeler and a Captain R. E. Kelly, conducted what was later reported as “a dashing little raid.”
At 8:55 the men went over the top, with strict orders to maintain silence until they reached the enemy saps. But no sooner had they cleared their own wire than withering fire came down from two flanks. Dundas and his command headed diagonally for the right sap, while Wheeler and his section raced for the other. Both were full of Germans, by chance waiting to launch their own trench raid on the Indians. The result was a melee of terror as men fought hand to hand in the dark with knives and clubs and bayonets. The Indians lost thirty-four men but cleared out the enemy. Wheeler saw to the wounded and then, under constant fire, directed his men through the night, equipped only with shovels as they filled in the saps, burying the dead from both sides who lay at the bottom of the trench, bodies entwined as they had fought, bloody faces frozen in puzzled and startled stares, the bewildered death masks of boys far too young to die. The officer compiling the war diary noted, “I should like to bring to your notice the coolness and dash displayed by Lt. Wheeler in the handling of his section.”
This was by no means Wheeler’s first experience with combat and death; for two months since he arrived in France, these had been the only constants in his life. But it was quite possibly the first time he had killed with his own hands. And there remained the haunting possibility that some of the lads at the bottom of the sap, in the darkness, with his men under duress and exposed to shell fire, may have been buried alive. In the immediate aftermath of the raid his journal reports simply that “the next few days passed fairly quietly, in the sense that nothing occurred beyond the usual shelling, sniping and bombing. The weather was very cold and frosty rendering the roads slippery and difficult for horse transport.”
Wheeler remained in France from October 1914 through the last days of 1915, one of a small army of military engineers who designed and built what became the Western Front. He drew maps of enemy trenches and tunnels, installed machine guns and sniper emplacements for maximum effect, and trained blindfolded men to build in the dark, in silence and stealth and under enemy fire. Men under his command, all Indians, took the lead in improvising new weapons for a new kind of war: trench mortars, grenades, periscopes, Bangalore torpedoes for blowing wire. At Loos in September, he and his men, working within fifty yards of the German line, erected fourteen hundred yards of wire in a single night, only to watch the following day as 4,000 of their comrades in the Indian Corps perished in a single attack. On December 24, 1915, the Canadian papers reported that Wheeler had been awarded the cross of the Légion d’honneur (Chevalier 5th Class). By then he and the Indian Corps had left France, en route to the fighting in Mesopotamia. In thirteen months on the Western Front the Indian Corps, two divisions of a total of 48,000 men, had lost 1,525 officers and 32,727 men of other ranks. More than 1,000 British officers of the Indian Army had fallen. Wheeler, who had fought at the front from the start, was lucky to be alive.
Wheeler and the Indian Corps arrived in Mesopotamia at a low point in Allied fortunes. At the outbreak of the war a British force had sailed from Bombay, with the mission of securing the oil fields. By November 1914 Basra was firmly in hand and the strategic problem solved. But as the war moved into the spring of 1915, a desire to curb Turkish ambitions and relieve pressure on Gallipoli, together with the allure
of capturing Baghdad, led the British to launch an all-out invasion of the country, which ended in disaster. Wheeler fought through the entire campaign, earning the Military Cross; he was mentioned in despatches seven times, and these were only the moments when someone of authority was there to notice. After enduring and surviving so much, he collapsed with typhoid fever at the end of June 1916 and was invalided back to India. By the time he was deemed fit for duty, in the fall of 1917, the British had taken Baghdad and his tasks became more pedestrian: securing military camps, positioning searchlights and wire, building bridges, roads, and rail lines.
The end of the war left Mesopotamia a backwater, but a land in turmoil and revolution. War-weary as they were, the British, afflicted by the hangover of empire, struggling with the remnants of the Ottoman Turks, invented a country they named Iraq, and then sought men who might understand it. In June 1919 Wheeler, promoted to the rank of major, was instructed to conduct a reconnaissance from Aliaga to Süleymaniye, 136 miles across an unknown desert occupied by peoples thought to be hostile to the British. His orders delineated his responsibilities. He was to describe the topography, note the condition and direction of trails, and identify sources of water, food, transport, and fodder. He was to discover the names of the nomadic tribes, place on the map points of potential ambush, and anticipate escape routes from enemy enfilade fire. He pursued this mission just as he had done things as a young surveyor in Canada, just as he had killed his first German soldier, and just as he proposed to find a route up the flank of Everest: by getting close, closer than anyone else would dare to do.
IF ANY MEMBERS of the expedition were upset with Wheeler for missing Kellas’s funeral, there is no mention of it in the documents. Mallory, whose letters to Ruth are full of small confidences, does not bring it up. Howard-Bury, quite prepared in his correspondence with Hinks and Younghusband to speak critically of colleagues (Mallory and Raeburn in particular), says nothing. Bullock’s diary is mute. No reference is made in the letters of Wollaston, Heron, or Morshead, or in the biographies, expedition reports, or memoirs of any member of the expedition. Wheeler’s own journal records not a hint of disapproval from the others. To a contemporary reader this seems rather strange. It would be almost inconceivable on a modern expedition for a team member present in camp at the time of the ceremony simply to miss the interment of a fellow climber. But for these men the war had changed the very gestalt of death. In the trenches, they lived it every moment—some, like Wheeler, for years. By the time he was twenty-eight he had witnessed the death of hundreds, encountered the shattered bodies of many thousands. Death’s power lies in fear, which flourishes in the imagination and the unknown. For Wheeler there was nothing more that death could show him, short of his own.
In the months and years immediately after the war the essence of death became redefined, even as survivors sought new ways to deal with the inexorable separation it implied. In the 1890s the practice of cremation hardly existed, with fewer than a hundred bodies being so disposed in all of Britain in a year; by the 1920s cremation was the choice of tens of thousands. Daily exposure to the horror of rotting flesh and bodies gnawed by rats made it seem a clean, pure, and highly desirable alternative to burial. If faith and traditional religion were among the casualties of the war, the rivers of dead inversely caused a surge of interest in unconventional notions of the spirit, the more esoteric the better, for mystics and oracles, mediums and soothsayers all promised the possibility, however remote, that communication with the dead might be achievable.
Hundreds of thousands of parents in Britain had never found out what had happened to their boys. They’d simply received an official telegram that read, “Regret—no trace.” More than 200,000 soldiers simply vanished, obliterated by shell fire. In 1918 there were still 500,000 unmarked graves in the war zones. The carefully manicured cemeteries built after the war by the Imperial War Graves Commission, maintained beautifully as memorials to this day, promoted the illusion that there were actual bodies buried beneath the neat rows of individual headstones. The inscriptions remember the dead, but the graves, for the most part, contain nothing but the hopes and dreams of the living.
Those who had experienced the worst of the war shared no such delusions. Death had been the backdrop of their lives. On any given day, most expected to die. The odds against a young subaltern like Wheeler surviving four years at the front were enormous. With death looming at all times, each man was granted license to deal with it as he saw fit. If there was decency to be found in the trenches, it was in the private sphere of dignity, respected by all, that each soldier cultivated within himself as he anticipated his own end and that of his friends and brothers. No one intruded into that space, just as no one on the expedition would have judged Wheeler for what he did or did not do on the morning of Kellas’s burial.
HOWARD-BURY, at any rate, had little time to mourn the loss of Kellas. Harold Raeburn was fifty-six and had been suffering bouts of dysentery and acute abdominal pain since leaving Darjeeling. Twice he had fallen from his mule and twice been kicked in the head. Having lost Kellas, Howard-Bury and Wollaston were not about to risk another man. At Kampa Dzong it was decided to send Raeburn back to Sikkim, where he might convalesce at lower elevation in Lachen, at a Christian mission run by Swedish Moravian nuns. Wollaston and Gyalzen Kazi would escort the patient as far as the mission and then by double marches return to the Tibetan Plateau to rendezvous with the expedition in a fortnight at Tingri. Thus within twenty-four hours the expedition lost the only two climbers with Himalayan experience and, at least until Wollaston’s return, its two medical doctors.
But out of disaster came the promise of new possibilities, especially the composition of the climbing party. Raeburn, as Mallory explained to Ruth, was already a write-off, quite unfit for high-altitude work, “a worn out factious old person, not at all suitable for the job.” His departure promised, if anything, to improve morale. Kellas, on this expedition, had never been destined for higher than base camp, given his condition and age. Heron had turned out to be a “solid treasure,” superb at handling porters, but he was no climber. Wollaston, Mallory’s closest friend to date on the expedition, was a fine naturalist but, at forty-six, not one for the ice and snow. Bullock was fit and had a particular knack for reading topography, and Mallory saw great things in him. He was also much taken with Morshead, “who has been walking everywhere on the hills up to 18,000 [feet] all the way from Darjeeling and looks as fit and strong as possible.” Howard-Bury was a strong walker and showed promise, a possible fourth for the climbing party. “Wheeler the other surveyor,” he wrote to Young, “though he has considerable mountaineering experience in Canada, is a lame duck with a stomach out of order. He may pick up but I’ve very little hope he’ll prove much use.”
Already one senses the hand of fate. Though no one on the expedition knew it at the time, Everest was already turning out to be Mallory’s mountain. Raeburn’s medical complications and the devastating loss of Kellas had simply helped to clear the decks. On the day of the funeral, just after dawn and before any in the camp had stirred, Mallory and Bullock had scrambled up the barren slope leading to the fortress to experience “the strange elation” of seeing Everest for the first time.
“It was a perfect early morning,” Mallory wrote. “We had mounted a thousand feet when we turned and saw what we came to see. There was no mistaking the two great peaks in the west; that to the left must be Makalu, grey, severe, and yet distinctly graceful, and the other away to the right—who could doubt its identity? It was a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world. We saw Mount Everest not quite sharply defined on account of a slight haze in that direction; this circumstance added a touch of mystery and grandeur; we were satisfied that the highest of mountains would not disappoint us.”
In truth, it was impossible to get a fully unobstructed view of Everest from Kampa Dzong. The mountain was still more than a hundred miles away, and its lower flanks were blocked by a nearer group
of mountains, the Gyangkar Range, which rose to 22,000 feet and ran north–south, perpendicular to the Himalayan wall, roughly forty miles to the west of their camp. But from the roof of the fortress, where the dzongpen had entertained Howard-Bury, Morshead, and Wollaston on the afternoon of the funeral, it was possible to discern several important things. Seen from the north, the vertical gain climbers would have to achieve appeared far less daunting than what they had observed from Darjeeling. The northern slopes seemed less steep, and the snow line appeared to be several thousand feet higher. The great masses of cumulus clouds that rolled north with the monsoon appeared to collapse against the southern side, blanketing even the lower elevations with rain and snow. Sikkim received as much as two hundred inches of precipitation a year, the Tibetan settlements on the plateau about fourteen. Perhaps, Howard-Bury suggested, the northern side of the mountains would be quite unaffected by the monsoon, in which case their prospects would improve considerably. As they would discover soon enough, he could not have been more wrong.
The challenge of assembling new transport, dispatching official letters and a telegram to Younghusband with news of Kellas’s fate, as well as preparing Raeburn and Wollaston for their retreat south to Sikkim, held the expedition in Kampa Dzong until the morning of June 8, when, after much haggling and arguments over loads, they set off to the west, into country through which no European had traveled. The first day took them sixteen miles across the Yaru Chu, still a small stream, through beautiful groves of willows, onto a rocky spur that led to what Wheeler described as “the most beautiful valley yet seen on the trip,” a great verdant plain that stretched all the way to Tingri. Bullock and Mallory, riding together, as always, ascended a small hill that rose out of the valley and spent an hour and a half at midday “basking in the sun and surveying the country around,” Mallory wrote, noting that “it was very beautiful in its Tibetan way; there is more water over here and a very dark green broad undulating strip made a great contrast to the base gravelly sand or yellow dried grass. But the beauty is really one of form—gentle slopes rising from the plain as tongues of hill land projecting into it … surrounding hills and on all sides an almost infinite number of graduated ridges.”