Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  Privately, he was appalled. As SS Malva approached Marseille, where he knew Ruth to be waiting, he wrote a desperate note to his sister Avie. “They can’t possibly organize another show so soon, particularly as I’ve also said that it’s barely worth trying again, and anyway not without eight first rate climbers. They can’t get eight, certainly not soon, perhaps not even the year after. Hinks already wants to know whether I’ll go again. When they press for an answer, I shall tell them they can get the other seven first. How they’ll pore over the AC list and write round for opinions about the various candidates. I wouldn’t go again next year, as the saying is, for all the gold in Arabia.”

  The following day, November 11, was the third anniversary of the Armistice, which had ended the war. Throughout the British Empire men and women stood still in silence at the eleventh hour. The simple ritual of remembrance, honored by captain, crew, and passengers on board the Malva, provoked in Mallory an even stronger longing for home, family, and friends. “Never mind Everest and its unfriendly glories,” he wrote to his old Cambridge mate David Pye, stealing some of his own lines from an earlier letter to Hinks. “I’m tired of traveling and travelers, far countries and uncouth people, trains and ships and shimmering mausoleums, foreign ports, dark-skinned faces, and a garish sun. What I want to see is faces I know, and perhaps Bloomsbury in a fog; and then an English river, cattle grazing in western meadows.”

  He felt grateful simply to be alive. The regrets that had haunted him after the retreat from Everest had been swept aside by time and reflection. In a letter to his friend and mentor Geoffrey Young, Mallory surrendered to God, thankful that the conditions on the North Col had been so severe as to present no possible “temptation to go on. We came back without accident; it seems now a question not as to what might have happened higher but what would have happened with unfailing certainty; it was a pitiful party at the last, not fit to be on a mountainside anywhere.”

  But as he recalled, that day, how close they had come to death, Mallory could not help but wonder who his companions might be should he accept Hinks’s offer and return to Everest in 1922. Bullock was obliged to resume his diplomatic post at Le Havre. Wheeler, with eighteen months of accrued leave, was going home to Canada for the first time since the outbreak of the war. Raeburn, for obvious reasons, would not be back, or Heron. Wollaston had no love for Tibet and was not a climber. Morshead was game, certainly a possibility, provided he abandon all survey work and pass muster with Bell and the indecipherable Tibetan authorities.

  Howard-Bury had been away from Ireland and his family lands for nearly two years and, as Mallory knew, yearned to return. He had written to Hinks from Kharta on October 2, at the end of the 1921 effort, indicating that he would not be back for a second year, what for him would have been a third season in the Himalaya. Howard-Bury reiterated his position in a letter of November 6, dispatched from Delhi: “Next year I am anxious to stop at home, as I want to see the Irish question settled and there will be developments of all kinds.”

  Mallory knew that Hinks, under pressure from Younghusband, had as early as February 1921 already promised the leadership of any future expedition to Charles Bruce. At the time, Howard-Bury had graciously supported the decision, saying, “I hope Bruce will be given the leadership of the expedition in 1922; it’s only right and his due that he should have it when the really serious attempt is made to climb Everest.” But this endorsement came long before their experiences on the mountain, before the death of Kellas and the collapse of Raeburn. Both Howard-Bury and Mallory had great respect for the general, but his selection did not inspire confidence or suggest that the members of the Everest Committee had learned anything from the 1921 expedition. In a veiled reference to Bruce, who would be fifty-six in 1922, Howard-Bury argued that “a medical examination of anyone taking part in the next expedition should be insisted upon and anyone over fifty should be ruled out.” Hinks informed Howard-Bury on November 3 that the general had indeed been seen by the Harley Street physicians Larkins and Anderson, who had passed him as fit, scars and bullet wounds being of no importance, nor apparently a blood pressure of 210/110. As if to add deliberate insult, Hinks publicly announced the appointment of General Bruce before Howard-Bury sailed from India, leaving the press to speculate that he had been relieved of duty for some perceived failure.

  In truth, Hinks, who harbored his own doubts about the general’s health, had urged Howard-Bury, in a letter of July 14, 1921, to accompany Bruce as his chief of staff. It was with some bitterness that Howard-Bury, who had done so much to make these expeditions possible and who, more than any other member of the expedition, had sensed and been moved by the mystic endowment of Tibet, wrote Hinks a final letter on the subject of Everest, noting, “I am glad the ordeal is over and that I can now sink back once more into quiet and obscurity.” His contribution, in fact, would never be forgotten. More than thirty years later, when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit for the first time, safely to return, the news was withheld from the British press for twenty-four hours so as not to compete with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Only two people in all Britain were told in advance, the Queen Mother and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kenneth Howard-Bury.

  As Howard-Bury exited the scene in the winter of 1921, Mallory moved to center stage. He knew that the same physicians who had approved General Bruce had only months before rejected as unfit George Finch, who had gone on to set climbing records that summer in the Alps while they had been on Everest. Finch would have to be included. Mallory would insist. He was the best ice climber in Britain. Other names came to mind, men who had also been considered for 1921. John Noel, if he could secure leave from his regiment. It would be a fitting tribute to old Kellas, Noel’s close friend and mentor. Geoffrey Young always spoke highly of Arthur Wakefield, who had declined an invitation in 1921. His age was a concern, but he could double as both physician and a climber. Perhaps he might be induced to come over from the backwoods of Canada, where he had fled after the war. Tom Longstaff would have been with them had he not already been committed to an expedition in Spitsbergen. At forty-seven, he was too old, but he might serve in 1922 as medical officer. Howard Somervell was a better candidate: another doctor, immensely strong by reputation, just thirty-two. To this list other names would be added as possible candidates: Teddy Norton, taught as a child to climb in the Alps by his grandfather Sir Alfred Wills, one of the founding members of the Alpine Club; Bill Strutt, a veteran guide and much decorated soldier; Noel Odell, another strong climber and, like Strutt and John Noel, fully recovered from wounds suffered in the war.

  On November 12, the day his ship docked at Marseille, Mallory wrote Hinks a noncommittal letter, deferring his decision about whether to join the 1922 expedition until they had a chance to meet in London. But in this same correspondence—written, presumably, with his beloved wife, Ruth, at his side, the couple reunited after his absence of five months—he took the time to critique at some length the equipment of the expedition. He preferred the Meade tents to the Mummerys, easier to get in and out of. The sleeping sacks were fine, the sun goggles excellent, the Gletscher Crème face grease and whale oil very useful. The rucksacks were terrible, much too small, “artless square bags made of unsuitable material.” The Primus stoves failed above 20,000 feet. Crampons too long, snowshoes invaluable, skis never used. Having sent off his report, he and Ruth went walking in the warm Mediterranean sun. Four days later, he would write Hinks again, from the Pont du Gard. “I don’t know precisely what I may have said in my haste from Marseilles; but please don’t tell the committee if the question arises that I don’t intend to go … That’s not my thought. I shall have to feel that with so many chances against us, we have some in our favour.”

  As he committed himself to return to Everest, he added a note of caution that proved prophetic. “We must remember,” he wrote, “that the highest of mountains is capable of severity, a severity so awful and so fatal that the wiser sort of men do well to t
hink and tremble even on the threshold of their high endeavor.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The Summit of Their Desires

  THE FIRST YEARS of peace found John Morris in remote India, living a hundred miles north of Lucknow, close to the Nepali frontier, trying, as he wrote, “without much success, to mould my disorganized life into some sort of pattern.” As a British officer in a Gurkha regiment, he could well have lived as a sahib, in imperial comfort and luxury. He chose instead to dwell in a tent, near the ruins of a British compound that smelled like a tomb, the gardens overgrown, the billiard table sickly with yellow mold, the plaster on the walls etched in cracks and decrepitude. His Indian servant, humiliated by the living conditions, resigned, unwilling to wait on an Englishman unprepared to accept his inherent superiority. Morris then took on a Gurkha lad, quite untrained but very beautiful, with an “easy almost animal way of moving. Subconsciously I suppose,” he admitted, “I wanted to sleep with him.”

  This simple life, with its gentle conflicts, so far removed from the war, left Morris suspended between the past and a forgotten future. He remained the most unlikely of soldiers. Of strategy he knew little, of close combat a great deal. He was almost blind, utterly dependent on his eyeglasses, but in the trenches he had never failed to kill. Though a career officer, he had no military ambitions of any kind, noting, “The years of war had bred in me a distaste for the close company of my fellow men. I felt an urgent need to get away.”

  His obsession was Tibet; he had studied the language, read every available book and military report, and sought through his contacts information about the many routes to its interior. As closely as possible, given his isolation, he had followed the exploits of the 1921 reconnaissance, and for some months had been in correspondence with General Bruce. The general wanted Morris as part of the team, but leave for an officer on active duty was problematic. Bruce went to the highest military authorities in the Raj. When, finally, a telegram arrived from Delhi requesting his release so that he could join the 1922 expedition, his commanding officer relented only on the condition that the months away on Everest count as home leave. Though this implied that Morris might have to wait another three to four years before returning to England and seeing his parents, he seized the opportunity. He had not been home since the end of 1915, and he had no overwhelming interest in going.

  Unlike so many of his peers, Morris had not succumbed to the war fever that swept London in the summer of 1914. The dour and wooden face of Lord Kitchener, peering down and pointing from every recruiting poster, reminded him of a fanatical Old Testament prophet who had “grown a moustache and put on fancy dress.” Morris felt no urge to answer the summons to serve his country. He worked at the time as a bank clerk. It was boredom that led him to enlist, and a class structure impossible to defy that elevated him—against all military reason, as he saw it—to an officer’s rank in the 5th Leicestershire Regiment. Just before going out to France, he tried to lose his virginity to a Nottingham prostitute but froze at the last moment and bolted, fully dressed, from her room. The following morning he went to a doctor, certain that he had contracted some horrible disease, despite having not shed his trousers. He was only nineteen. He loved to paint, and his passion was music, the “delicate tapestry of sounds” of Debussy and the genius of Rachmaninoff, whom he saw perform at the pianist’s London debut.

  Morris arrived at the front in the terrible spring of 1915. His first recollection was of getting lost in the trench system and approaching a signaler standing alone in a side bay. The man wore headphones. He was dead, though there was not a wound on his body. Morris recoiled in terror, but then, to his shame, began to laugh, a reaction he would soon consider to be normal.

  Months later he was ordered to lead a night raid on a German position. For several days he scouted the ground, crawling out of the trench after dark and inching his way through mud and tall grass soiled with the dead of 1914, the French and Belgians in tatters of red and blue cloth, the Germans in field gray, the British in decaying uniforms of khaki. On the night of the attack, twenty of his men would die and twenty others be wounded, though the raid accomplished nothing. The survivors returned with no useful information and not a single prisoner. The platoon to his right “managed to bring back a German helmet which had presumably belonged to a soldier who had been blown to pieces. It was half filled with glutinous blood and brains.”

  The very next day Morris was offered leave to return home for a week. As he headed for Calais, a freight train farther up the line broke its couplings and came crashing down on his troop transport, derailing the engine, which exploded in flames that swept over carriages crammed with soldiers. His car, by chance, was in the rear, and he suffered only minor injuries. For those up front, escape was impossible. He later recalled, “The screams of those trapped in the burning wreckage horrified me in a way that trench warfare never did. There was something obscene about this drawn out agony, so unlike the quick death of battle.”

  He reached London that night, just in time to join his mother at the theater, the Alhambra, for a performance by George Robey in the popular musical The Bing Boys. But his thoughts remained concentrated on the burning train, and “half way through … I could stand it no longer and we left.” Like so many soldiers home from the front, Morris found it exceedingly difficult to be with his parents. “There seemed to be nothing to talk about,” he explained. “I had entered into a world where they could not follow. I longed for my leave to end.” On his last day in London he was accosted on Regent Street by a major of the provost marshal’s department, a man who would never see the war, and severely reprimanded for wearing turned-up cuffs on his pant legs, a breach of regulations that had been invented in the months he had been at the front.

  He rejoined his battalion in Marseille, destined for Egypt—an unexpected reprieve, he wrote, from the “sinister life in the trenches.” But at the last moment, with half the men having embarked, those still marshaling in the docks were ordered back to the trains to return to northern France and the lines at Gommecourt Wood. It was the spring of the Somme. For weeks they would sleep by day and haul ammunition by night. In a shell blast Morris was wounded, a minor incident that took him to a field hospital, where a chaplain pleaded to minister to his soul. Morris refused. Recovered, he was sent directly back to the front on the very eve of the battle. At the last moment he was ordered out of the front line on the evening of June 30 to take up a position in support trenches a few hundred yards to the rear. While he waited through the night to learn the fate of his command, shells fell all around. A soldier crouching at Morris’s side was struck by a large splinter that all but severed his leg. Morris was impressed by the absence of blood. The boy died stoically, without complaint.

  The battle-wounded began to trickle back, among them Morris’s platoon sergeant, who seemed to have aged twenty years in the minutes of the failed morning attack. His ashen face stained with blood, his uniform drenched by it, he screamed hysterically. Every lad had been mown down climbing out of the forward trenches. Not an inch of ground had been won. In all Morris’s sector the story was the same. Bodies and parts of bodies trampled in the mud, limbs protruding from the timbers of shattered dugouts, and everywhere “the tattered remnants of annihilated battalions lay strewn over No Man’s Land like a picnic that had gone terribly wrong.”

  In the night Morris and men like him retrieved for burial what remained of the dead. In the dawn an acrid pall of smoke hung over the battlefield. Men walked about without fear of the enemy, as if in a trance, like sleepwalkers. Morris wrote, “All noise has ceased; a stunned hush had fallen over the blasted moon-like landscape.”

  On the eve of Morris’s twenty-first birthday he carried a mutilated soldier to an aid station behind the front. In the hospital tent, the sickening smell of gangrene and ether fascinated him. A voice came out of the haze, that of the surgeon about to go to work, warning him that what he would see if he stayed would not be pleasant. He returned to the lin
e, which over the next days began to smell like a cesspool from the decaying dead. In the heat the bodies bloated and the faces took on a peculiar greenish pallor. “They haunt me still,” Morris later wrote, “especially if I am alone at night in a forest.”

  In time everyone he had known in the army was dead. Morris only waited his turn. His salvation came quite unexpectedly, when a curious pamphlet reached the trenches, offering junior officers of British regiments the opportunity to apply for regular commissions in the Indian Army. Designed like a tourist brochure, the flyer gave the distinct impression that life in India was one long holiday. Morris knew nothing of the East, save that it was not France.

  On March 30, 1917, even as the British launched attacks near Arras and made plans for the summer offensive at Passchendaele, Morris, in London, sat before a panel of beribboned officers and gave his reasons for joining the Indian Army. A general wanted to know why he was not wearing the customary gold stripe on his sleeve, indicating that he had been wounded in battle. Fighting soldiers, Morris replied, disdained such ribbons. The general nodded sympathetically. Morris had his ticket out of the war and away from the almost certain death that awaited him on the Western Front.

  A soldier’s life in India inevitably led to the North-West Frontier, then as now a cauldron of tribal violence. During the war Afghanistan remained neutral, but in 1919 the ruler of Kabul, Emir Habibullah Khan, sensing weakness, ordered his army to descend upon India. He was stopped, but a fire was ignited that would take years and the entire Indian Army to extinguish. In late 1921 Morris was again at war, serving on the frontier with the Waziristan Field Force.