by Wade Davis
On December 11 he led a convoy of supply transports and troops, Punjabis and Gurkhas, through the Spinchilla Narai, a strategic mountain pass. Morris rode with the vanguard. The Mahsud tribesmen attacked from the rear, an ambush that took the British completely by surprise. More than a hundred fell, including the senior officer, Major Paget, who was killed. The command passed to Morris. When the enemy closed from three sides, he had no choice but to fight through them, even at the risk of abandoning the wounded. A Mahsud warrior came out of nowhere. Morris drew his revolver but could not shoot. He defecated in his pants. Only thirty of his original command got away, falling back at a run to the protection of the nearby fort. Morris tried to rally the men and rescue the wounded, but the colonel in command, fearing more casualties, refused to allow the sortie.
Morris climbed to a sentry post overlooking the plain. There was no sign of anyone. But in the distance a cloud of vultures hovered in the sky, waiting for the dead. Morris stood there for a long time, “watching the shadows lengthen; thinking and yet not thinking, physically numbed and unable to move away. As dusk was falling I noticed a solitary figure, moving very slowly and apparently with great difficulty. As he came near I recognized one of my own men. He was stark naked. He had been knifed in the belly and his testicles slashed. They now hung by bleeding threads of sinew. He was unable to speak and collapsed as soon as we carried him into the camp.”
At dawn Morris led a relief company back to the wounded. All were dead and each had been ravaged, their flesh flayed and their genitals “roughly severed and stuffed into the victim’s mouths.” There was little more to say, and nothing to do but seek revenge.
Within two months of this terrible moment, John Morris would be at the Mount Everest Hotel in Darjeeling, seconded to the 1922 Mount Everest expedition as transport officer, waiting to meet men he did not know. He had left Calcutta on the mail train and traveled across the Bengali plains, rising into the mountains at dusk. He had noticed the young boys perched on the front of the engine, ladling out handfuls of grit to give the wheels better purchase.
When, in his exhaustion, he had finally settled into his hotel room in Darjeeling, there came a sudden pounding at his door. Before he could respond, a great bear of a man lumbered into the room and unleashed a stream of fluent Nepali, “much of it abusive and obscene, after which he broke into roars of school boyish laughter.” This was General Bruce, the leader of the expedition. They had never actually met. Bruce later confessed to having been horrified by Morris’s bespectacled and unmilitary face. That the young soldier spoke excellent Nepali saved the day.
AS THE 1922 EXPEDITION came together in Darjeeling, with several of the men meeting for the first time, there was little sign of the camaraderie that in time would develop on the mountain. Conversations were formal and restrained as each took the measure of the other. “In that peculiarly British way,” Morris recalled, “we attempted to elucidate the details of one another’s upbringing and background without asking direct questions.” The atmosphere was awkward in part because there were initially two distinct factions, the climbers and those in support, soldiers chosen by General Bruce because of their experience in India and facility with local languages. “At first the climbers tended to regard those few of us who were not climbers as slightly superior servants,” Morris observed, “but this attitude faded as the climbers realized that they were dependent on the transport for every need.”
Among those straddling both camps and, in a sense, belonging to neither was Colin Crawford of the Indian Civil Service. Known as “Ferdie” because of his uncanny resemblance to Czar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, he had served with the Gurkhas during the war but was no longer a soldier. His climbing experience included seven seasons in the Alps and a number of excursions in Kashmir. In 1920 he had accompanied Harold Raeburn to Kangchenjunga. Brought on now, like Morris, as a transport officer, the thirty-two-year-old Crawford would prove to be “very cheerful but entirely useless,” in Bruce’s assessment, a decent rock climber but hopeless at altitude. Others on the expedition were less harsh, including Bruce’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lisle “Bill” Strutt, who later acknowledged that “Crawford’s great powers were neglected sadly almost to the end of the expedition—a crime for which I was chiefly responsible.” Crawford would indeed be undervalued but he was a comforting presence, always personable and often laughing. He would die in his seventieth year with a smile on his face, having just hit a ball for six out of the local cricket ground at Rosemarkie, his hometown in Scotland.
The third transport officer was the general’s nephew Geoffrey Bruce, a soldier since the age of seventeen and now, at twenty-five, one of the finest athletes in the Indian Army. He had never climbed a mountain, save to hunt, but he excelled at pig sticking, a sport long considered to be “of inestimable value in developing the manly qualities of the British soldier.” The competition pitted an individual with a nine-foot lance on a galloping horse against a species of wild boar unique to India, a creature known to attack and kill elephants and tigers. The goal was to strike the pig immediately behind the shoulder, driving the spear through the lungs and out at the breast. Only the very best competed for the Kadir Cup, the most coveted trophy in India, and in 1920 young Bruce reached the semifinals.
Like Morris, Bruce had fought with a Gurkha regiment on the North-West Frontier since the outbreak of the Third Afghan War. Only weeks before arriving in Darjeeling with his uncle, at the beginning of March, he had been awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in action. The deadly skirmish had occurred on June 13, 1921, by chance the very day that Mallory and Bullock had, from the heights above the Yaru Chu, seen clearly for the first time the summit of Everest. The official report noted that Bruce and his men, “fresh from the rigours of the Great War,” had been in “no mood to adopt kid-glove methods with the Mahsud tribesmen.” Their tactics, in truth, had been so merciless that the high command had been obliged to move young Bruce’s battalion to a quieter area, one less likely to provoke such politically problematic “incidents” of retaliation and vengeance.
The medical officer in 1922 was Tom Longstaff, at forty-seven a veteran mountaineer, too old for Everest but certain to be a steady and calm influence. He was the father of seven daughters. No proponent of large expeditions, he preferred simplicity: living off the land, moving fast, the climbers unencumbered by anything beyond the essentials. He had sought the position as physician and naturalist simply to return to Tibet and experience the approach march to Everest. His first love was ornithology, and with his slight build and curious face—a patrician nose, darting eyes, and a bright orange beard—there was indeed something birdlike in his appearance.
The night of his arrival in Darjeeling, March 13, an earthquake shook the walls of the Mount Everest Hotel. Longstaff blamed General Bruce for the tremor, encouraging him to shed some weight. He then clarified for his old friend the terms of his engagement, for he was independently wealthy and had paid his own passage to India: “I want to make one thing clear. I am the expedition’s official medical officer. I am, as a matter of fact, a qualified doctor, but I feel it my duty now to remind you that I have never practiced in my life. I beg you in no circumstances to seek my professional advice, since it would almost certainly turn out to be wrong. I am however willing if necessary to sign a certificate of death.” Longstaff, of course, would throughout the expedition remain deeply concerned about the well-being of the men, even as his own health failed. He was a good man, honest and direct. “His hatred of anything mean or shabby,” one of the climbers wrote, “gave a spice of nobility to his personal charm and keen intellect. He used to rag Mallory for being a high brow, while his brow was anything but low.”
IF THE CLIMBING PARTY appeared somewhat standoffish to Morris and the others upon its arrival in Darjeeling on March 20, it was in part because the men had already established a strong connection with one another on the voyage out from England and the subsequent rail journey across India fr
om Bombay. In 1921, most of the members of the reconnaissance had traveled alone to Darjeeling. General Bruce had encouraged Hinks to have this year’s party head out together, which they did, crossing from Folkestone to Boulogne on March 2, then continuing south across France by train to reach Marseille in time for the departure of SS Caledonia, which sailed with the rising tide on the afternoon of the following day.
Their titular climbing leader was Bruce’s deputy, Colonel Strutt, a highly decorated soldier and diplomat. Aristocratic, wealthy, fluent in German and French, Strutt had been a fine alpine climber, but at forty-eight he too was old for Everest. His medical examination on November 20, 1921, passed him as fit, with a notation indicating that “the slight wound on the left side of the lower jaw which he sustained in 1914 has left no disability, except that he wears a denture which appears to be quite satisfactory.” He was actually lucky to be alive. Commanding the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Scots during the retreat from Mons in the first autumn of the war, he had been caught in the open by multiple shell blasts, which left him severely concussed, partially paralyzed, and unable to walk for nine months. The debilitating effects lingered for nearly two years, and it was not until the summer of 1916 that he was deemed capable of taking up staff duties in Salonika, well away from the fighting.
Strutt emerged from the war a complex and difficult man, certain of his own opinions, and by all accounts pompous and arrogant. Morris described him as “the greatest snob I have ever known … kind and generous, but a survival of an age that had passed,” a vestige of a world of privilege and honor that had died in the trenches. When, in the first months of peace, revolution convulsed Vienna, Strutt personally rescued the Austrian royal family, whose members he had known since childhood, escorting the last emperor, Charles I, and his empress to safety in Switzerland. It was a bold and courageous move that prevented, as Winston Churchill wrote, another Romanov massacre. It also earned Strutt the enmity of Lord Curzon, the foreign secretary, who accused him of being a traitor to his country and threatened a court-martial. When Mallory heard this story on board the Caledonia, he came away convinced that there had to be some good in a man who had stood up to the former viceroy.
Mallory clearly enjoyed his second voyage to India, a welcome respite from the whirlwind that had been his life over the preceding weeks. In addition to writing long sections of Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921, a book being rushed into print by Edward Arnold, and working through equipment reports and preparations for the new expedition with Hinks and the Everest Committee, he had traveled the length of the country, delivering thirty lectures in ten weeks to a public increasingly inspired by the story of Everest. At the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, three thousand people had filled the seats and hundreds more had been turned away. There had been hardly a moment for his family, and now he was away yet again, and for several months. On board he still sought solitude, moments of “seasoned silence,” as he called it, when he could think and read. He had with him Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day and The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a devastating critique of the Versailles Treaty written by John Maynard Keynes, brother of his good friend Geoffrey. But Mallory also enjoyed his companions, and felt little of the alienation that had soured his journey out in 1921. “We go smoothly along in the smiling sunshine day after day,” he wrote to Ruth on March 7 as they neared Port Said, “and the members of the expedition are a happy smiling company with plenty of easy conversation.”
His new companions were indeed a remarkable lot. Howard Somervell had registered more than 350 climbs in Great Britain alone before heading for the Alps, where, during one six-week holiday, he reached the summits of more than thirty mountains. Immensely strong, with a stout body and a head so large the men teased him about his hat size, Somervell was in fact the gentlest of souls, decent and compassionate, a devout Christian of unfailing good humor. At thirty-one, he was a brilliant surgeon, a painter of exquisite watercolors, and a highly accomplished classical musician who over the course of the expedition intended to conduct the first serious study of Tibetan ethnomusicology. As a climber he had infinite reserves of energy and, like Mallory, could not resist a pitch of rock. When the Caledonia docked at Gibraltar for but two hours, Somervell, one of the party reported in a letter to Hinks, “proceeded to scale the rocks making the ascent in 10 minutes, but was stopped by a policeman near the top who ordered him down again as he was on secret military ground.”
Arthur Wakefield had been recommended to the Everest Committee by Mallory’s friend and mentor Geoffrey Young, who had never forgotten the record Wakefield set in the Lake District in 1905: fifty-nine miles of mountain summits with a total vertical ascent of 23,500 feet in less than twenty-four hours. Young had wanted him on the reconnaissance in 1921, but Wakefield had been unable to get away from the medical practice he had established in a small town in the forests of eastern Canada. He was recruited to the 1922 expedition as a climber, not a physician, but his age, forty-six, was against him. General Bruce would later dismiss him as “a noble and worthy gentleman … [but] a complete passenger … does not stand heights well.” Another of the climbers, George Finch, would have harsher words, suggesting that Wakefield “squandered his energy in a nervousness that amounted to hysteria.”
It was true, Wakefield’s family acknowledged, that the man suffered depression and nervous anxiety after the war. He had been, it will be recalled, a surgeon at a casualty clearing station behind the Somme front. On July 1, 1916, he witnessed the annihilation of the entire Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel, hundreds of young men whom he had, as a frontier doctor in Labrador, literally brought into the world. From this he would never recover, and the man who went to Everest in 1922 was certainly not the person Geoffrey Young had known before the war. But the actual record of the expedition, as we shall see, suggests that these judgments by Bruce and Finch were excessive and unfair. With Longstaff severely debilitated, Wakefield would step to the fore as physician, earning the lasting gratitude of the climbers whose lives he would save.
A war that came out of nowhere to consume a generation left in its wake a wasteland of isolation. Every man had to come to terms with the experience on his own. Somervell, too, had been a surgeon at the Somme. On that horrible first morning he walked alone through six acres of stretchers bearing the wounded and the dying. It was the most terrible experience of his life, but it led him only deeper into Christian devotion and compassion, which in the end freed him from trauma. Although he did not know it as he chatted up Strutt, played deck tennis on the Caledonia with Wakefield, or chess in the evenings with Mallory, Somervell would never return from this, his first journey to Asia. Forgoing a lucrative career as a Harley Street surgeon, with only £60 in his pocket he would travel through India, eventually settling in the south in Travancore, where he joined the staff of a mission hospital. For more than forty years he would sweep away all memories of the dead by saving the living, treating, with a small cadre of volunteers, more than 200,000 cases a year, performing as many as 15,000 surgeries, pioneering the treatment of leprosy. For the rest of his professional life Somervell alone would see 150 indigent patients a day, including Sundays if necessary. In his faith he was never dogmatic. On the Caledonia, it amused him when one night a fellow passenger, a narrow-minded Christian, chastised him for tolerating drinking and dancing.
The photographer John Noel was to Mallory’s mind the wonderful surprise of the expedition. Formally engaged to document the climb on film, both through stills and moving pictures, Noel, it will be recalled, was a veteran of the Himalaya and the dream of Everest. With Alexander Kellas, his good friend and mentor (now buried at Kampa Dzong), he had long before the war hatched schemes to reach the mountain, even in defiance of Charles Bell and the Tibetan authorities. In 1913, disguised as a native, he’d gotten as far as Tashirak, a mere forty miles from Everest, before being forced back into Sikkim by armed Tibetan soldiers. And it had been Noel’s Aeolian Hall lecture on March 10, 1919, for the Roy
al Geographical Society, that had inspired Younghusband and Percy Farrar of the Alpine Club to take action, setting in motion the chain of events that culminated in the reconnaissance of 1921.
Noel was an extraordinary character, an entrepreneur in a very modern sense and a born promoter given to wild schemes of the very sort that mountain climbing expeditions to this day cobble together to fund their efforts. Talk of using supplemental oxygen, the great debate of 1922, led him to propose the laying of a pipeline to carry gas to the top of the mountain. If steel cylinders were to be used, he suggested that they be dropped from airplanes. To maintain the supply line across Tibet to Everest, Noel suggested that a Citroën tractor car be carried over the Jelep La and up the Chumbi Valley. Cars, after all, had been delivered to the Dalai Lama in Lhasa—why not one for the Everest climbers? To raise money Noel was a fountain of ideas, which was one of the reasons Hinks thought so highly of him.
By all accounts a great raconteur, Noel, throughout the long voyage out to Bombay, regularly regaled Mallory and the others with stories of his travels in Labrador, his time in Persia as a spy, his early efforts to reach Everest, and his experiences in the war when, as a small arms instructor, he became one of the best pistol shots in the British Army. Naturally he said nothing about the months he had spent in hospitals suffering from shell shock, or of the nervous afflictions that tormented him for so many months of the war. But he did enthusiastically share his fascination with the new art of photography, and on this subject he was on very solid ground. As a still photographer he had been deeply influenced by the work of Vittorio Sella, the Italian pioneer who had virtually established the art of mountain photography, even as he invented the equipment that made it possible. Noel’s inspiration in cinematography was Herbert Ponting, who documented Scott’s Antarctic expedition of 1910–11, a film Noel had watched sixteen times before going to Everest.