Into The Silence

by Wade Davis

  To learn more, I turned to Carroll Dunham, an old friend and a brilliant anthropologist living in Nepal, who became, like Roger Barrington in the United Kingdom, an indispensable partner in the project. Carroll opened the door to the entire Tibetan community in Kathmandu. With her help I was able to secure a copy of the namthar and have it translated by a revered Buddhist monk, Lama Urgyen. An extraordinary scholar, Lama Urgyen had worked on no fewer than forty namthars. Thus he delivered not only a complete and accurate translation but also great insights into the character of Dzatrul Rinpoche, the intensity of his devotion, and the reverence with which the people of the region embraced him. While in Kathmandu I met Tsering Tsamchu, a ninety-year-old Buddhist nun who had studied with Dzatrul Rinpoche at Rongbuk. I asked her what he had looked like. She replied without hesitation: Shakyamuni, the Buddha.

  When Dzatrul Rinpoche passed away, in 1940, his spiritual heir Trulshig Rinpoche became abbot of Rongbuk. In 1959, with the final Chinese conquest of Tibet, the monks and nuns of Rongbuk were forced to flee to Nepal, crossing the Nangpa La. After a time in solitary retreat, Trulshig Rinpoche saw to the construction of a new monastery at Thubten Chöling, which in every way replicated the devotional ambience and ritual rigor of Rongbuk.

  Thus, in order to know what life was like at Rongbuk in 1924, Carroll and I had only to travel to Solu Khumbu and Thubten Chöling, home today to some eight hundred Buddhist monks and nuns. To stay at the monastery and be in the presence of Trulshig Rinpoche was from the Tibetan perspective to return spiritually to Rongbuk and the radiance of Dzatrul Rinpoche. In terms of ritual activities, this was quite literally true, for the esoteric rites and purifications delineated in such detail in Dzatrul Rinpoche’s namthar mark fixed points in a liturgical calendar that does not vary year to year. The “devil dances,” for example, that several of the climbers witnessed and that John Noel filmed at the end of the 1922 expedition were elements of a celebration known as Mani Rimdu, an eighteen-day festival that Carroll and I attended at Chiwong Monastery in 2005. See: Luther Jerstad, Mani-Rimdu: Sherpa Dance Ritual (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), and Richard Kohn, Lord of the Dance (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). More significantly, our time at Thubten Chöling opened my mind to the power and wonder of the Buddhist path. This new awareness unfolded with even greater insight during the month Carroll and I spent walking close to Everest with Matthieu Ricard, a renowned scholar and monk, as we studied the Buddhist science of the mind.

  A final phase of research grew out of these travels. First I needed to learn more about the practice of chöd, and for this I turned, in Kathmandu, to Lama Wangdu, one of Carroll’s teachers. Second, I wanted to know more about the Shining Crystal Monastery at Shegar; its fortress and temples had captivated, among others, Howard-Bury. In Kathmandu, Carroll learned of two unpublished manuscripts written by Pu Rab Ngawang, a Tibetan who, with his brother, a monk from Shegar, had been imprisoned by the Chinese for twenty years before escaping to Nepal. Despite the risk, his brother had returned to Shegar to smuggle out of the monastery its principal canonical text, the Ngag Dbang Skal Ldan Rgya Mtsho. He was caught, imprisoned again, and the text confiscated by Chinese authorities. When Carroll and Pu Rab Ngawang met, he was astonished to see a facsimile of this text on the cover of a book I had left with her, a remarkable translation: Pasang Wangdu and Hildegard Diemberger, Shel Dkar Chos ’Byung: History of the “White Crystal”: Religion and Politics of Southern La Stod (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996). See also: Maria Antonia Sironi, Hildegard Diemburger, and Pasang Wangdu, The Story of the White Crystal (Bergamo, Italy: Ferrari Editrice Clusone, 1995). Pu Rab Ngawang’s own writings on the history of Shegar were translated by Thinley Dondrup, a Tibetan scholar from Tribhuvan University and the University of Wisconsin. Thinley also translated the namthar of Lingkhor Rinpoche, who was the lama of Shegar at the time of Dzatrul Rinpoche and the British expeditions. Both documents offered curious insights.

  Finally, I needed to understand Tibetan notions of sacred geography. I had first learned of hidden valleys and spiritual refugia in the writings of two friends and colleagues, Ed Bernbaum and Johan Reinhard. See: Edwin Bernbaum, The Way to Shambhala (Boston: Shambhala, 2001) and Sacred Mountains of the World (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), and Johan Reinhard, “Khembalung: the Hidden Valley,” Kailash, vol. 6, no. 1 (1978), pp. 5–36. Their work led me to Hildegard Diemberger, a brilliant scholar and adventurer who had spent much of her life in the Himalaya. Her father was the renowned Himalayan climber Kurt Diemberger. It did not surprise me that the daughter of such a man would turn out to be one of the world authorities on Tibetan ideas of sacred landscape. I found her at the anthropology department at Cambridge University, where she welcomed me warmly even as she opened my mind to the real meaning of mountains. It was Hildegard who showed me that the entire time the British were scrambling across the flanks of Everest, they were walking in mystic space.

  1: Great Gable

  The memorial gathering at Great Gable was widely reported. See: “A Mountain War Memorial: Ceremony on Great Gable,” Yorkshire Post, June 9, 1924; “Mountain War Memorial: Unveiling of Tablet on Great Gable,” Times, June 9, 1924; “Memorial Service in the Clouds,” Daily Mail, June 10, 1924; and “A Mountain Memorial: Climbers Who Fell in the War,” Advertiser, June 13, 1924. For the annual FRCC dinner at Coniston where the gift of land was announced, see: “A Mountain Memorial,” Westmoreland Gazette, October 20, 1923, and “Splendid War Memorial,” Yorkshire Post, October 23, 1923. For Wakefield’s speech at the dinner, see: “Preserving the Heart of Lakeland: 3,000 Acre Gift to the Nation,” Manchester Guardian, October 15, 1923. Wakefield’s climbing record is noted in: Ashley Abraham, “Lake District Fell Walking,” Fell and Rock Climbing Club (FRCC) Journal, vol. 5, no. 2 (1920), pp. 173–80. Documents regarding the ceremony, including Geoffrey Young’s account of the day and Wakefield’s correspondence as president of the club, may be found in the Collection of the FRCC at Kendal.

  For a fine biography of Geoffrey Young, see: Alan Hankinson, Geoffrey Winthrop Young (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995). For a sense of the spirit of the Pen y Pass gatherings—along with Young’s memorable description of Mallory as a climber: “He swung up rock with a long thigh, a lifted knee, and a ripple of irresistible movement”—see: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Geoffrey Sutton, and Wilfred Noyce, Snowdon Biography (London: J. M. Dent, 1957). For more on Pen y Pass, see: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, “An Impression of Pen y Pass, 1900–1920,” in H. R. C. Carr and G. A. Lister, eds., The Mountains of Snowdonia (London: Crosby Lockwood, 1948), pp. 75–89.

  For Young’s harrowing account of the first months of the war, see: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, From the Trenches (London: Unwin, 1914). The passage beginning, “In the new army around us” is quoted from p. 226 of his hauntingly beautiful memoir, The Grace of Forgetting (London: Country Life, 1953); “the writing of madmen” is from p. 155; “Is that death?,” p. 169; “In the half-exposed remnant,” p. 245; “for then we still thought all men were human,” p. 233.

  G. M. Trevelyan, a friend from Cambridge of both Young’s and Mallory’s, served with Young on the Italian front. For an account of that campaign and the action at Monte San Gabriele that cost Young his leg, see: G. M. Trevelyan, Scenes from Italy’s War (London: T. C & E. C. Jack, 1919). The Roof Climber’s Guide to Trinity, published anonymously by W. P. Spalding in 1900, was reissued by Oleander Press in Cambridge in 2009. Young describes Mallory’s near disaster on Nesthorn in On High Hills (London: Methuen, 1927), p. 178. See also: Geoffrey Winthrop Young, ed., Mountain Craft (London: Methuen, 1920), a book dedicated to the memory of fifty “gallant comrades,” climbers, for the most part, killed in the war.

  The vast literature on the Great War continues to expand by the year. Books encompassing the entire war that I found especially helpful include: Arthur Banks, A Military Atlas of the First World War (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2004); Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books,
1999); Martin Gilbert, The First World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), and A History of the Twentieth Century, 1900–1933 (New York: Morrow, 1997); Edward Gleichen, ed., Chronology of the Great War (London: Greenhill Books, 2000); B. H. Liddell Hart, A History of the World War, 1914–1918 (London: Faber and Faber, 1934); Richard Holmes, The Western Front (New York: TV Books, 1999); John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999); Hew Strachan, Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and The First World War: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Denis Winter, Death’s Men (London: Penguin, 1979). See also: Lyn Macdonald, 1915: The Death of Innocence (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), and To the Last Man: Spring 1918 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998).

  Wherever Wakefield traveled as a missionary and a doctor, he sowed the seeds of imperial desire, attracting to the colors the very best men, the brothers, uncles, and fathers of all those whose lives he had affected as a physician and healer. He had begun in 1911 at St. Anthony, at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, and by 1914 he had established local branches of legionnaires in virtually every settlement in his domain. “It is most encouraging,” he would write in a report from Mud Lake, as the winter snows of early 1914 drifted past the second-floor window of his study, “to find so keen a sense of duty to their country, and of love to their King and to the Empire, of which they are citizens, amongst those living in these northern wilds … On my northern trip Legion meetings were held at Nain and Hopedale, and the greatest loyalty was displayed, nearly all the able bodied young fellows, and many of the older men also, joining with enthusiasm.” Both Wakefield and his wife, Madge, sent accounts of their experiences to Toilers of the Deep, the official publication of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. For accounts of the Grenfell Mission, see: Wilfred Grenfell, A Labrador Doctor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), and Forty Years for Labrador (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932).

  Wakefield’s World War I service papers dating from December 1916, when he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force, are found in the database of the Library and Archives Canada (RG 150; Accession 1992–93/166, Box 9990–17). These include records of his service on HMHS Letitia beginning on March 12, 1917. See also: War Diary, 2 Canadian Stationary Hospital (TNA: PRO WO95/4109).

  Thirty-three letters written by Wakefield to his wife, Madge, between 1914 and 1919 survive (those from 1917 are missing, presumed accidentally destroyed). Several provided particular insights: on the Florizel on October 6, 1914; at Salisbury Plain on December 4, 1914; on German atrocities on November 26, 1918, from Pamploux; “I assure you I am doing my best” on December 8, 1918, from Ludendorf.

  Two letters proved especially important in the early phase of the research. We knew that Wakefield had left the Newfoundland Regiment just before it embarked for Gallipoli. A letter written to his wife on September 12, 1915, placed him in France with the 29th Casualty Clearing Station. A separate document, a movement order dated September 25, 1915, indicated that Wakefield on that date returned on leave to England. A search in the National Archives, War Office (WO) records, revealed that for inexplicable reasons the war diary of the 29th CCS does not cover the period from August 15 through December 15, 1915. Because of this gap in the war diary, it was uncertain when Wakefield returned to France, and if, when he did, he remained attached to the same medical unit.

  All communications from the front were censored, and junior officers, responsible for vetting the letters of their enlisted men, exercised discretion with their own correspondence. On February 3, 1916, Wakefield wrote to his wife, with a postscript that noted his location as being simply “Somewhere in France.” But in the letter he mentioned a bronze statue of a virgin, sunk by its own weight at a right angle to the steeple of a ruined church. This was undoubtedly the Madonna of the Basilica of Albert, a mournful image of pity and despair that had over time taken on redemptive, even mythic, significance for the men on both sides of the trenches. It was said that if she fell to earth, the side responsible would be destined to lose the war. Many claimed that blood rained from her body, just as tears fell from the eyes of the Christ child in her arms. This reference indisputably placed Wakefield in Albert, the staging ground for the Somme, in the spring of 1916.

  Knowing that the army was not likely to have transferred experienced surgeons out of the sector on the eve of the assault, I was curious whether Wakefield might possibly have been responsible for the medical support for his beloved Newfoundland Regiment, which arrived at the Somme front in April, less than three months before the battle. In the archival records, the unit diary of the 29th CCS resumes on January 1, 1916, which allowed us from that date to track Wakefield’s movements.

  The first challenge was to determine whether, at the Somme, the 29th CCS received the wounded from the 29th Division, which included the Newfoundland Regiment, attached at the time to the 88th Brigade. The DMS (Director of Medical Services) for the Third Army (TNA: PRO WO 95/381) revealed that as of March 3, 1916, the 29th CCS was transferred to the administration of the Fourth Army, under Rawlinson, which included the 29th Division. The Fourth Army DMS diary (TNA: PRO WO 95/447) confirmed that as of July 1, 1916, the 29th CCS remained attached to it. The next step was to consult the diaries of the field ambulance units (88th Field Ambulance [TNA: PRO WO 95/2296]; 1/1 South Midland Field Ambulance [TNA: PRO WO 95/2752]) responsible for evacuating casualties from the regimental aid posts to the 29th CCS at Gézaincourt and of the ambulance trains that carried the wounded from there to the base hospitals at Boulogne, Étaples, Le Havre, and Rouen. On July 3, 1916, for example, six trains evacuated a total of thirty officers and 4,206 other ranks from the 29th CCS.

  The war diary of the DMS for the Fourth Army (TNA: PRO WO 95/447) provides in a single entry a haunting sense of the chaos and agony of July 1. At 10:00 p.m. admissions to the field ambulances totaled 526 officers and 14,146 other ranks. Trains from Acheux carried these to 29th CCS, where the wounded already numbered 528 officers and 7,236 enlisted men, including 1,460 victims of poison gas. The war diary of the 88th Field Ambulance, which supported the 88th Brigade, confirmed that it was based at Acheux, close to Beaumont-Hamel, where the Newfoundland Regiment was annihilated. On the casualty lists were names that confirmed that the handful of Newfoundlanders who survived the debacle at Beaumont-Hamel did indeed pass through Wakefield’s 29th CCS.

  For the overall medical challenges of the war, see: Lyn Macdonald, The Roses of No Man’s Land (New York: Atheneum, 1989); T. J. Mitchell and G. M. Smith, Medical Services: Casualties and Medical Statistics of the Great War (Nashville: Battery Press, 1997), originally published in 1931; and Ian Whitehead, Doctors in the Great War (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1999).

  Howard Somervell describes his early life in his memoir After Everest. For his military record, see: Officer File (TNA: PRO WO 374/64114) and the war diary of the 34th CCs (TNA: PRO WO 95/415). Many medical records from the Great War were destroyed in the German attacks on London in 1940. Fortunately, those of the 34th CCS survived. TNA MH 106/776 contains a complete record of surgical procedures undertaken at 34th CCS between June and August 1918; those performed by Somervell alone take up thirty-three pages. His expertise, forged out of necessity and constant experimentation, resulted in a number of publications both during and after the war. See: T. Howard Somervell, “The Symptoms and Treatment of Trench Foot,” Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, pp. 38–45, and The Surgery of the Stomach and Duodenum (London: Edward Arnold, 1948). For Somervell’s correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 11, File 6.

  For the best account of the opening assault on the Somme, see: Martin Middle-brook, First Day of the Somme (New York: Norton, 1972). See also: Malcolm Brown, Somme (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1996); John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking, 1976); Gerald Glidden, When the Barrage Lifts: A Topographical History and Commentary on the Battle of the Somme, 1916 (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1990); and Ray Westlake, British Battalions on the Somme, 1916 (Barnsle
y: Leo Cooper, 1994). In recent years, a number of books have attempted to exonerate Douglas Haig by suggesting that after 1915, attrition was both a legitimate goal and the lone strategy that could have brought an end to a war that in an unprecedented manner had harnessed the full economic and industrial capacities of nation-states. Denis Winter, in Haig’s Command: A Reassessment (London: Penguin, 1991), suggests to the contrary that Haig’s mind ran on rails and that for four years the field marshal cast away the lives of his troops as if on a mission to reduce the national population.

  For Somervell’s description of walking through six acres of wounded soldiers at Vecquemont on July 1, 1916, see: After Everest, pp. 38–40. The experience transformed him into a pacifist and no doubt led to his decision to devote his life to saving lives in India. See: Howard Somervell, Knife and Life in India: Being the Story of a Surgical Missionary at Neyyoor, Travancore (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), and India Calling (London: Livingston, 1947). In After Everest, he recalled:

  One day I went for a short walk on the battlefield. I sat down to rest on a sandbag. Just in front of me was a lad asleep, looking very ill—sallow skin, quite still. My God he’s not breathing! He’s dead! I got a real shock. I sat there for half an hour gazing at that dead boy. About eighteen I should say. He lay on his back, not mutilated, perhaps not dead many hours. Strange that, with corpses and bits of them strewing the ground for miles around, I should be so impressed by this one dead body. But so it was. For the moment he personified the madness called War. What did it mean to him? What were diplomacy, national relationships, commercial interests to him? Why should he be cut off before really tasting the joys and hardships and glories of life? And he was just one of tens of thousands.