by Wade Davis
For a serving officer to publish such a tract was tantamount to treason. To avoid the embarrassment of a military court-martial, the government agreed to a compromise suggested by Graves. Sassoon would be declared mentally unfit and dispatched to Craiglockhart, a military hospital in Edinburgh that specialized in the treatment of officers suffering from neurasthenia, or shell shock. Graves made this arrangement not to compromise his friend but, rather, to save him. At the medical review board, Graves acknowledged that Sassoon suffered from hallucinations, visions of the dead rising from the corpse-strewn soils of Picardy. Three times during his testimony he burst into tears, recalling the ground where he, too, had been abandoned to die. Only one who had lived through the insanity of the trenches, he said, could understand that Sassoon’s statement was no mere protest. It was the agonized cry of a soldier doomed never to be free from the horror.
At Craiglockhart Sassoon met Wilfred Owen. Owen had joined the 2nd Manchesters in December 1916 and within a week had been at the front, “marooned on a frozen desert,” lying beside the stiff bodies of friends dead from the cold. For twelve days he did not sleep, wash, or remove his boots. Under constant gas and artillery attack, with shells bursting within yards of his position, burying comrades alive, Owen shattered. It was not about courage or cowardice. Later in the war he would win the Military Cross by single-handedly seizing a German machine gun and using it to kill more of the enemy than he wished to remember. He would die seven days before the end of the war, leading his men in an attack across the Sambre River and the Oise Canal. Shell shock was not due to personal weakness; it was a state of being that afflicted, to one degree or another, a majority of the men who actually knew the reality of the front. In 1916 it accounted for 40 percent of the casualties in combat zones. More than 80,000 men were formally diagnosed, and these were the ones who came out of the line not just dazed but rabid, incapable of speech, incontinent, their eyes bulging in rage, their fingers clawing at their mouths, drooling with the livid faces of the half dead. Owen endured for three months, until, shaking and tremulous, his memory vacant, he was evacuated from the front.
At the hospital Owen showed some of his unpublished poetry to Sassoon, who encouraged him to write about the war. Through Sassoon, Owen became friendly with Graves. By the same post that brought Owen an invitation to Graves’s wedding came a letter from the Nation accepting for publication the “Miners,” his first poem to appear in a national magazine. Owen must have felt some elation as he traveled to London and St. James’s Church in Piccadilly for Graves’s wedding on January 23, 1918. He no doubt shared his good news with Graves and perhaps with Mallory, himself an aspiring writer. Graves and Owen had first met at Craiglockhart in early October 1917, an encounter so inspirational to Owen that he had within the week composed six new poems. Among them was “Dulce et Decorum Est,” arguably the greatest anti-war poem ever written. The title comes from Horace, from a line that had been inscribed in public school minds for generations: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
For more on Owen and Sassoon, see: Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003); John Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) and (as editor) The Poems of Wilfred Owen (New York: Norton, 1986); Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); and Jean Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet (New York: Routledge, 1999).
For a sense of the scale of the industrial war effort, consider that for four years and four months, gunners fired as many as a million shells a day. Behind the narrow British front, engineers laid 6,879 miles of railroad, along which rolled millions of tons of supplies: food, weapons, bandages, bullets, timber, petrol for the tanks and trucks, and hay by the trainload for tens of thousands of horses. The army requisitioned more than thirty thousand miles of flannelette to clean rifles, six million rabbit skins for winter vests, fifty-one thousand rubber stamps, ten million shovels, and 137,224,141 pairs of socks.
Mallory’s final break with Charterhouse came at a memorial service for the school’s dead. The headmaster sat proudly as Field Marshal Lord Plumer remembered the war as “a complete vindication of the English Public-School training in enabling inexperienced soldiers to take responsible posts successfully.” Mallory knew the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, and Plumer’s remark brought to mind the final verse of “Suicide in the Trenches”:
You smug-faced crowd with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go
When Mallory went to Ireland, Desmond Fitzgerald, head of propaganda at the Dáil, the provisional Irish assembly, personally authenticated his documents, writing, “Mr. G Mallory is anxious to have first hand information as to acts of oppression and terror. I shall be glad if he can be assisted.”
6: The Doorway to the Mountain
For a sense of Darjeeling and its railroad circa 1921–24, I consulted contemporary guidebooks, including one written by David Macdonald, the British trade agent at Yatung. See: Darjeeling and Its Mountain Railway (Calcutta: Caledonia, 1921); K. C. Bhanja, Darjeeling at a Glance (Darjeeling: Oxford Book & Stationery, 1941), and Lure of the Himalaya Embodying Accounts of Mount Everest Expeditions by Land and Air (Darjeeling: Gilbert, 1944), History of Darjeeling and the Sikkim Himalaya (New Delhi: Gyan, 1993; originally published in 1948); E. C. Dozey, A Concise History of the Darjeeling District Since 1835 (Calcutta: Jetsun, 1989; originally published in 1922); David Macdonald, Touring in Sikkim and Tibet (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1999; first published by the author in Kalimpong in 1930); and Jahar Sen, Darjeeling: A Favoured Retreat (New Delhi: Indus, 1989). For the breakdown of the mules, see: “Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 58, no. 1 (July 1921), pp. 56–59.
In September 1920, Kellas, accompanied by Morshead, reached 23,600 feet on Kamet in the Garhwal Himalaya. Even as Raeburn and Howard-Bury arrived in Darjeeling, he climbed Narsing (19,930 feet) and reached 21,000 feet on Kabru, a peak just south of Kangchenjunga, to photograph the Everest group from the Kang La, some sixty to eighty miles, he estimated, from the face of the mountain. After nearly a year in the field, he was spent and exhausted before even beginning the Everest reconnaissance. The telegram announcing his death read: “Younghusband. Geographical London Deeply regret report
death of Kellas from sudden heart failure at Kampadzong on June Fifth.” It was wired from Calcutta at 12:50 p.m. (7:20 a.m. GMT on June 8). Sent as urgent three times, at three times the normal expense, it was received in London on the afternoon of June 8, exactly eight and a half hours after having been sent from Calcutta. For the formal announcement of the loss, see: “Mount Everest Expedition,” Geographical Journal, vol. 58, no. 2 (August 1921), pp. 136–37.
For Morshead’s early life, see Ian Morshead’s biography The Life and Murder of Henry Morshead. For the Lohit and Dibang expeditions, see: E. W. C. Sandes, The Military Engineer in India, and The Indian Sappers and Miners (Chatham: Institute of Royal Engineers, 1948). For the exploration of the Tsangpo, see: Bailey, No Passport to Tibet, and H. T. Morshead, “An Exploration in Southeast Tibet,” Royal Engineers Journal (January 1921), pp. 21–40. During the war Morshead commanded the 212th Field Company Royal Engineers (TNA: PRO WO 95/2414), 33rd Division (TNA: PRO WO 95/2411). His second-in-command was John de Vars Hazard. According to the war diary, Lieutenant Hazard was severely wounded at 11:00 p.m., May 15, 1916, while supervising the construction of an observation post on the Somme front. On June 1, 1918, Morshead’s command shifted to the 46th Division (TNA: PRO WO 95/2672) after his predecessor and his adjutant were struck by a shell and killed instantly. Morshead himself was badly wounded by rifle fire on September 25, 1918. In May 1919 Morshead was transferred to India and placed in charge of the Waziristan Survey Force; see History of the Corps of Royal Engineers, vol. 5 (Chatham: Institution of Royal Engineers, 1952). For his correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 31, File 2, and Box 11, File 3. Setting out from Darjeeling, Morshead’s team included the surveyors Lalbir Singh, Gujjar Singh, and Torabaz Khan, the photographer Abdul Jali, and fifty porters. For his account of the 1921 expedition, see: H. T. Morshead, Royal Engineers Journal (September 1923), pp. 353–70. See also: “Report on the Operations of the Mt. Everest Survey Detachment 1921,” Royal Engineers Library, 30/34 1921 (97206), ms. 16 pages. Of interest as well is a comprehensive obituary published in the Royal Engineers Journal (December 1931), pp. 718–23.
For the early life of E. O. Wheeler, see: Esther Fraser, Wheeler (Banff: Summer-thought, 1978). For his record as a cadet at RMC, see National Archives of Canada, II-K-7, vol 7. Both Wakefield and Longstaff climbed with Wheeler and his father. See: A. W. Wakefield, “A Canadian Alpine Club Camp,” FRCC Journal, vol. 5, no. 3 (1921), pp. 261–73. Wheeler’s papers (M169) at the Whyte Museum include a diary for 1911–12 and two scrapbooks, one spanning 1914 to 1924 and a second with personal papers from 1910 through 1933. Of note are newspaper clippings tracking his military honors, first the Military Cross in February 1915, and in December the cross of the Légion d’honneur (Chevalier 5th Class), awarded personally by General Haig.
From August 16, 1914, Wheeler served in the 1st King George V’s Own Bengal Sappers and Miners, No. 3 Company. The war diary (TNA: PRO WO 95/3938) indicates that the unit embarked for France on September 9, reached Marseille on October 14, and was entrenched at the front on October 31, where its soldiers served through the worst of the fighting until November 1915, when the unit was shipped out to Mesopotamia. In the subsequent campaign Wheeler was mentioned in despatches five times in three months, before being invalided to India with typhoid fever (TNA: PRO WO 95/5134). As of April 17, 1917, Wheeler was attached to the 8th Field Company KGO Sappers and Miners (TNA: PRO WO 95/5222); he ended the war at the 55th Infantry Brigade headquarters (TNA: PRO WO 95/5229) and was later transferred to the 51st Brigade, 17th Division, the occupying army (TNA: PRO WO 95/5210). See: J. W. B. Merewether and Frederick Smither, The Indian Corps in France (London: John Murray, 1918).
Wheeler called his wife Dolly; her full name was Dorothea Sophie Danielsen. She was from Birmingham but had made her way to London during the war. They were engaged five days after first meeting. She sailed for India before either knew that Wheeler would be offered a place on the Everest expedition. Married at the Bombay cathedral on March 15, they had but a month together before heading to Darjeeling. Wheeler wrote eighty-three letters to Dolly during the expedition, the first from Rongli on May 21 and the last from “Toong Bungalow” on October 16, three days before they were reunited. These letters complemented Wheeler’s journal and provided a fascinating lens on the 1921 expedition. For Wheeler’s correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 4, File 4. For his account of the 1921 reconnaissance, see: E. O. Wheeler, “The Mount Everest Expedition, 1921,” Canadian Alpine Journal, vol. 13 (1923), pp. 1–25.
The modern Western fascination with Tibet arguably began with the theosophists. See Annie Besant, The Ancient Wisdom (London: Theosophical Publishing, 1899); Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (2 vols.; London: Theosophical Publishing, 1888); and Sylvia Cranston, Helena Blavatsky (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 1993). In the late 1920s and early ’30s, just as scores of war memoirs broke the silence of a decade, a number of books appeared heralding the mystical wonders of Tibet and riding the wave of interest in the occult and all things metaphysical that followed the war. See: Alexander David-Neel’s My Journey to Lhasa (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), Initiations and Initiates in Tibet (London: Rider, 1931), and Magic and Mystery in Tibet (New York: Claude Kendall, 1932); Barbara Foster and Michael Foster, The Secret Lives of Alexandra David-Neel (New York: Overlook, 1998); James Hilton, Lost Horizon (London: Macmillan, 1933); and Nicholas Roerich, Altai-Himalaya (New York: Frederick Stokes, 1929), and Heart of Asia (New York: Roerich Museum Press, 1930). These books influence perceptions of Tibet to this day. Walter Evans-Wentz published a translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927); forty years later it would provide the lyrics for a song by John Lennon and the Beatles, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from the album Revolver, released in 1966.
In recent years, a number of excellent books have examined this cult of the sacred, particularly in the context of contemporary Tibet and the politics of the exile community and the West. See: Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and Dreams of Power: Tibetan Buddhism and the Western Imagination (London: Athlone Press, 1993); Thierry Dodin and Heinz Räther, eds., Imagining Tibet: Perceptions, Projections and Fantasies (Somervell: Wisdom, 2001); Lee Feigon, Demystifying Tibet (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); and Donald Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
7: The Blindness of Birds
There has been much discussion and controversy concerning Tibetan names for Everest. The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin first proposed the name Tchoumou Lancma, and suggested that it had been noted by French Jesuits in China as early as 1717. See: Sven Hedin, Mount Everest (Leipzig: Verlag Brockhaus, 1923). Charles Bell disagreed, suggesting that the name was not Chomolungma but Cha-ma-lung, a prosaic reference to a southern region of snows where Tibetan kings delighted in feeding birds. See: Sydney Burrard, “Mount Everest and Its Tibetan Names,” Survey of India, Prof. Paper 26 (1931). In 1930 David Macdonald, the British trade agent at Yatung, was told by Tibetan officials that the proper name was Mi-ti Gu-ti Cha-pu Long-nga, the full meaning of which was, according to Charles Bell, more or less, “the mountain whose summit was invisible to those nearby, but seen from all nine directions, and so high that birds flying over its peak go blind.” One thing is clear: the popular translation of Chomolungma as “Goddess Mother of the World,” commonly cited in the Everest literature, is a romantic projection with little connection to ethnographic or historical reality. See: Edwin Bernbaum, “A Note on the Tibetan and Nepali Names of Mount Everest,” American Alpine News, vol. 8, no. 227 (1999), pp. 25–26; Ed Douglas, Chomolungma Sings the Blues (London: Constable, 1997); Johan Reinhard, “The Sacred Himalaya,” Alpine Journal, vol. 29, no. 61 (1987), pp. 123–32; J. R. Smith, Everest: The Man and the Mountain, pp. 211–24; T. S. Blakeney, “A Tibetan Name for Everest,” Alpine
Journal, vol. 70, no. 311 (1965), pp. 304–10.
For an understanding of Tingri as a trading nexus, with routes reaching east to Shegar and Shigatse, west to Nyenyam, and south across the Himalayan passes to Nepal, see: Barbara Nimri Aziz, Tibetan Frontier Families: Reflections of Three Generations from D’ing-ri (New Delhi: Vkas, 1978); and “Tibetan Manuscript Maps of Dingri Valley,” The Canadian Cartographer, vol. 12, no. 1 (1975), pp. 28–38. For an introduction to the Buddhist dharma, see: Keith Dowman, The Sacred Life of Tibet (London: Thorsons, 1997); Thomas Laird, The Story of Tibet: Conversations with the Dalai Lama (New York: Grove, 2006); Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard, The Monk and the Philosopher (London: Thorsons, 1998); and Robert Thurman, Essential Tibetan Buddhism (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).
For hidden valleys and sacred geography, see the writings of Hildegard Diemberger: “Beyul Khenbalung, the Hidden Valley of the Artemisia: On Himalayan Communitites and Their Sacred Landscape,” in A. W. MacDonald, ed., Mandala and Landscape (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 1997), pp. 286–334; “Political and Religious Aspects of Mountain Cults in the Hidden Valley of Khenbalung-Tradition, Decline and Revitalization,” in Anne Marie Blondeau and Ernst Steinkeller, eds., Reflections of the Mountain (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996), pp. 219–32; “Pilgrimage to Hidden Valleys, Sacred Mountains and Springs of Life Water in Southern Tibet and Eastern Nepal,” in Charles Ramble and Martin Brauen, eds., Anthropology of Tibet and the Himalaya (Ethnological Museum of the University of Zurich, 1993), pp. 60–72; “Mountain Deities, Ancestral Bones and Sacred Weapons,” in P. Kvaerne, ed., Tibetan Studies (Oslo: Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture, 1994), pp. 144–53; and “The Hidden Valley of the Artemisia,” dissertation, University of Vienna, 1992. See also: Toni Huber, ed., Sacred Spaces and Powerful Places in Tibetan Culture (Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1999); The Cult of Pure Crystal Mountain: Popular Pilgrimage and Visionary Landscape in Southeast Tibet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Franz-Karl Ehrhard, “‘A Hidden Land’ in the Tibetan-Nepalese Borderlands” in A. W. MacDonald, ed., Mandala and Landscape (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 1997), pp. 335–64; Hamid Sardar-Afkhani, “The Buddha’s Secret Gardens: End Times and Hidden Lands in Tibetan Imagination,” dissertation, Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, 2001; and Ngawang Zangpo, Sacred Ground (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 2001). For the chöd tradition, see: Jérôme Edou, Machig Labdrön and the Foundations of Chöd (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 1996); Sarah Harding, ed., Machik’s Complete Explanation: Clarifying the Meaning of Chöd (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 2003); and Joshua Waldman, Lama Wangdu: “Chod Tradition,” thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison.