True Summit

by David Roberts

  MEANWHILE, the down-to-earth Lachenal cursed the delay in Lété. All his frustration and suffering are packed into an extraordinary sentence he wrote in his diary on June 20.

  My feet give me a lot of trouble and I have truly had enough of this, of the noise of the Kali [Gandaki, the river the caravan followed], always the same, of listening constantly to people around me talking in a shrill language that I don’t understand, of suffering, of being dirty, of being hot, of being injected by idiots, of not sleeping, of not being able to move around, of being surrounded by no one who is kind to me, of passing whole days alone on my stretcher with at best one Sherpa as companion, with no sahibs, knowing full well that nothing will get done, not even ordinary tasks, without my having to ask many times and then to wait a long, long time.

  In his misery, only one thought gave Lachenal any pleasure: to contemplate “my family, my kids, whom I have a mad desire to see again, my wife who alone will take care of me.”

  From Base Camp, Herzog had sent a Sherpa ahead as a runner to get the news of the expedition’s success back to France. On June 16, while Herzog lay waiting for death in the woods of Lété, Figaro broke the news. Because the team had signed exclusive contracts with that newspaper and with the magazine Paris-Match, Herzog and Ichac had been vigilant, as they had periodically sent off dispatches, that news from the expedition not be intercepted and leaked. Even at the time, Rébuffat was scornful of these first efforts by Herzog to put his own spin on the story. In one undated letter to Françoise, he wrote, “Don’t believe for a moment what the telegrams sent to Figaro say. It makes us laugh sometimes to hear the wording Ichac and Herzog give them!”

  Slowly the caravan moved on. On the 21st Lachenal bore what he called “the most painful episode for me of the whole evacuation,” when Adjiba carried him across a bridge over the Kali Gandaki. At the start of the crossing, Lachenal’s left foot (the worse frostbitten) struck a big stone; then, as Adjiba stumbled on, both feet banged repeatedly against the chains that suspended the bridge. “He left me weeping beside the trail on the other side,” wrote Lachenal; “he dumped me literally on the ground as he went off to look for the Bara Sahib [Herzog].”

  So the entries in Lachenal’s diary stream on, noting small indignities and rare moments of pleasure, giving the day-by-day details of the long march home that Herzog’s account is too well crafted to include. “A pretty bad night. Didn’t have any morphine. Besides, I was nibbled by fleas.” “In the middle of the night, a huge need to take a shit which I satisfied in an old box.” “It rained in torrents almost the whole night and it’s still raining this morning.” “I believe I have never been so dirty in my life. It’s been two months since I washed—not even my hands.”

  “All the young females in this region are beautiful, with eyes like coals.” “In the evening, the countryside was very beautiful, a mixture of the green of vegetation and the ochre of the cliffs.” “When I’m not suffering too much, life seems almost good.”

  Lachenal’s sole distraction on the slow march out was a mystery novel Ichac lent him, which had the ominous title, The Man Without a Head. That, cigarettes, and morphine got him through his days.

  Lachenal’s able-bodied teammates seemed to him to have little compassion for his sufferings. Even Terray was distant on the march out from Annapurna. Only Rébuffat seemed truly solicitous. “He was very nice to me last night and this morning,” wrote Lachenal one evening, and some days later, “He offered me several very kind words, not idiotic ones. Several heartfelt words in the right tone, not the ritual phrases of consolation.”

  On July 1, with the return of a courier, Lachenal was overjoyed to receive several letters from Adèle. Yet reading them filled him with a deep melancholy at the thought that his house in Chamonix, in July, “would be all beautiful (flowers, grass), waiting for me, and that I would return terribly deformed.”

  On July 2, Oudot performed his first amputations. The penicillin had reduced the men’s septicemia, but many digits were clearly unsalvageable. On a meadow beside the river, Oudot first went to work on Herzog. Lachenal says that four of Herzog’s toes, including both big toes, were the first to go; Herzog’s own account has a little finger cut off first. “This gave me rather a twinge,” writes Herzog in Annapurna, with a kind of gallows humor. “A little finger may not be much use, but all the same I was attached to it!” According to Herzog, the operation was performed without anaesthetic (why, if Oudot had novocaine?).

  Then it was Lachenal’s turn. As Oudot snipped away with his scissors, “I cried like a baby and howled. Ichac and Lionel held my foot.” Later that night, however, “calmed by morphine, I spent an excellent evening with Pansy with a pack of Gauloises and a bottle of cognac.”

  By now, the halting caravan of Annapurna survivors had spent a full month on the march out. Wrote Herzog, “The expedition had turned into a limp and anemic body straggling without much spirit on a course the reason for which escaped us. We were buoyed up by a single wish: to get to India as quickly as possible.” As always, Lachenal was beside himself with impatience. “What a lot of time we’re wasting!” Herzog quotes him as complaining toward the end of the long march.

  “We’ll have to be patient, Biscante; things aren’t always easy.”

  Finally, on July 6, three trucks that Noyelle had gone ahead to arrange arrived at the men’s camp. After the wounded had been loaded aboard, the trucks drove them to the railway terminus at Nautanwa. From there, the train would speed the men to Delhi.

  Yet on the first leg of that journey, in 113 degree heat inside the railway car, Oudot performed a last set of amputations. After Lachenal had removed his own dressings, the doctor waited for the brief halts of the train at successive stations, then quickly cut away with his scissors. “At the station before Gorakhpur,” wrote Lachenal laconically, “two toes fell from my right foot. At the stop at Gorakhpur, three more from the right foot.”

  In his sweaty haste, Oudot dropped his smaller pair of scissors down the window slot. Cutting with the larger pair, he sliced into living flesh. Lachenal screamed and jerked his foot away, whereupon Oudot scolded him, telling him to be more cooperative. Incredulous, Lachenal wrote in his diary that night, “I will remember this forever.”

  The jocular tone of gallows humor bathes this nightmarish scene in the railway car in Annapurna.

  Things had to be cleaned up now; the nauseating smell drove even the natives away. Sarki and Foutharkey set to work, they opened the the door wide and with a sort of old broom made of twigs, they pushed everything onto the floor. In the midst of a whole heap of rubbish rolled an amazing number of toes of all sizes which were then swept onto the platform before the startled eyes of the natives.

  In his diary, Lachenal wrote at the end of this wretched day, “I suffered something truly horrible, but after all, so much the better. Is not memory proportional to suffering?”

  In a 1999 documentary about Annapurna filmed by Bernard George, Herzog looks back with a certain disdain on Lachenal’s agonies. “He was obsessed with this story of his feet,” says Herzog, in measured tones. “There was a kind of obsession that was painful. It breathes in all his writings: ‘My feet, my feet, my feet.’ . . .

  “In climbing, one must adapt. I lost both my feet and my hands, but it didn’t ruin my life.”

  What was the cause of Oudot’s haste in the railway car? Surprisingly, Herzog had chosen to divide the party. He, Oudot, Ichac, and Noyelle would change trains at Gorakhpur and ride to Kathmandu. Lachenal, Terray, Rébuffat, Schatz, and Couzy would proceed to Delhi. The rationale for this separation, according to Herzog, was that “I intended to make every effort possible to keep the promise I had given at the start to visit the Maharajah of Nepal.”

  It was no accident that Herzog took the expedition doctor with him. By now, on July 6, all the climbers wanted nothing but to get back to France as soon as possible. Not only psychologically, but in terms of the worsening condition of Herzog’s and Lachenal’s feet and
hands, the sooner the men could fly to France the better.

  In the end, however, it would be eleven more days before the Annapurna team boarded its airplane. Those eleven days of waiting drove Lachenal deeper into fury and despair.

  IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES, it is puzzling that Herzog would have delayed his whole team’s return to France for any ceremony, no matter how prestigious. In Annapurna, he devotes three and a half of the last five pages of the book to his audience with the Maharajah, which unfolds as a pageant of jewel-encrusted uniforms, of Gurkha soldiers presenting arms, and dignitaries giving formal speeches. At the climax of the ceremony, the Maharajah conferred on Herzog the country’s highest military honor, the Gurkha Right Hand for valor, saying, “You are a brave man, and we welcome you here as a brave man.”

  Yet the book also makes clear that attending the ceremony taxed Herzog to the limit. As he sat watching the long performance, pus and blood oozed through his bandages. Ichac whispered, “How’s it going?”

  “Pretty awful,” Herzog whispered back. “I don’t think I can hold out much longer.”

  Later, in Delhi, Oudot discovered that Herzog’s feet had become infested with maggots. When he tried to use tweezers to remove them, they withdrew into holes in the man’s dead flesh.

  Even if Herzog felt it vital to attend the audience of the Maharajah, why could the five climbers in Delhi not have flown at once back to France?

  When I interviewed her in 1999, Françoise Rébuffat gave me one answer, based on her late husband’s understanding of the situation. “Herzog said at one point that his company, Kléber-Colombes, had asked him to work, to go see the Maharajah. They knew Nepal would need rubber.

  “Herzog took away all the men’s passports, so they couldn’t go home early. No one was to get back to France before Herzog. He even insisted on being the first off the plane when it landed at Orly. This embittered Gaston.”

  In fact, it was Lucien Devies who, acting in consultation with Herzog, secured tickets for a return flight on July 16. Meanwhile, in Delhi, the five climbers loitered, with nothing to do. Lachenal’s diary records this ordeal by monotony, which became for him even worse than the agonies of the retreat by stretcher.

  “All my comrades are dawdlers who think only about themselves, never about me,” he writes on July 8. That evening the men attended a dinner party for all the French citizens in Delhi—all fifteen of them. “My feet felt really bad, and in addition I was sick to my stomach with colic, and at every instant I was afraid I would have to ask someone to carry me to the bathroom.”

  July 9: “I changed my dressings, which were oozing [with pus] and which smelled really bad. There is a lot of rotten flesh. . . . I change positions a thousand times a day, a thousand times a night. My ass, on which I sit day and night, gives me a lot of trouble.”

  July 10: “The afternoon was very slow, it seemed it would never end. Several times I asked myself what day it was. Yes, at 6:00 P.M., as at 3:00 P.M., as at 1:00 P.M., it was still always the 10th and to get to the 11th, it was necessary to wait half the night. And after—after that it will be the 11th, just like the 10th, with the same suffering, the same pains.”

  July 11: “Bored to death. The onset of the night was very slow. Morphine.”

  Appalled by the gangrene that was developing in his feet, Lachenal twice begged his companions to fetch doctors to attend to him. These native physicians were in over their heads, as they confronted the ravages of frostbite.

  The doctor undid my dressing with a great deal of delicacy. He proceeded with much propriety. He sterilized his tools over an alcohol flame. He seemed a bit frightened, he didn’t know what he ought to do, so he asked me. . . . In the end, he was content with covering my feet with gauze soaked in Mercurochrome and wrapping them back up again.

  By July 12, on learning that the flight home was to be delayed another day, Lachenal had reached the ragged end of his patience. “Does Momo think of no one but himself?” he raged in his diary.

  Finally, after the return of the Kathmandu party, Lachenal consented to one more treatment by Oudot, who amputated his last toes. “I suffered horribly. He gave me an intravenous shot of morphine, which did me little good. . . . At each attack of the scissors, the scalpel, the lancet, my big toe jumped. For me this was a huge disappointment, for I had truly believed I could keep part [of my toes].”

  “Will I still be able to ski properly?” Lachenal wondered in his diary on July 15. “Tomorrow is the departure toward my wife.”

  At last the 16th arrived. The men boarded the airplane, then whiled away the hours of the endless flight. Just before landing at Orly the next day, Lachenal and Herzog put fresh dressings on their wounds.

  Their reception on arrival was more tumultuous than anyone had predicted. Before a wildly cheering throng, Herzog was hoisted first off the airplane, his feet and hands covered with enormous bandages. Rébuffat followed, then Couzy, then Terray, carrying Lachenal in his arms like a child. Reporters swarmed around the worn-out climbers, demanding at once the whole story of Annapurna. Herzog’s mother, father, and siblings embraced him. Adéle took Lachenal’s head in her hands and kissed him, tears streaming down her face.

  For the French, still sunk in the humiliation of World War II, the conquest of the first 8,000-meter peak ever climbed became at once a matter of incalculable national pride. Indeed, it could be argued that no triumph of sport in the nation’s history ever meant so much to its people. Nor was the glory to be short-lived. Fifty years later, Annapurna still occupies a sovereign place in the French soul.

  For Herzog, the ordeal of recovery had just begun. Annapurna ends with the arrival at Orly, with Herzog’s ringing envoi: “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.” The most moving passages in L’Autre Annapurna concern the author’s convalescence. In the end, he would spend a full year in the American hospital at Neuilly, undergoing twelve major operations and a number of skin grafts. His spirit would plummet to a bedrock despair, before the “new life” could truly commence.

  Early on in his hospital stay, Herzog underwent a moment of deep horror. Surrounded by doctors, the patient lay still as nurses unwrapped the dressings on his feet. The head physician offered soothing words: “Maurice, be brave while I change this last bit of gauze.”

  Suddenly Herzog heard a chorus of cries. Doctors and nurses alike jerked back involuntarily. “They’re jumping!” someone screamed. “They’re jumping!”

  The maggots that had infested Herzog’s feet in Nepal had gorged on his dead flesh. Now, each one as thick as a pencil, at the moment of release from their prison of gauze, they leapt into the air in every direction.

  Herzog could not control the tears of an utter desolation.

  SEVEN

  The Meditation of Rébuffat

  WITH THE TEAM MEMBERS bound by their contract to publish no account of the expedition for five years after its conclusion, it would seem that Devies and Herzog had planned from the start for Herzog to write the official book. In L’Autre Annapurna, however, Herzog insists that this was not the case—that as he lay recuperating in the hospital, he had no notion of writing about the expedition.

  In that memoir, he attributes the spark of the idea to a head nurse named Irène Kravchenko, whose blue eyes, blond hair, and “ravishing” smiles boosted the invalid’s morale. Kravchenko’s beauty, writes Herzog, camouflaged “an inflexible will.” One day she let her patient know that she considered him psychologically as well as physically damaged. What he needed, she counseled, was a purpose in life.

  “A purpose?” Herzog protested. “My god, what? Reading? Is that your idea?”

  “Why not write?” proposed Kravchenko.

  “You’re joking. What about my hands?”

  “You could dictate a book. Your book. Your life, your death. A new life. . . . You must do it. You can do it!”

  Is this story disingenuous? Is it a complete fiction? How could Herzog not have planned to write the book a voracious public was already cla
moring for? In its portrait of the maimed victor of Annapurna as a reluctant celebrity, the Kravchenko vignette mirrors a stance Herzog would come to perfect in his lecture appearances.

  As soon as its editors could put together a story, on August 19 Paris-Match ran its exclusive account of the expedition. The cover featured the now-famous summit photo of Herzog holding aloft the Tricolor attached to the shaft of his ice axe; inside were splashed sixteen pages of color and black-and-white photos. (These photos were credited to Ichac, although Rébuffat took the ones high on the mountain, Lachenal the summit photo.) The issue broke all the magazine’s previous sales records.

  On January 25, 1951, 2,500 spectators crowded into the Salle Pleyel in Paris to watch the premiere of the film Ichac had brought back from Annapurna. The audience included the president of France, Vincent Auriol, and five ministers. Herzog, holding the stumps of his hands pressed together before him, limped across the stage, with his eight teammates following in single file, to the wild applause of the congregation.

  In L’Autre Annapurna the reluctant celebrity gives us a glimpse of the climbers nervously lingering backstage before their procession. Everyone feels intimidated by the grand occasion. His friends counsel Herzog to lead the procession on stage, but he demurs, urging they appear as a group. Terray clinches the debate: “You were the first on the summit. Here, you should be first as well. Go ahead.”

  After the premiere on January 25, it would require thirty more showings of the film in Paris, and some 300 lectures and individual appearances by the climbers in other French cities, to satisfy the public’s passion for details of the great adventure.

  On February 17, Paris-Match ran another cover story on Annapurna, focusing on the film premiere at the Salle Pleyel. This time the cover photo showed a still emaciated Herzog, clean-shaven and dapper in jacket and tie, holding his truncated hands out toward the audience as he spoke into a microphone. The cover blurb announced, “Paris salutes the triumph of the conquerors of Annapurna”; then, “Herzog—his life, his struggles, his defeats, his victories.” The text hailed Herzog as “our number one national hero.” As for the film premiere and the subsequent séances at the Salle Pleyel, the reporter gushed about the “enormous crowd” that “every night shouts itself hoarse, crying out its pride in the conquerors of the Himalaya.”