The Moth and the Mountain

by Ed Caesar

  Wilson himself saw nothing peculiar about his optimism. When he camped on that first night, with only an indifferent meal of lukewarm Quaker Oats in his belly, he felt success was close.

  * * *

  The sheltered spot where Wilson camped on his first night alone was well chosen: out of the wind, and flat. It was also reviving to the spirit. The previous year, Ruttledge had written that this position, at the junction of the Rongbuk and East Rongbuk Glaciers, afforded an indelible view:

  One sees across miles of blue seracs the great cirque west of Mount Everest, from which Pumori stands up alone, ivory-coloured, like a tooth of some gigantic tiger. Everest itself is hidden from view by a shoulder of the mountain group which culminates in the North Peak. Eastward lies the rounded, boulder-strewn tongue of the East Rongbuk glacier, grim foreground to the fluted loveliness of the peak beyond; and the northern wall of the valley is a series of red, perpendicular spires, reminiscent of the Dolomites.

  Wilson’s jubilation at his progress on the first day was tempered by his travails on the second. Having made himself tea and breakfast, he packed his tent and began his climb up the East Rongbuk Glacier, with its powerful impediments to his progress and no visible track to follow. The glacier was formed of huge ice seracs, between fifty and a hundred feet high, which dwarfed and blinded him. Viewed from above, the glacier looked like the icing on top of a Christmas cake. In Ruttledge’s description, to look at this section of the glacier from a high vantage point was an almost psychedelic experience:

  Photography can give no true picture of the ice scenery of the East Rongbuk glacier. It can but show the outlines and mass of the pinnacles, not their gradations of blue, green and gray, and their transparent loveliness. Would that some great painter could accompany us to Everest. The least imaginative of mountaineers must feel, as he watches his companions winding in and out among the great ice-towers, that he is in an enchanted land where things undreamt of in his philosophy may occur at any moment. All is silence, save for the murmur of some little glacier stream wandering over the gleaming ice, and the occasional creak of a serac.

  Wilson, at ground level, did not have a transcendent experience. For him, the glacier was a nightmarish obstruction: a blue, black, and white maze. He could not make head nor tail of it. He scrabbled up steep slopes to get a better view of a possible route, only to find himself—without crampons—slipping down again. He narrowly avoided crevasses. Moraines that might have helped him pick his way up the glacier were covered in snowdrifts. He made halting progress. His breath became short. He experienced what was known by mountaineers of the period as glacier lassitude, a feeling of torpor that they believed was occasioned by stagnant air and an undersupply of oxygen in the trough of a high valley. To mitigate his fatigue, he dumped inessential supplies: one of his Tommy cookers, some food, some candles. By the end of the day—a day on which he had hoped to have reached Camp III—he had barely passed Camp I. When Wilson camped that night, the temperature dropped precipitously.

  He managed to write a few lines in his diary:

  What a hell of a day… have been floundering about doing 50 times more work than necessary… looking forward to getting at Camp III… shall do utmost to get there tomorrow as want to be top on birthday 21st.

  A member of the 1924 expedition to Everest navigates the ice obstacles of the East Rongbuk glacier.

  The next day was hardly better. Wilson rose early from a deep sleep and plowed onward, and upward, picking his way through the maze. He reached Ruttledge’s Camp II at around 4:00 p.m. and decided to pitch his tent, briefly scouting the remains of the British expedition’s campsite for anything of use to him. But there was “not a cigarette butt to be found.”

  Instead, he left a bag full of more supplies near Camp II, including two books. One was a volume on “courage,” given to Wilson by a friend; the other was The Voice of the Silence, his Buddhist text. Wilson no longer needed either. He had learned The Voice of the Silence’s maxims well: “The fearless warrior, his precious life-blood oozing from his wide and gaping wounds, will still attack the foe, drive him from out of his stronghold, vanquish him ere he himself expires. Act then, all ye who fail and suffer, act like him; and from the stronghold of your Soul chase all your foes away—ambition, anger, hatred, e’en to the shadow of desire—when even you have failed.”

  Wilson had by now given up hope of reaching the summit on his birthday “unless a miracle happens.” In a rare moment of complaint, he noted that “if he had the service of coolies like expedition”—he meant Ruttledge’s expedition—“should be at camp 5 by now.” Wilson’s spirits, however, remained strong. He began to be uplifted by the wildness around him:

  The glaciers are marvellously beautiful—gorgeous duck egg blue. Too tired take out camera but will get them on way back. Saw E [Everest] in snow mist this p.m. What a gorgeous sight as it blended into background. Started to snow as camp was just pitched.

  The snowfall continued the next day and didn’t stop. Wilson made only three-quarters of a mile’s progress. He found himself unaccountably thirsty, stopping every few yards to eat snow. Before he turned in again that evening, he scouted a route that he hoped would bring him to Camp III the next day. Wilson was still two miles’ trek away from the camp, and he longed for the food supply “the boys” had assured him was there. Even for a man used to fasting, Wilson was by now profoundly undernourished. He fantasized about a mug of hot chocolate.

  By Friday morning, April 20, he was bemoaning his lack of proper equipment to walk and climb on the ice. (“Hope there are crampons at Camp 3,” he noted, “otherwise shall have to improvise with tin cans and rope.”) The snow continued to fall. Visibility was bad. Wilson wrote in his diary that night:

  Think I shall have to take a bit more to eat and see if that will solve the lassitude business. Don’t feel any ill effects, no hardship in breathing. Don’t think anyone would undertake this job for sheer bravado. Think the climbers had it cushy with servants and porters.

  On Saturday, April 21, Wilson turned thirty-six years old. He was not on the summit of Everest, as he had hoped. Instead, he was floundering, dangerously, on the glacier nine thousand feet below, and running out of energy. The nights had turned so cold that his feet felt like blocks of ice. On the morning of his birthday he attempted to get some more sleep as the sun came up, but he was overtaken by a snowstorm. He made some progress, but eventually the blizzard forced him to quit not far from where he’d started.

  Wilson realized he needed to make a quick decision. He could go on, hope that the weather improved, and that the stores at Camp III revived him. Or he could return to Rongbuk, eat a few proper meals, and make another attempt. His life depended upon the conundrum.

  From the stronghold of your Soul chase all your foes away.

  It was largely owing to his pluck and determination in holding this post that the enemy attack was held up.

  * * *

  Wilson turned back. There was nothing else to do. In the snowstorm, he knew he might not make Camp III, even with a mammoth effort. If he pressed on, he would die on the beautiful glacier. His throat was sore and his eyes stung. He started to descend. He found Camp II, where he now dumped much of his kit in readiness for a possible second attempt. Then he pitched his tent for the night. At some time on this chaotic day, Wilson also found, and then discarded, a pair of crampons—presumably left by Ruttledge’s party. It is a measure of Wilson’s state of mind that he failed to note this crazy piece of luck in his diary that day.

  Wilson was by now in such bad condition that he realized he must try to reach the Rongbuk Monastery by the following evening. It would be a long trek—the longest he’d done at this altitude. To help him cover the ground, Wilson emptied his pack of everything he deemed inessential and carried what he described as a “skeleton rucksack,” which included only his sleeping bag and a few emergency rations. Having made his choice, Wilson found himself at peace.

  “Discretion better part of v
alour,” he wrote in his diary.

  On Monday, April 23, Wilson ate a single slice of bread before starting his trudge to Rongbuk at 6:00 a.m. Somehow, he kept his legs moving for hour upon hour. He entered a dreamlike, delirious state, in which his mind was cast back to old friendships, and forward to new revelations. Somewhere along the way, he started to think about Bradford, and his upbringing:

  Realised during that long trek back that the only true romance I’ve had in life was from my mother. Am going to take her round all the old childhood spots when I get back, buy her ice cream, and pick up her crocheting out of the dirt when she falls asleep.

  Is romance the word? Perhaps so. Recall how Wilson measured the mantle of his priest’s disguise as being “about 6 inches longer than mother’s nightie.” But the dominant sense in this passage is Wilson’s yearning for affection. How often Wilson appeared to have longed for an intimate, reciprocal relationship with a woman. How little he seemed capable of playing his part. Now, close to death on a mountain, he wished only for the purity and safe harbor of maternal love.

  Wilson knew he had to get to Rongbuk. Having left most of his supplies behind, he bet the house on successfully retracing his steps. Failure to reach the monastery in a day would likely mean death. As the morning became the freezing afternoon, and his body rebelled at being pressed into service despite the lack of fuel, he stumbled many times. Sometimes, when he fell, he didn’t have the strength to right himself immediately and he simply gave in to a long, undignified tumble down the mountain. The evening became pitch-black night. It was so cold when the sun disappeared that Wilson quaked from head to toe. All sensation left his feet. He needed to keep moving. If he stopped, he was done for.

  Wilson walked for fourteen hours. Shortly before 10:00 p.m., he took one more fall and tumbled head over heel, to the bottom of a gully. He somehow scrambled up one of its banks and found himself looking at the Rongbuk Monastery. Half-dead, he shouted out for his men: Tewang, then Rinzing, then Tsering. Anyone. Tewang rushed to Wilson with outstretched arms, his smile blazing like fireworks. The other two followed. One put up a tent while the others started cooking food. In the following days, Wilson wrote of the deep pleasure of a midnight feast that included “rice, soup, fried Tibetan meat, and the most gorgeous pot of tea I ever had in my life.”

  The three Bhutias were overjoyed to see Wilson. They had formed a true bond with him over the past few weeks. They must also have believed that his arrival at the monastery would signal the end of his attempt to climb Everest, and the start of their return to Darjeeling. Wilson, however, entertained no such thoughts of surrender. He still needed to climb the mountain.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN MOORLAND GRASS

  • October 1917–May 1934 •

  There was no quit in Wilson, and there never had been. In the hardest circumstances, he had always found the strength to endure. The only thing he ran away from was relationships. Some people are born bullish. Wilson may have been one of them. But he developed his peculiar, cussed brand of courage into not only a trait, but a calling card. That one quality was at the heart of the story he told about himself.

  “Stop me?” he told the reporters. “They haven’t got a dog’s chance!”

  Wilson’s public narrative, you begin to realize, was forged in private trauma. You return again and again to his military records. There is a long period between when he signed up, in 1916, and when he sailed to France, at the end of 1917. You look at one stretch of time, in the wet and windy October of 1917, which Wilson spent at home in Bradford, shortly before deploying to the front line. This, you think, might be the moment when everything—from Wytschaete to Everest—began.

  Second Lieutenant Maurice Wilson had gone home, to 39 Cecil Avenue, to see his family. Victor was there, recuperating. For most of the summer and autumn of 1917, Maurice had been at an officers’ training corps at Oxford. He had not yet seen Victor since he returned from the front line. No record of the meeting between the two brothers survives, but their respective dates of home leave tell you it must have happened. You imagine Maurice, spruce in his uniform, meeting Victor, who was shaking, nearly stone-deaf, suffering from nightmares, and obviously in torment—a brother with his war about to start and a brother whose war was already over.

  What passed between the two men in that cool October? What stories could Victor tell his little brother? How much did he spare him?

  * * *

  This is some of what Victor might have told Maurice.

  Victor might have spoken about how grim and wet his first training camp was, or about that first Christmas away from home, in 1914, when pillows of snow fell on the parade ground. Or about his own first journey to the front line—how he and the other Bradford boys in the First Sixth had boarded trains for London in the springtime of 1915, where, at Liverpool Street Station, they read in the evening papers the casualty lists from the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. Seven thousand British soldiers died in the battle, and the newspapers were full of names.

  The journey to France was almost romantic. Victor had boarded a train to Folkestone, then sailed to Boulogne. The voyage across the English Channel was undertaken in darkness—an hour and a quarter of noiseless, lightless sailing. Their ship was accompanied on either side by torpedo boats. It reached France at midnight. The men marched two and a half miles up a hill to a camp at a place called St. Martin. Many of them had brought with them tender remembrances or extra kit from home—books of poetry, knuckle-dusters—but left them at Boulogne, before the long climb. Their packs were already heavy enough. They lay down that cold night where they could, with their overcoats their only protection from the wet grass.

  The realities of active service then came to Victor and the battalion fast. They were moved from the coast to the front in trains, forty-four fully laden men to a stock car, a tighter squeeze than a Saturday afternoon on the terraces watching the soccer at Bradford Park Avenue. The soldiers of the First Sixth once spent thirty hours jammed in a train compartment, on account of some logistical error. Men pissed where they stood. Some, who were sleeping upright by the doors, fell out of the slow-moving train entirely and were forced to race on foot to rejoin their comrades.

  In those early days, spirits were high. To pass the time, the boys of the First Sixth sang. Hours and hours of singing. Toward the end of their first day on the Continent, they met a train full of wounded British soldiers, traveling in the other direction. Many of the injured men bore head wounds; the British army did not introduce the steel helmet until later in the year. Victor, on his way to the front line, wore a cloth cap, made in his own city by Brown Muff & Company.

  Later in the day, another train, full of soldiers on leave, passed the same way.

  “Are you downhearted?” shouted the leave-bound soldiers to the men of the First Sixth.

  “No!” came the reply.

  “Well, you damned soon will be.”

  Soon enough, Victor could attest to the truth of that statement. The First Sixth were stationed in the front line on the outskirts of a village called Fauquissart, alongside the Border Regiment, who had been in the war a little longer. This was Victor’s first disorienting experience of life in a forward trench. Beneath a sliver of gray-blue sky, two mud walls with makeshift dugouts encased him. He learned to keep his head down.

  At Fauquissart, the men of the First Sixth were shelled for the first time. The new men were frightened out of their wits, but the old sweats from the Border Regiment ignored all but the closest explosions. A few of them played soccer in the trenches, and when the ball went over the top, they scampered to collect it. Victor and his pals could not be so sanguine. Captain Tempest, the battalion’s diarist, said that “men grew older visibly” during that first hour of bombardment.

  Victor never got used to the shells—nobody did, despite appearances—but he soon became accustomed to the strange schedule of war in the trenches of the Western Front. There was, at dawn and at dusk, the “stand-to,” during which the men woul
d wait by their ladders in readiness for an attack. There was the peace of breakfast time, when both Allied and German guns would normally cease, and the smell of cooked bacon would fill the trenches. There was long and cold sentry duty at night, the running of wire in no-man’s-land, the patrols. There were the snatches of sleep, caught anywhere one could be comfortable. There were the small but regular portions of canned food. There was the crawl of the lice, which infested every uniform. There was the constant haggling and cajoling for cigarettes. There were the letters home, which were peppered with white lies. There were many rats. And every day, even in quiet sections of the line, when no attacks took place, there was what the top brass termed “wastage”: death and injury from enemy gunfire or bombs or accident. On an average day on the front line, some seven thousand Allied soldiers were killed or injured.

  * * *

  It would have been hard for Victor to explain all of this—but, in any case, Maurice already knew the outlines. By 1917, he had been a soldier himself for more than a year, even if he had not yet fought on the front line, and enough of his friends from home were in uniform. A horrifying number of those friends had already died.