by Wade Davis
Two days later he learned from Ruth that Robert Graves had been listed among the dead in the casualty rolls of the Times, only to reappear, as if by a miracle, among the living. Mallory responded to the news in a manner that suggests his senses had been completely dulled by the banality of death. “I missed Robert’s name in the casualty lists,” he wrote to Ruth on August 18. “I look at them in the Weekly Times. He must have had a lucky escape. He is a nice creature but I’m disappointed in his poems and wish he hadn’t published them.”
In mid-September, back in the trenches, Mallory drifted by a soldier and paused to examine his face, as if gazing into his own past. He was initially uncertain whether the man was alive or dead, an actual soldier or a ghost. He wrote to Ruth, “He had a rare dignity; for him clearly there were things beyond his surroundings. He had beautiful visionary eyes which looked at me thoughtfully before he answered my remarks and I felt that, if I had timidly asked him ‘Do you hate it all very much,’ he would probably have replied with infinite reserve.”
By October Mallory’s horizon was a flat, desolate plain, which the autumn rains had turned to mud. There was not a single square inch of ground, he wrote, unaffected by shell fire, not a blade of grass to be seen. In the mire men drowned unnoticed. “If hereafter I say to a friend ‘Go to Hell,’” he mused in a letter home, “he’ll probably reply ‘Well I don’t much mind if I do. Haven’t I perhaps been there?’”
On October 4 came the welcome news that Robert Graves had been staying with Ruth. Graves wrote to Eddie Marsh on October 29, telling him that George had not had leave in six months. In a letter home on December 9, Mallory said that he had not seen the sun but once in twenty days. “Like the life?” he reflected after his most recent spell in the trenches. “I prefer to say that I like living.”
CHRISTMAS 1916 marked a turning point for Mallory. Thanks to the intervention of Eddie Marsh, his leave came through and he spent ten glorious days at home with Ruth and Clare. Returning to duty on Boxing Day, he was reassigned as an orderly officer to one of the many colonels who flocked about the headquarters, safely decamped three miles behind the front. His task was to look after the colonel’s needs, which were few, for the man, as far as Mallory could tell, didn’t actually do anything. He resembled, Mallory wrote, a Chinese mandarin in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. Mallory’s own batman had been a barber in civilian life, so his mornings now began with a shave in bed. After the horror of the trenches he found life as an officer’s valet, pampered in turn by his own servant, to be surreal. “I feel somewhat of a stranger in a strange land,” he wrote to Ruth on February 4, 1917. Three days later he learned that he had been recommended for a staff position, to serve as a liaison officer with the French command. After two months of tedium, he applied to return to his battery. By April 7, he was again at the front, in an exposed observation post, directing artillery fire in the prelude to the Battle of Arras. In six days beginning on April 9, fourteen Allied divisions supported by 2,817 guns advanced three miles, with the Canadians capturing Vimy Ridge. Casualties were a mere 40,000 dead and 128,000 wounded. The British deemed it a great victory.
The day before the attack Mallory, by good fortune, was invalided out of the line. For some months his ankle had been bothering him, the same one he had hurt eight years before while scrambling in the quarry near his parents’ home at Birkenhead. The injury, never diagnosed, had in fact been serious; the bone had fractured, healed improperly, and was now literally coming apart. The only solution was surgery. By the beginning of May he was back in London, convalescing at the Officers’ Hospital at Portland Place. Mallory felt no shame in having been spared death at the front. The injury was for him deliverance. “Trafford, My dear Trafford,” he wrote to his only brother, not long after his return to England, “I have come back for good, the Lord be praised.”
His respite was brief. Though the ankle remained problematic well into September, he was returned to active duty in the summer and stationed at Winchester to train with a new generation of heavy artillery, guns with a range of over six miles. Happily he was free every weekend to be with his young family, Clare and his beloved Ruth, who was pregnant with their second child. Geoffrey Young wrote joyfully from Italy agreeing to be godfather. Beridge was born in the third week of September, on the same day they received the terrible news that Geoffrey, wounded earlier in the month, had lost his leg. For Mallory it was the death of a dream, as if every mountain had instantly eroded into the sea. “It’s the spoiling of some flawless, perfect thing,” he wrote to Lady Alice Young, Geoffrey’s elderly mother. “We had promised each other days on the mountains together, if we should meet again, and I can’t separate my own loss in it from his.”
In October, Mallory was promoted to full lieutenant and destined for France. In Belgium the battle of Passchendaele had raged since the end of July. After three months of steady bombardment, the entire universe of the British Army was a sodden wasteland of churned mud, poisoned by gas and fouled by the litter of war, dead horses and mules, headless corpses, bits and pieces of bodies, entire gun crews blasted into the air and staked headfirst in the mud when they fell back to earth. The only way to avoid being swallowed by the quagmire was to stick to the duckboards, wooden tracks laid upon the muck. Readily targeted by the enemy, these ran threadlike among the shell holes, vital supply lines that could be used only by night. As men walked blind, clinging to lifelines strung along the planks, they could hear from the darkness the groans and wails of the wounded, the despairing shrieks as men crawled into shell holes only to be swallowed by the fathomless mud. “The monstrous disgrace of Passchendaele,” wrote the playwright R. C. Sherriff, himself wounded in the battle, “was proof, if proof was needed, that the Generals had lost touch with reality.”
Having escaped the fight at Arras, saved by an old climbing injury, Mallory was spared the agony of Passchendaele by a freak accident. On October 8, as he rode his motorcycle into Winchester to post a letter, his back wheel locked just as he rounded a corner on St. Giles Hill. The bike spun out and he crashed into a gatepost, crushing his right foot and injuring his thumb as well. Released from Magdalen Hospital on October 16, though still incapacitated, he returned to the Winchester camp, where all talk was of the battle.
On November 3 all leave in the British Army was canceled and those on leave were ordered immediately back to duty. There was a crisis at the front. Senior officers in the battle line called for an end to the slaughter in Flanders. General Haig insisted on pounding on, revising his strategic and tactical goals by the day to rationalize the pointless slaughter. Mallory was resigned to dying. “For my part,” he wrote to Geoffrey Young on December 5, “I don’t intend, for what ever little that might be worth, to be alive at the end.” Fortunately, the injury to his foot was serious enough that it was not until after Christmas that he was deemed fit for service, by which time the onset of winter had finally silenced the battle.
The New Year brought a brief moment of joy. Robert Graves, at twenty-two, was to be married to Nancy Nicholson, a beautiful artist of eighteen, with Mallory standing as best man. He was, Graves wrote to Eddie Marsh on December 29, 1917, “my oldest surviving friend.” The wedding was set for January 23, 1918. Among those invited was the poet Wilfred Owen. Graves knew Owen through Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. The wedding, Graves later recalled, “was both wild and subdued.” He was outfitted in his dress uniform, field boots, spurs, and sword. Nancy wore blue, and balked at the formality of the service. With wartime rationing there was no sugar or butter, and when George Mallory “lifted off the plaster cast of imitation icing from the cake, a sigh of disappointment rose from the guests … champagne was another rare commodity and the guests made a rush for the dozen bottles on the table. Nancy decided to get something out of her wedding and made off with a bottle.”
Through the spring of 1918 Mallory continued to be haunted by good fortune. On March 21 the Germans launched the Spring Offensive, which began
with the most intense bombardment of the war. In five hours more than three million high-explosive and gas shells fell upon the British Fifth Army. Attacking out of the fog, German storm troopers retook in days what the British had struggled six months to capture at the Somme. Within twenty-four hours 21,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner; in nine days the number captured rose to 90,000. Thirteen hundred British gun emplacements were overrun. On April 9 the Germans attacked again at Ypres, prompting General Haig to issue his fateful proclamation to the troops: “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight to the end.” By the beginning of June the Germans had reached the Marne and were within striking distance of Paris, just as they had been in the summer of 1914. Desperate to turn the tide, the British raced every able-bodied man to the front. From the hospitals alone they returned 60,000 a month, soldiers whose wounds had been deemed sufficiently healed to let them be cast again into the cauldron.
Assigned inexplicably—indeed, miraculously—to yet another training course, this time a battery commanders’ session at the artillery school at Lydd, Mallory remained at home through the entire crisis. There is a gap in his correspondence from late 1917 through September 1918, during which time he lived happily with Ruth and his family at Littlestone, a seaside village near Lydd on the coast of Kent. From the channel ports one could hear the distant sounds of the battle in France. During the summer of 1918, as the French counterattacked at the Aisne and the Americans, in their baptism of fire, drove the Germans from Belleau Wood, as 15,000 tons of gas fell upon the Allied line in a single assault and German casualties rose to over a million dead and wounded, George Mallory and Ruth went on a climbing holiday to Scotland. How he avoided the front for sixteen months during the climax of the war is a mystery, though one senses the hand of Eddie Marsh. By the time he finally returned to France, in late September 1918, he had been reassigned to the 515th Siege Battery, positioned between Arras and the coast, a safe distance from the front. His commanding officer was Major Gwilym Lloyd George, son of the prime minister. The British had already lost one son of a prime minister, Raymond Asquith, shot fatally through the chest at the Somme in 1916; they were not about to lose another. Mallory had his ticket out of the war.
On November 3 Major Lloyd George was summoned to Paris to be with his father. “Lucky dog!” George wrote to Ruth. “I wish my father were P.M.” Five days later, on “a lovely morning, frosty and sunny,” he announced his intention to “go forth somewhere today—possibly to search for Geoffrey Keynes who is about 20 miles from here.” Keynes was posted at a casualty clearing station near Cambrai. On the night of November 11, the two friends shared a tent and awoke to the noise of shouting and engines whistling. As they looked out into the dark they saw the entire front erupt in the flares of thousands of Very lights, ignited in celebration of the Armistice. Mallory’s brother, Trafford, appeared on November 12, and they welcomed peace with a party at the officers’ club in Cambrai.
“It was a good evening,” George wrote to Ruth in the morning, “altogether of the kind one would expect from the public school type of British officer. The prevalent feeling I make out, in part my own, is simply the elation that comes after a hard game or race of supreme importance won after a struggle in which everyone has expended himself to the last ounce. What a freedom it is now! I seem to be inundated by waves of elation and to be capable now of untroubled joy such as one hasn’t known during these four years since the war began. I doubt if I quite realized before what a load we were carrying about with us constantly … I want to lose all harshness of jagged nerves, to be above all gentle. I feel we have achieved victory for that almost more than anything—to be able to cultivate gentleness.”
Robert Graves did not celebrate the end of the war. He felt only despair and sadness. As the guns fell quiet in Flanders, he went out that night, “walking alone along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuulan, cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.”
Wilfred Owen’s brother Harold, serving in the navy and stationed off the African coast on the cruiser Astraea, saw that same day an apparition of his brother, sitting peacefully in a chair in his cabin, smiling the most gentle of smiles. On the small table was a letter written to Harold the previous April in which Wilfred had anticipated his death, saying, “I know I shall be killed. But it’s the only place I can make my protest from.” Harold Owen wondered if he was dreaming. He glanced down, and when he looked up the chair was again empty. Harold fell asleep, only to wake to the perfect certainty that his brother was dead. Wilfred had, in fact, been killed on November 4. Word of his death would reach his parents at Shrewsbury on November 11, 1918, the same day as Harold’s vision, even as the church bells in their village tolled the news of victory and the Armistice.
WITH THE END of the war came the challenge of peace, and the immediate need to demobilize six million men and find work for them in an economy that had geared two-thirds of its industrial capacity and workforce toward the production of weapons of war.
On paper the victory had been complete. Britain emerged supreme, her cities and fields unscathed, her navy unchallenged, her armies triumphant, her enemies vanquished. In reality, the war left the nation bitterly divided, spiritually exhausted, and financially ruined. The gold reserves had been drained, and the national debt surpassed the gross national product. Inflation and unemployment soon reached levels not seen in a century. Taxes and death duties alone provoked such economic agonies that between 1918 and 1921 a quarter of all English land would change hands, a shift in fortunes and ownership on a scale not experienced in Britain since the Norman Conquest.
“In the autumn of 1919, in which I write,” stated Mallory’s old friend John Maynard Keynes, “we are at the dead season of our fortunes. The reaction from the exertions, the fears, the sufferings of the past five years is at its height. Our power of feeling or caring beyond the immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed. The greatest events outside our own direct experience and the most dreadful anticipations cannot move us … We have been moved already beyond endurance, and need rest. Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.” By 1922 there would be two million unemployed and half a million veterans living on the streets, going door-to-door, seeking help, begging for clothes and food.
The long hallucination of the war induced a universal torpor and melancholy, a sense of isolation, a loss of center, a restless desire to move—what Christopher Isherwood called the “vast freak museum of our generation.” For some, like Robert Graves, the conflict had marked their entire adult lives, with each moment of it, as he later recalled, having provoked an inward scream, the duty to run mad.
“We left the war,” wrote Herbert Read, “as we entered it: dazed, indifferent, incapable of any creative action. We had acquired only one quality: exhaustion.” The entire futile exercise, wrote Vera Brittain, had amounted to “nothing but a passionate gesture of negation—the negation of all that the centuries had taught us through long eons of pain.” Having lost her fiancé, her brother, and her two best male friends, she had “no one left to dance with. The War was over; a new age was beginning; but the dead were the dead and would never return.”
As formal negotiations in Paris stretched into 1919, the British government formed the Peace Committee to determine how properly to commemorate the victory. The initial meeting, chaired by the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, proposed a four-day celebration to be held in August 1919. Under pressure from veterans and the million or more soldiers still awaiting demobilization, who deemed it a waste of money, the event was scaled back to a single parade, scheduled for July 19. Thousands of citizens descended on London to watch fifteen thousand servicemen parade past a temporary wood-and-plaster monument erected in Whitehall, a cenotaph dedicated to “The Glorious Dead.” Had the actual dead walked abreast down Whitehall, the parade would have lasted four days. Had each man who died in the war been g
ranted a single page upon which to inscribe his life, it would have yielded a library of some twenty-six thousand volumes, every book six hundred pages long.
As a schoolmaster George Mallory was one of the first to be demobilized, and by the end of January 1919 he was back at Charterhouse, recalling all the reasons he had come to despise the headmaster (though, ironically, Frank Fletcher may well have saved his life, simply by keeping him out of the conflict for the first two years of the war). He returned to a school haunted with the spirits of vanquished youths, boys he had taught. The school’s arcane rituals and rules, meanwhile, chafed; he found them more intolerable than ever. A compromising letter had come to light, and he faced sanctions because of his friendship with Robert Graves, who evidently as a schoolboy had been intimate with another schoolboy, who was now, at any rate, dead.
Mallory tried to reinvent himself as a schoolmaster. He wrote his old friends David Pye and Geoffrey Young, offering a vision of a new kind of school, one that would not separate boys from their families but rather bring them together, a pedagogy that would celebrate the imagination and reward experimentation, all with the goal of fostering personal growth, a school where sports would be an option and not the ultimate measurement of man.
It was a forlorn hope, a dream impossible to realize. Knowing that he had no future at Charterhouse, Mallory wrote to the League of Nations Union, a peace organization, seeking employment. On August 25, 1920, his third child was born, “a thumping great bruiser of a boy with fists and feet, a chin and very fat cheeks.” In the fall he was hired by the league to go to Ireland and report on the troubles. Since the Easter Rebellion of 1916, the island had been convulsed with violence. The vast majority of the people supported Sinn Fein, the political party of independence. The British had responded by dispatching forty thousand troops, outlawing the Irish parliament, suppressing the press, and implementing a wave of repression known as the Terror. Mallory, clearly a sympathizer, was perfectly positioned. He had a friend, Conor O’Brien, a Pen y Pass climber, who ran guns for the Irish. Mallory sent word, and was invited deep into the movement. He learned of the sinister chambers at Dublin Castle, bore witness to raids by the notorious Black and Tans, watched as the Royal Irish Constabulary lined up the innocent to be searched. One night in Dublin he was himself awakened at night by a stranger with a gun in one hand, a flashlight in the other, demanding to know if he was Protestant. “There has been wrong on both sides,” Mallory wrote, “but national aspirations, a passionate idealism, are to be found only on one side. It is to this fact that Irishmen appeal when they exclaim, ‘If only the people of England knew! If only they would come and see!’ ”
