by Wade Davis
I first wrote about Mallory in Shadows in the Sun, a collection of essays published by Island Press in 1998. In February 1999 I wrote a letter to my agent and friend, Peter Matson, outlining thoughts for a book. It provoked considerable interest, which led to a wonderful editor, Ash Green, and a contract with Knopf. What interested me from the start was not whether Mallory reached the summit but, rather, why on that fateful day he kept going, quite possibly aware that he was walking to his death. I knew that most of the men on the three expeditions had gone through the fire of the Great War. As I wrote in that letter more than ten years ago: “There was indeed something Homeric about Mallory and his companions. After the war, when so many had died, life was precious but effervescent. Perhaps this explains his willingness to climb on, accepting a degree of risk that might have been unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived.”
In May 1999, just as my research was getting under way, the discovery by Conrad Anker of Mallory’s body transformed the field of play. By chance I had a profile of Mallory in press at the time, which became the first feature magazine article heralding the discovery (“Everest’s First Hero,” Men’s Journal, June–July 1999, pp. 132–36, 183–84). This was simple luck, and it drew little attention in a whirlwind of international media coverage celebrating a truly remarkable event in mountaineering history. Within a year no fewer than eight books would appear, many of them splendid. Audrey Salkeld, the preeminent historian of Everest, and Tom Holzel reissued their classic account with revisions and a new foreword by Eric Simonson, the leader of the expedition that found Mallory’s corpse: The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine (Seattle: Mountaineers, 1999). Audrey also brought out an illustrated book with David Breashears, Last Climb (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 1999). The expedition that found the body published two accounts: Jochen Hemmleb, Larry Johnson, and Eric Simonson, Ghosts of Everest (Seattle: Mountaineers, 1999); and Jochen Hemmleb and Eric Simonson, Detectives on Everest (Seattle: Mountaineers, 2002). From the BBC, contingent on the expedition, came Peter Firstbrook’s Lost on Everest (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1999). Conrad Anker collaborated with David Roberts to produce The Lost Explorer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). Inspired by the discovery, Reinhold Messner published The Second Death of Mallory (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000). Peter and Leni Gillman wrote a fine and updated Mallory biography: The Wildest Dream (London: Headline Book Publishing, 2000). This was followed by the first biography of Sandy Irvine, written by his grandniece; this essential contribution had been in the works long before the sensational events of the spring of 1999: Julie Summers, Fearless on Everest (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).
These publications presented something of a quandary. What possibly remained to be said about a story that had been covered by so many writers? Assuming that Knopf might be wondering the same thing, I offered to return the advance. Ash Green generously replied that he had not offered me a contract because he wanted another book on Mallory but, rather, because he wanted a book by me on Mallory. I casually remarked that it might take ten years to complete—which, I am afraid to say, turned out to be true.
The challenge from the start was to go beyond the iconic figure of George Mallory and take the research to new levels of depth and scope. I began with several visits to London to work through basic archival sources, most especially the forty-one boxes of files containing reports, correspondence, and miscellaneous documents of the Mount Everest Committee housed at the Royal Geographical Society, which also has the most complete visual record of the expeditions in its photographic collections. The archive of the Alpine Club was equally rich, yielding a number of key diaries and reports, as well as a complete collection of press clippings from the era. The letters of George Mallory are for the most part at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Thanks to the generous cooperation of these institutions, I was able to secure copies of all documents pertinent to the research, a collection that itself fills six file-cabinet drawers in my office. While in London on those early visits I was also able to contact some family members, descendants of many of the key figures in the story. All were exceedingly helpful: Colonel Norton’s sons, Richard and Bill; Geoffrey Bruce’s niece, Sally Izod; John Noel’s daughter Sandra; Peter Odell, grandson of Noel; Graham Hoyland, grandnephew of Howard Somervell; and Julie Summers, grandniece of Sandy Irvine.
Julie Summers was especially gracious and provided a connection to a brilliant historical researcher, Roger Barrington. My goal from the start was to learn as much as possible about the lives of all twenty-six men who went to Everest in 1921–24. I was especially interested in their experiences during the war, and my own preliminary efforts at the National Archives (TNA; formerly the Public Record Office), the Imperial War Museum, the British Library, and other repositories had convinced me that I needed the help of a professional researcher living in Britain who was familiar with the complex distribution of military records, many of which are housed in regimental archives scattered throughout the nation. Suffice it to say that without Roger’s partnership over several years, this book could not have been written. Some of the expedition members escaped the war; Arthur Kellas and Harold Raeburn were too old; Sandy Irvine, too young; Tom Longstaff served in India; Guy Bullock, in the diplomatic corps; Bentley Beetham remained at home, a schoolmaster. But the other twenty men most assuredly did see the fighting, and thanks in good measure to Roger’s research, we were able to determine, with some notable gaps, where each was posted on virtually every day of the entire war.
Once I knew the military unit and the location in both time and space of each protagonist throughout the war, my next research challenge was to ascertain, to the extent possible, what each man might have endured. It was famously said of both Passchendaele and the Somme that the army lacked the clerk power to tabulate the dead. If so, it recorded just about everything else. The Great War was so thoroughly documented that one wonders how the men found time to fight. Every unit maintained a war diary, with the task of reporting on operations, intelligence, casualties, and any other pertinent information rotating among the junior officers. These diaries, together with letters, personal journals, and trench maps made it possible to track each of our men through the war with a level of specificity I would not have imagined possible at the outset.
The British war zone in France was relatively small, the number of men engaged enormous, and the outpouring of literature after the war so vast that virtually every corner of the battlefield at every point in the war has been described by multiple voices, by enlisted men and officers, in poetry and prose, in tones as brash and confident as a fearless Yorkshire sergeant’s and as haunted as the wail of a young subaltern in a well of despair. As long as I knew that one of our key figures was present at an action, I could extrapolate from other sources what had transpired. Mallory, for example, may not have described the black night when his unit moved south to the Somme, but Ramsay, his commanding officer’s batman, did. Typical of these secondary sources that proved so useful are: Anonymous, Four Years on the Western Front (London: Odhams, 1922); William Andrews, Haunting Years (London: Hutchinson, 1930); A. F. Becke, History of the Great War: Order of Battle of Divisions (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1945); J. C. Dunn, The War the Infantry Knew (London: P. S. King, 1938); Rowland Feilding, War Letters to a Wife (London: Medici Society, 1929); J. D. Hills, The Fifth Leicester (Loughborough: Echo, 1919); E. A. James and Hugh Jeudwine, A Record of the Battles and Engagements of the British Armies in France and Flanders, 1914–1918 (London: London Stamp Exchange, 1990); Christopher Moore, Trench Fever (London: Little, Brown, 1998); E. W. C. Sandes, The Military Engineer in India (Chatham: Institute of Royal Engineers, 1933); and E. A. Tandy, The War Record 1914–20, Records of the Survey of India, vol. 20 (Dehra Dun, 1925).
In addition to personal memoirs, a number of books and anthologies give voice to individual soldiers, poignant tes
timonies that read like notes in a great musical score of madness. See: Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Great War (Guilford, Conn.: Lyons, 2002); Malcolm Brown, The Western Front (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1996); John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Laurence Houseman, ed., War Letters of Fallen Englishmen (London: Dutton, 1930); John Laffin, British Butchers and Bunglers of World War One (Thrup: Sutton, 1989); Lyn Macdonald, ed., Voices and Images of the Great War (London: Penguin, 1991); Anne Powell, ed., The Fierce Light (Aberporth: Palladour, 1996); and David Robert, Minds at War (Burgess Hill: Saxon, 1996).
“The war,” Duncan Grant wrote to Mallory, “is simply undermining my life so the less said about it the better.” But it could not be ignored. On October 25, 1914, Robert Graves wrote to Cyril Hartman, an old friend from school, “You have probably seen the Charterhouse casualty list; awful … I am in the special reserves which feed out two battalions in France. The 1st has been annihilated—except for two officers and a few men … The chance against returning whole-skinned if we go out now is about 2–1 and I have consequently resigned myself.” The odds of dying only got worse as the war went on.
In his war memoir, Good-bye to All That (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), Robert Graves estimated the life expectancy of a young subaltern to be about three months, after which time he would be either wounded or dead. There were roughly four wounded for every fatality, and of these one would be hurt so severely as to never return. The three lightly wounded recovered only to face the same odds again and again, until in the end those who survived the war had been wounded more times than they could remember. Such a cycle of morbidity and death, and its impact on the mind and the imagination, was not readily curtailed by the Armistice, which was seen by many as arbitrary in nature, meaningless in content, a mere truce that simply postponed the inevitability of another conflict.
If the war shattered the last vestiges of the old order, making a mockery of notions of glory, honor, and valor, peace heralded the birth of modern times, a new century stained, as Winston Churchill would write, in blood. Caught between worlds, the old and the new, spinning in a whirlwind of psychological and social uncertainty, was an entire Lost Generation, including most of the key players in the Everest adventure. Beyond simply knowing what they had faced in the war, it was essential that I understood what the war had implied for the society and culture in which they lived. For this I turned to two brilliant books: Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor, 1989), and Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). See also: Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991); Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Jay Winter and Blaine Baggett, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (New York: Penguin, 1996).
Yet another major research challenge took me into the history of the Raj and the complex diplomatic maneuvers of Lord Curzon, Charles Bell, and the frontier cadre engaged in the Great Game. For this I was most fortunate to have the assistance of my cousin Grant Guyer, an authority on British colonial history. Grant very kindly joined me in London on my first visit, introducing me to the ways of research in Britain and to any number of historians, colleagues with whom he had worked while pursuing his doctoral studies at Oxford. The key connection was Alex McKay, the author of the seminal book Tibet and the British Raj: The Frontier Cadre 1904–1947 (Richmond: Curzon, 1997). See also: Alex McKay, ed., Pilgrimage in Tibet (Richmond: Curzon, 1998).
In Canada, two avenues of research proved extremely useful. After Everest, Arthur Wakefield settled in Quebec, where members of his family still live. His son Bob, who passed away at ninety-two in 2007, and his grandson Charles very kindly shared personal insights, as well as Arthur’s war diary and Everest journal and the private letters he wrote to his wife, Madge, both from the Western Front and from Everest. These proved invaluable.
E. O. Wheeler grew up climbing in the Canadian Rockies, and his papers are housed at the Whyte Museum, in Banff, Alberta. His son John, after an illustrious career with the Geological Survey of Canada, retired to Vancouver, where I found him, at age seventy-five, living a block away from the house my parents had owned when I was born. It was a wonderful encounter. He and my father had attended the same boarding school at more or less the same time, and I, by chance, had climbed many of the northern peaks that John had been the first to survey. We met for a long afternoon, at the end of which he produced a remarkable treasure. According to Everest historians, only Guy Bullock kept a complete journal during the 1921 expedition, curt notes that were published in two parts in the Alpine Journal. See: “The Everest Expedition, 1921, Diary of G. H. Bullock,” Alpine Journal, vol. 67, no. 304 (1962), pp. 130–49, and no. 305, pp. 291–309. Mallory wrote letters and Howard-Bury official dispatches, but neither kept a daily account. E. O. Wheeler, as it turned out, did—two complete volumes that had never been seen by anyone outside of his immediate family.
I was so astonished that I could not bring myself to ask that they be copied. But as we parted late in the day, John Wheeler handed me the two journals, saying simply that he thought I would find them useful. I have them with me still, and it is my hope that I may be able to repay John his trust by having them, with his permission, published in their entirety. They provide an astonishing perspective on the 1921 reconnaissance, arguably the most interesting of the three expeditions. And they reveal the character and personality of a remarkable man who spent more time alone, higher and closer to the mountain, than anyone—the unheralded Canadian surveyor who mapped the inner core of the Everest massif and solved the puzzle of the North Col, thus opening the doorway to the mountain.
A second major phase of the research entailed several return journeys to Nepal and Tibet. Having delved into the literature, I went back to Everest in 2000 with fresh eyes. Accompanying me was an extraordinarily insightful man and one of the greatest of Himalayan climbers, Dorjee Lhatoo, former head of the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling, the training ground for all great Indian climbers. Established in the immediate wake of the British conquest of Everest in 1953 by Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of Indian independence, the HMI from inception was inspired by new ways of thinking about mountaineering. Its formal mandate was to train young men and women “not only to climb Himalayan peaks, but also to create in them an urge to climb peaks of human endeavor.” Dorjee had been recruited to the HMI as an ideal candidate to realize Nehru’s dreams. He was married to Sonam Doma, niece of Tenzing Norgay, who first reached the summit of Everest with Hillary in 1953.
Born at Yatung, in the Chumbi Valley, Dorjee had fled Tibet as a small boy with his widowed mother. They were economic refugees, and his anger at what the Chinese have done to his country was matched in its intensity by his disdain for what the Tibetan theocratic leadership had failed to provide for the Tibetan people before the Chinese invasion. “They offered us prayer wheels,” he would say, “when what we needed and wanted were real wheels.” A veteran of Everest, not to mention Nanda Devi and Chomolhari, Dorjee had trained generations of Indian climbers, including Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman to reach the summit of Everest.
For two months, Dorjee and I walked in the footsteps of the British reconnaissance of 1921. We visited Tingri and Nyenyam, climbed to the summit of the ruined fortress at Shegar, retraced the explorers’ approach to the Rongbuk Monastery, went up the East Rongbuk Glacier to the North Col, and later crossed from Kharta by way of the Samchung La and the Chog La to the lower Kama Chu and the headwaters of the Arun. From below Sakeding we traversed the length of the Kama Valley to Pethang Ringmo and the Kangshung Face, before returning over the
Langma La to explore the upper reaches of the Kharta Chu. Dorjee led me up any number of subsidiary peaks, and was an invaluable source of information not only on the challenges of Himalayan climbing but on the ethnography and history of Kharta, where his wife’s family originated.
We did not by any means go everywhere the British went. A plan to reach the Jelep La, visit the village of Dorjee’s birth, and then follow the Chumbi Valley to Phari and, beyond, to Kampa Dzong was stymied by Chinese officials who, having promised us a permit to enter borderlands off-limits to foreigners since the 1959 invasion, reneged at the last moment, stranding our party in Tibet, even as they pocketed the $25,000 fee. This setback aside, in those weeks we covered enough ground on foot to leave me only more astonished by what the British had accomplished in a single season. Dorjee and I returned to this theme when I visited him in Darjeeling in 2002. We spent several days touring the town; Dorjee introduced me to a new generation of Sherpa climbers, even as he pointed out what remained of the Darjeeling the British had known in 1921–24.
The more time I spent with Tibetans in the environs of Everest, the more interested I became in what the mountain meant to them, and how their great-grandparents might have viewed the arrival and activities of the British climbers, the first Europeans many of them would have known. A main point of interface, as we have seen, was the Rongbuk Monastery, headed by its charismatic abbot, Ngawang Tenzin Norbu, or Dzatrul Rinpoche. Although several of the British climbers wrote of their impressions of Rongbuk, the only account of the British from a Tibetan perspective is based on a few excerpts from Dzatrul Rinpoche’s namthar, or spiritual autobiography. This is the encounter between the rinpoche and General Bruce widely quoted in the Everest literature. See: Alexander MacDonald, “The Lama and the General,” Kailash, vol.1, no. 3 (1973), pp. 225–33. The autobiography, as far as I could tell, had never been translated in its entirety.
