by Paul Watkins
As we descended from the glacier fields, I would cajole Sugden and Stanley to set their differences aside, since even on successful climbs they managed to find things to argue about. Knowing them both as well as I did, and resorting to silly games I invented, such as asking each person to name three things he could not live without, I was usually successful. By the time we returned to civilization, Stanley and Sugden would be as close to friends again as they had been before we’d left.
I played my part with such sincerity that the others took to calling me “Auntie,” a title I pretended to despise. And if I was sometimes not entirely successful in my diplomacy, fatigue usually stepped in to finish the task.
Coated with the white dust of dried sweat and the gray dust of the scree slopes, we pitched our tents at campsites like the Boule d’Or, where we were regulars and where Madame Thibodeaux would hold a place for us each year. We were also known at the nearby Piton café, where we drank ice-cold “demis” of Stella Artois and lingered over bowls of white-bean cassoulet. At the end of our third summer, the owner of the Piton, Monsieur Rancourt, took our picture in front of the café, framed it, and hung it above the bar, along with the pictures of other climbing teams who had made Chamonix a second home.
As time went by, we spent less time in Chamonix, and grew tired of the incessant booming of mini-cannons, which the hotels would fire off when their guests had summitted Mont Blanc. These guests, when they reached the top, would signal with bright scarves or flashing mirrors to people waiting on the hotel balconies, bottles of Bouvier at the ready. The town had become a magnet for the kind of tourist known to local Chamoinards as “Pioux-Pioux”: people attracted to the trendiness of mountaineering rather than the climbing itself. One could see them gathered outside the Hotel Tremblay, late in the summer mornings, by which time any serious climbers would long since have set out. The Pioux-Pioux wore the latest mountaineering fashions and were content to let their guides lug their gear. Even with the loads they had to carry, which sometimes included birds in cages and dogs in miniature copies of the tweedy hiking clothes worn by their owners, these guides were to be pitied more for the humiliation they endured than for the physical exertion of their jobs. Most of the Pioux-Pioux halted at the first patch of ice, drained the contents of their whiskey flasks, and retreated to town.
In the summers that followed, we did our best to follow in the footsteps of mountaineers like Mummery, Stephen, Whymper, and Tyndall, whose well-thumbed memoirs we carried with us everywhere. This brought us to places like Grindelwald, Murren, Kleine Scheidegg, and Zermatt, where we camped above the town in a small forest called the Erikawald. There, in August, dozens of camps would spring up and the woods would echo with the sounds of every language in Europe. We were students, most of us, and in a shingle-roofed shrine to the Virgin Mary, erected at a crossroads in the wood, abandoned textbooks from the universities of Freiburg, Oslo, Warsaw, Paris, and Verona lay stacked. They were used either for reading material on rainy days or for starting fires, depending on the quality of the book.
It was here that we heard stories of more distant mountain ranges. The Rockies, Patagonia, the Himalayas. Our nights were filled with plans for future expeditions.
Back at Oxford, with finances a continuing problem, I made a wise switch from selling blood to writing about our expeditions in the View, the Climber’s Gazette, and other Alpine journals. The publications didn’t pay much, but with the articles we began to establish ourselves as a mountaineering team worthy of following in the footsteps of earlier climbers, as well as their guides; men like Emil Boss, Melchior Anderegg, and Jean-Baptiste Aymond, whose names were almost too sacred to be spoken aloud.
We became known as the Lucky Six, after the old dice roller’s expression. This was because of the way we seemed, to others, to be gambling with our lives. But it was also because of the way that our luck was holding out, since we had never suffered any mishap. This luck we did not take for granted. In the summer of 1938, climbers were dying at a rate of two a week on the slopes around Chamonix.
Our good fortune came to an end when war broke out in September of 1939. By January of the following year, I and the rest of the Lucky Six had been called up.
We went our separate ways.
Whistler and Sugden went into the navy, Forbes joined the merchant marine, and Armstrong became a sniper in the army. Stanley, engaged in his “vital war service,” went into his father’s Bully Beef factory. Having authored several articles on mountaineering, I was appointed as a climbing instructor for the Royal Marines at the Achnacarry barracks in Scotland. Achnacarry was used mostly for the training of commandos, and later for American Rangers. There, I lived a spartan but relatively safe existence until August of 1944, when I was asked by the commanding officer at Achnacarry to assemble a handful of men skilled in mountaineering for an unspecified task in Europe.
The commanding officer’s name was Sholto Lindsay. He had cavernously dark eyes, spiky gray hair, and usually wore a kilt, both on and off duty. Lindsay owned the land on which the Achnacarry base had been built. In exchange for the use of the land, the army had put him in charge of running the base, a task he performed with humorless efficiency.
On the day he asked me to assemble the team, Lindsay and I were out on the training ground beside a twenty-foot-tall wooden fence, off which soldiers were jumping into a pit of mud. The point of this exercise was that they should emerge from their fall with their rifles ready to shoot. We lost at least one man a week during training on this fence, from broken legs, dislocated hips, and damaged spines. Several had refused to jump at all. When this happened, their lockers were cleaned out and their mattresses rolled up and tied to the squeaky black frames of their beds. They were sent away and their names were not mentioned again. They were not pitied or envied. They simply vanished, as if they had never existed.
We stood beside the mud pit, and as each soldier landed, a wall of cold slime sprayed across our uniforms.
“You can take a week to sort out a list,” said Lindsay. Oblivious to the dirt that spackled his face and clothes, he puffed on a small-bowled pipe, speaking to me with the pipe stem gripped between his teeth.
“I don’t need a week, sir,” I replied. “I can give can you the names right now.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. The pipe jerked upwards as he clenched his teeth. “Can you indeed?” he replied.
I gave him the names of the Lucky Six.
“Right, then,” said Lindsay. “You’d better start tracking them down.”
The only one who refused the offer was Stanley. “I can’t,” he said when I called him on the telephone. “I’m sorry. I just can’t. I refuse to get involved in this madness.”
“What madness?” I asked. “This mission?”
“No, William. The war. That madness.”
Stanley’s refusal to join us came as no shock to me, although I knew there was more to it than he was telling me just then. I could not bring myself to be angry at him, but that did not stop the others when they heard about it, especially Sugden. For the rest of us, the chance to climb again and the importance that was being attached to this task, whatever it was, gave us all a sense of purpose which we had not felt since we were last together as a group.
For myself, I wondered if my father might at last find some meaning in the path I had chosen to follow.
It took two months, but by the end of that time the five of us were assembled at Achnacarry.
In the weeks ahead, we went on daily marches, for distances ranging between ten and twenty miles, carrying fully loaded Bergen rucksacks. These were very similar to the ones we had used on our own before the war. The only difference was that in addition to our regular gear, each pack was weighted down with two parcels. Each parcel contained four bricks wrapped in canvas. As part of the training, we were also given instruction in low-level parachute jumps. We started out by jumping off towers wearing parachute harnesses attached to ropes, but we quickly moved on to actual jum
ps from the side door of a Dakota transport plane flying only three hundred feet above the ground. For this, we wore the heavy rimless helmets of the Royal Parachute Regiment and Dennison jump smocks, with their green-and-brown camouflage pattern which seemed to have been applied by a monkey with a paintbrush. Once I got used to the idea of hurling myself into space, the jumps weren’t actually that difficult, since the chutes were the static-line type and opened of their own accord as soon as we leaped from the plane.
There was such a thing as a reserve chute, normally attached to the chest. But our Polish parachute instructor, a man named Zimanski, informed us a little too cheerfully that we were jumping so near to the ground that these reserve chutes would not have time to deploy if the main chute failed. In other words, if our main chutes did not open, we would not only be dead but would literally break every bone in our bodies.
“Even those little ones in your ears,” said the instructor, pinching the air between his thumb and index finger to show us how small the bones were.
Zimanski wore a black beret, as opposed to the red berets of the Royal Parachute Regiment. He had been part of what was known as the Free Polish Brigade, made up of those who had managed to escape from the German occupation of their country. Zimanski had been a member of a brigade under the command of General Sosabowski and had been involved with Operation Market Garden, the battle for the Arnhem bridgehead. The men of Sosabowski’s brigade were pretty much slaughtered as they crossed the Rhine, and I’d heard that only a few made it back. Zimanski never talked about this, at least not in English. When he got drunk, however, which he did every night without exception on a homemade alcohol called spiritus, he would burst into our barracks when we were sleeping, turn on the lights, and yell at us in Polish. At times like this, it was impossible to imagine that he was even related to the quiet, broadly smiling man who taught us in the daytime. Invariably, Zimanski would be hauled out of our barracks by the military police. He never put up a fight. As soon as he saw the red caps of the MPs, he would sit down on the floor and wait to be dragged off. The next day, he would be back to his old self and seemed to have no memory of his tirades from the night before.
We were also put through a course in the use of various weapons, including the Sten submachine gun, the Webley revolver, and the Sykes-Fairbairn fighting knife. We also practiced throwing Mills bomb grenades and learned to hold our genitals when they went off only a few feet away on the other side of the practice trench, or risk being neutered from a vacuum created by the blast.
With little else to discuss, we speculated endlessly about what we would be asked to do and where we would be sent.
The training ended with a climbing exercise on a rock face overlooking Loch Amon. The tannic acid in the ground had stained the lake water almost black. A local legend held that in 1900, a boy had tried to swim across it on a dare. He had traveled halfway across when a huge creature rose up from below and dragged him down.
I was glad to turn my back on the loch as we began our climb. Despite the added weight we had been asked to carry, the ascent was easily accomplished and by the end of the day we had marched back into camp through the pouring rain. We were peeling off our wet and dirty clothes and listening to the showers groan and creak as warm water finally began to pour through them, when Sholto Lindsay came in, kilt swinging about his knobbly knees.
“Report to my office in fifteen minutes,” he said, then turned on his heel and walked out again.
All thoughts of rest evaporated. We knew this was the moment when we would be told where we were going.
There was no time to shower. We piled into any dry clothes we could find and shambled into Lindsay’s office, having dashed across the empty parade ground under the steadily falling rain.
In Lindsay’s office, I was astonished to see, sitting comfortably at Lindsay’s desk, none other than Henry Carton. He was not wearing a military uniform. Instead, he had on a Norfolk jacket made of impossibly thick wool and a turtleneck sweater which bunched around his throat. His cheeks were rosy and the bristles of his mustache looked as stiff as pencil leads. Carton was leaning back in Lindsay’s chair as if he owned the place.
“Gentlemen,” said Lindsay, closing the door, “you know who this is.”
Of course we did.
“Due to Mr. Carton’s expertise in the specific nature of your task,” continued Lindsay, “he has very kindly volunteered to help us out.”
Carton had been smiling at us, but now the smile flickered and died. “Where is my nephew?” he asked. “Where is Stanley?”
“He didn’t sign up with us, I’m afraid,” said Lindsay.
Carton stood suddenly, sending his chair scudding back against the wall. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he spluttered.
Lindsay cleared his throat. His face turned red. “I wasn’t at liberty to give out any specific names over the telephone.”
“But when you mentioned the group, I assumed they’d all be here.” Carton looked stunned. His eyes fanned across us. “I thought he’d finally come to his senses, instead of wasting away in that bloody sausage factory!”
“It’s all right, sir,” said Sugden quietly. “We feel the same way.”
The rest of us glared at Sugden, because he had no right to speak for all of us.
Carton glanced around the room, as if he did not know where Sugden’s voice had come from. “It’s bad enough that he dodged his military service, but now he’s gone and let you down as well!”
This time, nobody replied.
In the quiet of the room, we heard the wheezing of his ruined lungs.
“Where’s the phone?” demanded Carton.
“There’s one in the orderly room,” said Lindsay.
Carton stamped out of Lindsay’s office and across the parade ground to the leaky, tar-paper-roofed hut which served as our orderly room.
For a while, we all just stood there in silence.
Then Lindsay spoke. “I wouldn’t want to be that chap Stanley right about now.”
We mumbled in agreement.
A minute later, Carton reappeared from the orderly room and walked back to Lindsay’s office. His face was red, his hands clenched into fists. He swung into the room and slammed the door, then returned to his place behind the desk. He was out of breath from even that short walk. “It’s no good!” he said. “The little beggar won’t listen to reason.”
Carton fumbled behind him for the chair and sat down heavily. He reached to the sides, spreading his arms like wings, and gripped the edges of the desk, as if it were the only thing anchoring him to the world. He blinked. There were tears of rage in his eyes.
Lindsay pulled down the blinds and flipped on the light. Rain tapped at the corrugated iron roof. The remains of a coal fire smoldered in the grate. Lindsay sat himself down by the fire in a chair whose stuffing was bursting out of a dozen broken seams. He propped his feet, which were encased in boots so mirror-polished that they looked as if they were made of glass, upon an empty ammunition box. Then he folded his arms and nodded at Carton to begin.
Carton tried to compose himself. He tilted his head first to one side and then to the other, cracking the bones in his neck. For a moment, Carton stared at the green paper of the blotter on Lindsay’s desk and pursed his lips, as if he did not know how to begin. Then he breathed in sharply and raised his head, looking at each of us in turn. “You’re going to Italy,” he said. “How does that sound?”
“A damned sight better than the North Atlantic,” replied Forbes. His old half smile was gone. Instead, after two years of serving on a convoy ship, he bore the permanent expression of someone who has just seen a bad traffic accident.
“I’m afraid it’s not going to be any sort of sunny holiday,” said Carton. “You’re going into the Italian Alps. Actually, you’re going to climb my mountain. That’s why they’ve brought me in here, since I’m the only one who’s ever done the climb who’s still alive to talk about it.”
We glanced at one anothe
r, smiling nervously. It was not a nervousness brought on by any lack of confidence. Looking back, I could not recall why we were so sure of ourselves. When you are trained to believe you are the best, and failure is never discussed, the idea of not succeeding becomes unthinkable.
There was a rustling behind us and we turned to see that Lindsay had pulled down a detailed map of the Alps on a rolling oilcloth screen. At first, I saw the map as just an overwhelming tangle of brown gradient lines, blue veins of rivers, and blank areas of white. The outer reaches of these white areas formed crooked fingers, marking the borders of the Lingua del Dragone glacier. Etched with blue contour lines like the swirls on a human finger, the map made the glaciers seem clean and unimposing. But I knew it was really a desert of dirty ice, trenched with thousands of crevasses, exposed to the wind, their surfaces melting by day and freezing by night. Out there in the middle of the white sea, like a tiny island, was Carton’s piece of rock. The summit ran along a north-south ridge, which I knew would be mined with cornices. These were waves of snow blown into overhangs, like the crests of breaking waves. Sometimes it was hard to tell what was solid ground and what was a cornice. If you fell through one, you might find nothing below you for thousands of feet. I could see from the contour lines that it rose up sheer on the eastern and northern sides. Anyone climbing it would have to approach from the south. The nearest height mark showed 3,374 meters, which was the summit of the Blinnenhorn, more than a thousand meters lower than the Matterhorn, and over six hundred meters lower than the Eiger; but as with the Eiger, height was not the challenge here. Even from the map, the loneliness and desolation of the rock was clear to see.
