two had been among those active on the Face the year before. According to a report in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, “two Munich men have also pitched their tent near Alpiglen, a little to one side and without much fuss. So far they have refused to give their names”. Actually the two “men from Munich” came from Bayrisch-Zell. One of them was no less a personality than Andreas Heckmair, also a guide by profession.
It was a considerable gathering, linked only by a common target. Each party worked on its own, keeping its own counsel, following its own plans and methods of training.
There was naturally an unspoken rivalry between the separate parties, an element of personal and national competition—though this played quite an important part in the efforts to climb the North Face. The Italians, even Italian guides, have always been accused of an unusual degree of chauvinism, but it should never be forgotten that Italy is a young nation with a burning love of glory and blazing sense of patriotism, which occasionally burst their bounds. Her mountaineering activities began mainly in the years and decades during which her people were achieving political unity in a single State, during the second half of the last century. The dramatic race on the Matterhorn was not only regarded as a contest between Whymper and Carrel, but as an event of national importance. The question was really—“Il Cervino” or “das Matterhorn”? And Carrel, ex-trooper of the Bersaglieri, was determined to climb the Cervino from Breuil in his native valley, with and for his own countrymen. Less thought was given to the mountain than to the flag on its summit. Let us recall Whymper’s moment of triumph when he beat the Italians to the summit and unfurled his flag—the sweat-soaked shirt of Michel Croz, his Chamonix guide; remembering how the victorious Englishman begged Croz “for heaven’s sake” to help him roll stones down the Tyndall Arête, so that Carrel and his Italians climbing up it might learn for certain that they were too late, that they had been defeated in the race….
What about such rivalries and races to achieve first ascents? They are as old as mountaineering itself. Even the tremendous opening fanfare to Alpine climbing—the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786—was accompanied by the strident trumpet-tones of human discord. Jacques Balmat had no wish to share his fame with Dr. Paccard, who accompanied him on the climb. There has always been keen competition between the guides of different nationalities, indeed even of different valleys, a competition that remains as keen as ever today.
We have only to turn back the pages of the Eiger’s own history. In 1859 Leslie Stephen and the Mathews brothers, English climbers all, made the first-traverse of the Eigerjoch with their guides. Leslie Stephen, one of the most distinguished characters in the “Golden Age” of mountaineering, who invariably gave pride of place to the feats of his guides, keeping his own in the background, describes this “Rivalry of the Guides” in his charmingly humorous book The Playground of Europe.
The Mathews [he writes] were accompanied by two Chamouni men, Jean-Baptiste Croz and Charlet, whilst I had secured the gigantic Ulrich Lauener, the most picturesque of guides. Tall, spare, blue-eyed, long-limbed and square-shouldered, with a jovial laugh and a not ungraceful swagger, he is the very model of a true mountaineer; and, except that his rule is apt to be rather autocratic, I would not wish for a pleasanter companion. He has, however, certain views as to the superiority of the Teutonic over the Celtic races….
While they were reconnoitring the best way through the ice-falls there was sharp competition between Lauener and the Chamonix men. Stephen writes:
We had already had one or two little races and disputations in consequence, and Lauener was disposed to take a disparaging view of the merits of these foreign competitors on his own peculiar ground. As, however, he could not speak a word of French, nor they of German, he was obliged to convey this sentiment in pantomime, which perhaps did not soften its vigour.
That was written in 1859.
So it will be seen that various kinds of rivalries are no degenerate phenomena of the new generation. It is impossible to speak of a profanation of the mountains. The great prototypes, whom it is usual to present to the eyes of youth as examples of ice-grey-bearded distinction, the Pioneers above all, the men of action, did not make the milk of a pious mentality their favourite drink. They were neither supermen nor knights in shining armour, but simply men, like those of today.
During the ‘thirties the Italians achieved a leading place in international mountaineering, especially on rock. And be it only mentioned in passing that, around the turn of the century, the Himalayan and other expeditions of Luigi Amedeo di Savoia, Duke of the Abruzzi, outclassed all similar enterprises sponsored by other nations for their daring and brilliant organisation.
To return to our Italian party on the Eiger, that first Wednesday of July 1937. They started up the so-called Lauper Route on the North-East Face of the Eiger, a glorious and exposed climb in the old classical style. It is a route for masters, not virtuosos. Dr. Hans Lauper and Alfred Zürcher discovered it and in 1932 they climbed it with those fine Valais guides Alexander Graven and Josef Knubel. The Lauper Route certainly offers a training-climb on the way to the North Face, but only for the best-trained and the most accomplished of climbers. Others would not be good enough to tackle it. Let no one dream of starting on the Lauper Route as a “practice climb” unless he can wield his ice-axe with the same skill and assurance as the peasant of the valley swings his scythe on the precipitous slope, so that he strikes the ice in the right rhythm and at the right angle accurately to a fraction of an inch. Even in this era of the ice-piton and the ice-hammer the true criterion of the climber on ice is his axe. It is as wrong as it is useless to try to reverse the current of development, but it is the duty of every mountaineer to learn to cut steps as efficiently as did the guides of yesterday, even with their clumsy ice-axes, whose master-craft in providing ladders of steps was such that they were for a long time able to dispense with the use of the modern crampon. When people begin to use on moderately difficult ground equipment and methods suitable for the unusually severe, it is not just a sign of extraordinary prudence, but an indication that another step in the development of technique has been surmounted. It is, of course, possible to escape from a difficult situation with inadequate and unsuitable equipment; but it is not to be recommended.
Our two Italian guides Piravano and Detassis embarked on the Lauper Route, which looms up above the small ice-field of the “Hoyisch”, or “Hohen Eis”, a sharp-crested, steep route, armoured with glassy rock-slabs and towering ice-cliffs. Their object was to get to know the mountain from every side. At first they had no intention of climbing the whole Lauper Route, but only meant to reconnoitre part of it. This was an entirely new conception in the history of the North Face. It was a notion ahead of its times, a true guide’s notion. Giuseppe and Bruno intended not only to climb the North Face, but eventually to guide tourists up it. If that proved to be too difficult, dangerous and impracticable, they meant to withdraw from the whole enterprise. Even if their attempts and experiences finally proved negative, it was a notion worth bearing in mind; for it was not merely new, it was revolutionary. It must be recalled that the company of Swiss guides was still clinging to its old tradition, admittedly a grand and fine tradition. Their attitude towards the North Face was hardly a whit different from that of the old Berchtesgaden guide—the first man to climb the East Face of the Watzmann—Johann Grill-Kederbacher, who had come to the Eiger as long ago as 1883(!) with the intention of climbing its North Face. Kederbacher’s verdict had then been: “Impossible!” Now, in 1937, the Swiss guides were still saying “Impossible!” At a time when the two Italians, Bruno and Giuseppe, had arrived to climb the North Face—with a view to guiding tourists up it….
It was on a Wednesday that they started up the Lauper Route. On the Thursday they could not be seen, the weather was too bad. Snow-slides and heavier avalanches could be seen sweeping the route. That was enough to authorise a reporter to send off a telegram in a great hurry to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “the two Italians have probably fallen”. The report went the rounds in many papers. Many know-it-alls and ignoramuses added the opinion that Piravano and Detassis had entered upon their venture without sufficient thought and inadequately
