best ice-expert.
But what had actually been happening?
The slabs and ledges on the lower half of the route were treacherous and slippery with fresh snow. The two Italians moved slowly upwards, using every known precaution. Above the first cliff they bivouacked, at a point reached by Lauper’s extraordinarily strong and thrustful party, in unusually favourable conditions, before mid-day. On the Thursday the pair climbed on up the mighty roof of the mountain.
That was when the accident happened. A snow-slide swept Piravano, who was leading, from his footholds. Bruno, belaying his companion on an ice-piton, managed to hold him; but he could not prevent Giuseppe from seriously injuring a leg. So that superb ice-climber, unfit now to lead or even to move without support, was completely out of action. Pride and the guides’ code forbade them to call for help. A descent was impossible, for avalanche-threats and snow-covered slabs forbade a retreat. A traverse across to the Mittellegi Hut was equally out of the question. Piravano had to be continually belayed from above, so that traverses were unthinkable. Yet the rocky upper pitches of the Lauper Route would be equally impossible, because a man with such leg injuries would be unable to stand the pain. So Bruno Detassis decided to climb straight up the fearsome ice-slope, steeper than the roof of a Gothic cathedral, and bring his injured friend up on to the top part of the Mittellegi Ridge, belaying him vertically from above.
And he succeeded. It was a memorable and altruistic effort on the part of the guide from Trento. It was evening by the time they reached the Mittellegi Hut, perched like an eagle’s eyrie on the storm-swept ridge. And on Friday, July 8th the two men who had fought their way so gamely to shelter and safety, without calling for aid, were brought back safely to the valley by their Swiss colleagues, Inäbnit and Peter Kaufmann. Both expressed the greatest admiration for Bruno and Giuseppe.
Needless to say, the reaction of part of the Italian Press to the prematurely sensational reports from the Job’s comforters, already quoted, and the actual safe return of their compatriots was not exactly amiable. The national trumpet was blown fortissimo—without the assistance, or indeed the wish, of the two first-class guides from Trento and Bergamo—and a great triumph celebrated, when it was really only the sort of victory of courage and endurance one would expect of guides of that quality.
Unhappily, there were still many papers which had not sensed the great change of 1937 and were still pandering to their readers with sensational reports in the style of the previous year. And there were even professed mountaineers, shunned and despised by the fraternity, who either through a desire to show off or as mere parasites wished to cook their own little brew on the flame of public interest.
Andreas Heckmair, waiting at the foot of the Face with his friend Theo Lösch, withholding his name from all the inquisitive reporters, quietly studying the wall and its tricks—he even discovered a new line of ascent under the Rote Fluh and up by the right to the North-West Ridge, but did not publicise the variant because he thought it unimportant—this same Heckmair reported as follows on those strange lads who would have done so great a disservice to the cause of mountaineering had they not been shown up as the charlatans they were.
They told everyone, who wanted or didn’t want to know, about their Eiger intentions, climbed about on the approaches to the North Face in such an obvious way as to be an invitation to those interested to watch them, let themselves be entertained in Grindelwald, and generally gathered advance commendation wherever it was to be found. Not only we ourselves, but the Grindelwald guides were rightly infuriated by them. These Alpine crooks were attracted by the Eiger as a moth is drawn to a light. It is a relief to report that at the end of their ill-doing they received the punishment they had invited and finished up by getting the push out of Switzerland.
It can be imagined how delighted the real climbers, the quiet, serious men genuinely at work on the problem of the North Face, were when these parasitic impostors were ejected. Besides the Italians, besides the three Munich men, Wollenweber, Zimmermann and Lohner, besides Heckmair and Lösch, a number of others were either occupying the tents and hayricks or were just moving in. There was Rudi Fraissl, who had earned a great name in Viennese climbing circles by his first ascent of the North Face of the Peternschartenkopf in the Gesäuse. His rope-mate and close compatriot was Leo Brankowsky, a pleasant, helpful lad, whom all his friends called Brankerl. Leo was certainly no “Brankerl”, in the Viennese sense, no “softy”, but a tower of strength when an overhang had to be climbed or a companion held on the rope. Fraissl was a fanatical lover of freedom and an individualist who found it difficult to subordinate himself. The mountains could devise no way of encompassing his end. His craggy skull and his courageous tongue, never a respecter of authority, signalled him out for a harder death than any the mountains could have handed out to him. He died in Russia in February 1942, in the company of a number of the best climbers of the Army Mountaineering School, during an attack on which it was senseless to employ such hand-picked specialists. Rudi Fraissl protested beforehand—as if he were engaged in a trade-union meeting. He protested with all the inflexible strength of his Viennese tongue, with that very un-Viennese firmness he adopted on anything he had rightly made up his mind about. As an N.C.O. in the German army he dared to protest against his senior officer on behalf of his comrades and himself; he died, not as an N.C.O., but as a private soldier, reduced to the ranks as punishment for his crime. And he died as the leader of a roped party should.
At that time in July 1937, Fraissl and “Brankerl” were in their tent near Alpiglen; so were Liebl and Rieger; and Primas and Gollackner too, two men from Salzburg.
Just when Andreas Heckmair had pronounced it as unlikely that the weather-conditions would improve sufficiently to warrant an attempt on the Face and turned his back on it on July 15th, Ludwig Vörg and Hias Rebitsch arrived, followed a little later by Otto Eidenschink, the first to climb the West Wall of the Totenkirchl direct, and his fellow-member of the Munich Section, Möller. It was an élite of the climbing fraternity who were together at the bottom of the wall or succeeding one another down there during the summer of 1937. Heckmair left and Vörg arrived without actually meeting one another, or ever suspecting that they might be going to form a single rope resulting in a common success the following year.
And besides the “Storm Troops”, one kept on meeting members of the Voluntary Rescue Service, particularly of the Munich Section, ready to try the Face and, above all, to climb to the rescue if there was an accident. The guides of Grindelwald, too, were holding themselves in readiness, without orders or obligation—just as they had in 1936.
The large body of newspaper readers demanded to be kept continually informed of what was happening on the Eiger. “Every stroke of an axe, every tug on a rope is recorded,” remarked the Zürich paper Sport sarcastically.
Yes, the much sought-after sensation was on the way again. Not really a sensation but a tragedy; and yet not a sheer tragedy like those of recent years, but a very sad chapter in the long history of the Eiger. It started on Thursday July 15th, that same Thursday on which Ludwig Vörg, waiting for Hias Rebitsch down in Grindelwald, stood staring doubtfully up at the rain, which set in towards evening; the same Thursday, when Andreas Heckmair and Lösch went down to Grindelwald without knowing that a certain Ludwig Vörg was standing moodily at a nearby window. The Thursday on which Franz Primas and Bertl Gollackner started up the Lauper Route.
Primas was a well-known, extremely competent climber from Salzburg. He belonged to the climbing club, “Die Bergler”, formed by a number of the best Salzburg climbers. On a ski-tour in the Tennengebirge, close to their home, Primas had come to know Gollackner, hardly nineteen years old, but a good rock-climber and a plucky ski-runner full of the spirit of adventure. Secretly, without a word to anyone, these two decided to go and “have a look” at the North Face of the Eiger. It would be quite wrong to smile in a superior fashion at the mountain enthusiasm of men like these who, with empty pockets, mount their bicycles on the long pilgrimage, just to have a look at the peak of their dreams.
Primas
