from hallucinations, seeing the streets filled with corpses. Like many of these veterans he seemed to be slightly lost for the remainder of his life.
What effect might such feelings have on the 26 men in the photographs at Everest Base Camp taken a few years later? And in particular, what consequences might there be on a man making climbing decisions at high altitude?
Most of the members of the 1921 expedition had served in the war and they were being led by a colonel. They saw their attempt to climb the mountain as similar in many respects to warfare, and the whole bandobast of Gurkha soldiers, pack animals and baggage resembled a military expedition. Norton described it as ‘our mimic campaign’, and Mallory wrote in his last Times despatch: ‘We have counted our wounded and know, roughly, how much to strike off the strength of our little army as we plan the next act of battle …’
For Mallory, any notion of warfare as a chivalric enterprise must have swiftly evaporated in 1914 as his former pupils at Charterhouse were shipped off to the trenches: 686 of them would perish in the mechanised slaughter. As we have seen, the reproach of his fireside became intolerable, and he sought some way of joining up, but the headmaster of Charterhouse refused to release him. His university friend the poet Rupert Brooke died in April 1915 in the Aegean on his way to Gallipoli, provoking Mallory to write to Benson: ‘I’ve been too lucky; there’s something indecent, when so many friends have been enduring such horrors, in just going on with one’s job, quite happy and prosperous.’
Eventually the headmaster relented and Mallory joined the Royal Garrison Artillery, a relatively safe billet behind the lines compared with living in the trenches. His ankle injury, suffered in a climbing accident in 1909, was ignored by the medics, but it would become a recurrent problem.
The horrors of the Somme were too terrible to write about to his wife, but in a curious forerunner to Wilfred Owen’s ‘My subject is war, and the pity of war’, Mallory wrote to Ruth: ‘Oh the pity of it, I very often exclaim when I see the dead lying about.’
We have already seen his narrow escapes from bullets and shells. He had a curiously lucky war with his postings, too, and it now appears that he had a guardian angel. Eddie Marsh, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, had interceded to make sure Mallory had ten days’ leave at Christmas 1916, and it is possible that he kept a lookout for him throughout the conflict. Marsh was another of those who had become enamoured of George Mallory – and Rupert Brooke – when, ten years before, he had seen the pair on stage at Cambridge.
One senses an invisible hand guiding events. After his leave Mallory was sent well behind the lines to act as an orderly officer. Then, when he had successfully applied to return to his battery at the front, he was invalided out by the ankle injury the day before the attack at the Battle of Arras. A ‘Blighty wound’ was one that enabled you to be sent back home to Blighty, and one that many soldiers devoutly wished for. After convalescence, Mallory managed to crush his right foot in a motorcycle accident, and missed the Battle of Passchendaele. Then, just before the Spring Offensive of 1918, he was assigned to another training course. In all, he managed to miss nearly a year and a half of the most murderous fighting at the front, even though he had actively sought to put himself in the way of danger by joining up in the first place.
I suspect that Mallory felt a sneaking sense of guilt at surviving the war unscathed while all around him were being killed or maimed. And all because of a slightly embarrassing ankle injury caused by falling off a minor crag, with perhaps a little help with his postings from a well-placed admirer. Could this have fed into a relative lack of concern for his own physical safety high up on the mountain?
A more tangible effect of the war on the first Everest expeditions was that it forced the selection of older men who had done little recent climbing. Sandy Irvine, for instance, was ten years younger than the average age of the other members in 1924. This would have reduced the overall strength of the team, and on his last climb Mallory simply didn’t have a powerful back-up of climbers forcing stores and Sherpas up the mountain behind him.
Mallory’s experiences in the war may have led him to go too carelessly, too impatiently against the greatest enemy he ever faced. His Blighty wound may also have helped his demise, as it was his right ankle that broke once again in his last fall (having saved him in the war, it may have contributed to his death after it). No one can have been very surprised at Mallory and Irvine not returning from their battle with Mount Everest, and in the official history of the 1924 expedition it seemed that Norton had seen it all before:
We were a sad little party; from the first we accepted the loss of our comrades in that rational spirit which all of our generation had learnt in the Great War, and there was never any tendency to a morbid harping on the irrevocable. But the tragedy was very near; our friends’ vacant tents and vacant places at table were a constant reminder to us of what the atmosphere of the camp would have been had things gone differently. To several of us, particularly to those who, on previous expeditions to Mount Everest or Spitzbergen, had been close friends with the missing climbers, the sense of loss was acute and personal, and until the day of our departure a cloud hung over the Base Camp. As so constantly in the war, so here in our mimic campaign Death had taken his toll from the best, for they were indeed a splendid couple.6
5
The British Empire was driven by bloody-minded individuals with a sense of mission, such as Livingstone, Napier and Burton, and one such was Francis Younghusband, the man largely responsible for the first attempts to climb Mount Everest.
He was a small, heavily moustached man, who was almost the personification of Empire. He had become the youngest member of the Royal Geographical Society, and in 1890 received the RGS Patron’s Medal for his great journey through Manchuria, undertaken when he was only 23. While on leave from his regiment, he pioneered a route between India and Kashgar, prime Great Game territory. Later, as a captain, he was ordered to survey part of the Hunza valley, where he bumped into his Russian counterpart, Captain Grombchevsky, who was surveying possible invasion routes. After dinner they swilled brandy and vodka, and compared their soldiers. They also discussed the possible outcome of a Russian invasion. After this friendly sparring, straight out of a buddy movie, they rode off in opposite directions.
The threat from Russia was therefore very real, and there was an obvious psychological advantage in gaining the high ground between the two great empires. Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, clearly wanted the highest point of the Himalayas climbed, writing that:
As I sat daily in my room, and saw that range of snowy battlements uplifted against the sky, that huge palisade shutting off India from the rest of the world, I felt it should be the business of Englishmen, if of anybody, to reach the summit.
In this context it can be seen that the climbing of Mount Everest was more of a political decision than a ‘wild dream’. In its way it was the British Empire’s moon-shot, with similar political motivation to the United States’ moon-shot of the 1960s. Crucially, it would plant the British flag on the northern bounds of India. The problem was that the Tibetans didn’t want to talk to the British and pursued a policy of splendid isolation, keeping foreigners at an arm’s length. Myths arose about this forbidden land, and the desire to explore it grew.
Then in 1893 Captain Charles Bruce of the Gurkhas, who had climbed with Martin Conway in the Karakorum the previous year, met Younghusband at a polo match. He put the idea of climbing Mount Everest to him and between them they started a train of events that was to prove unstoppable. Younghusband was then Political Officer in Chitral, and the idea fermented within him, particularly as he knew that he could count on the support of the establishment. In the meanwhile Curzon became
