“Can you let a line down,” they asked him, “so that we can attach a rope, rock-pitons and anything else you need?”
“I have no line,” came the reply.
“Climb down as far as you can, then, and cut away Angerer’s body. Then climb up again and cut the rope above you. Then untwist the strands of the piece of rope you have gained, join them and let the resulting line down.”
The answer was a groan: “I’ll try.”
A little while later they heard the strokes of an axe. It seemed incredible that Kurz could hold on with one frozen hand and swing the axe with the other. Yet he managed to cut the rope away; only, Angerer’s body didn’t fall, for it was frozen solid to the rock. Almost in a trance, answering the last dictates of the will to live, Kurz climbed up again, cut away the rope there. The manoeuvre had won him twenty-five feet of rope, frozen stiff. And then began the unbelievable work of untwisting the strands. Every climber knows how difficult that is, even on firm ground, with two sound hands. But Toni Kurz was suspended between heaven and earth, on an ice-glazed cliff, threatened by falling stones, sometimes swept by snow-slides. He worked with one hand and his teeth … for five hours….
A great avalanche fell, narrowly missing the guides. A huge block whizzed close by Schlunegger’s head. And then a body came hurtling past. Toni’s? No it wasn’t Toni’s, but Angerer’s, freed from the imprisoning ice. Those were hours of agony for Toni, fighting for his life, agonising too for the guides, who could do nothing to help, and could only wait for the moment when Kurz might still achieve the incredible.
Presently the fabricated line came swinging down to the rescue party. They fastened a rope to it, with pitons, snap-links, a hammer. Slowly those objects disappeared from the view of the guides. Toni Kurz’s strength was ebbing fast; he could hardly draw up the line, but somehow he managed it. Even now the rope wasn’t long enough. The guides attached a second to it. The knot where the two ropes were spliced swung visible but unreachable out there under the great overhang.
Another hour passed. Then, at last, Toni Kurz was able to start roping down, sitting in a sling attached to the rope by a snap-link. Inch by inch he worked his way downwards. Thirty, forty, fifty feet down … a hundred feet, a hundred and twenty. Now his legs could be seen dangling below the overhang.
At that moment the junction-knot jammed in the snap-link of the sling in which Toni was sitting as he roped down. The knot was too thick and Toni could not force it through the link. They could hear him groaning.
“Try, lad, try!” the frustrated rescuers cried to encourage the exhausted man. Toni, mumbling to himself, made one more effort with all his remaining strength, but he had little left; his incredible efforts had used it almost all up. His will to live had been keyed to the extreme so long as he was active; now, the downward journey in the safety of the rope-sling had eased the tension. He was nearing his rescuers now; now the battle was nearly over, now there were others close at hand to help….
And now this knot … just a single knot … but it won’t go through…. “Just one more try, pal. It’ll go!”
There was a note of desperation in the guides’ appeal. One last revolt against fate; one last call on the last reserves of strength against this last and only obstacle. Toni bent forwards, trying to use his teeth just once more. His frozen left arm with its useless hand stuck out stiff and helpless from his body. His last reserves were gone.
Toni mumbled unintelligibly, his handsome young face dyed purple with frost-bite and exhaustion, his lips just moving. Was he still trying to say something, or had his spirit already passed over to the beyond?
Then he spoke again, quite clearly. “I’m finished,” he said.
His body tipped forward. The sling, almost within reaching distance of the rescuing guides, hung swinging gently far out over the gulf. The man sitting in it was dead.
It will never be known exactly how the whole disaster built up or what precisely happened while Sector-Guard and humanitarian Albert von Allmen was getting his tea ready. The very fact that Andreas Hinterstoisser was off the rope at the moment of his fall leads to the conclusion that he—probably the best technician of the four—was trying to find a specially safe place for pitons to secure the descent on the rope. It was impossible to establish from Toni Kurz’s fragmentary and incoherent sentences whether Hinterstoisser was hit by a stone, or whether they all fell owing to a fall of stone, or whether the others were trying to catch Andreas as he fell and so were all pulled off their holds. The guide from Berchtesgaden needed all his strength for his own preservation, nor could he spare thoughts or words for reports. It is quite clear that all three were on the same rope, and that it ran through a snap-link attached to a piton. The fall jammed Rainer against the piton so that he could not move. Tatters of bandage found on Angerer’s skull, when his body was recovered much later, proved that he had been the injured member of the party, seen on the Face by those who watched.
It was one of the grimmest tricks of fate which left Toni Kurz uninjured at the outset, so that he was forced to endure his agony to its uttermost end. He was like some messenger from the beyond, finding his way back to earth simply because he loved life so well.
The tragedy of Sedlmayer and Mehringer had been enacted behind the curtains of the mountain mists. Men could only guess at it. But Toni Kurz ended his brave and vigorous life before the eyes of his rescuers. It was this that made the tragedy of 1936 so impressive and so shattering that it will never be forgotten.
Arnold Glatthard, that reserved and silent guide, said: “It was the saddest moment of my life.”
Unfortunately, not everybody showed that respect and reserve which death—and particularly death in such a manner—commands.
One newspaper wrote of Toni Kurz’s death: “Kurz spent his fourth night complaining. When the search for notoriety and obstinate willpower conspire to bring a man to grief, one cannot really register regret….”
Another, dated July 24th 1936, produced the following remarkable description of the men who climb the Eiger’s Face and the motives that impel them:
Perhaps these young men have nothing more to lose … what is to become of a generation to which Society offers no social existence and which has only one thing left to look to, a single day’s glory, the swiftly tarnishing highlight of a single hour? To be a bit of a hero, a bit of a soldier, sportsman or record-breaker, a gladiator, victorious one day, defeated the next…. The four recent victims of the Eiger’s North Face were poor creatures. When some kindly folk in Grindelwald invited them to dinner, they tucked in to the proffered meal like true warriors; afterwards, they said they hadn’t had such a good meal for three years. When asked what was the purpose of their risky venture, they replied that its main object was to improve their positions. They believed that such an exceptional feat would bring them honour and glory, and make people take notice of them….
Another article bearing the same date and headlined “Climbing under Orders” gives the matter a bizarre twist in the opposite direction.
Kleine Scheidegg, July 24th. A report is current here that the four climbers had been ordered to make the ascent. It has been said that they were very excited on Friday evening; that they would never have taken such a grave risk as free agents. Perhaps their records will reveal this or that secret which did not pass their lips, now numbed and frozen into silence.
This was, of course, the direct reverse of the truth. Kurz and Hinterstoisser were at this time on the strength of the Mountain-Ranger (Jäger)-Regiment No. 100 and on leave from Bad Reichenhall. When their commanding officer Col. R. Konrad, who had experience of climbing in the Bernese Oberland, learned of their plans he telephoned Grindelwald and, in the strictest terms, vetoed any attempt on the Eiger. That was on the Friday evening. The message reached the tents on the Kleine Scheidegg too late. Kurz and Hinterstoisser had started up the Face a few hours earlier….
In the context of previous tragedies on the Eiger’s