“I can see them! They are still alive! They are moving! Climbing!”
And so in fact they were. One could see the tiny dots, moving slowly upwards across the sheer, smooth shield of ice which leads to the “Flatiron”. So they were really still alive, after five days on this fearful Face, after four bivouacs in spite of the bitter cold, raging storms, avalanches, everything. They were alive and still moving upwards.
Hope flickered again; an unnatural optimism surged up. Surely the lads were going to pull it off in spite of everything. Otherwise, they would certainly have turned back!
But the guides and the climbers, who had spent a life in the mountains, remained silent. One doesn’t announce publicly that one has written men off as lost. The guides and the climbers knew well enough why they hadn’t turned back; it was because the avalanches and the falling stones had caught them in a terrible trap. In addition there were the fearful difficulties of rocks, now plastered with ice and snow, and at the very best swept by cascading waterfalls. The only hope now was to fight a way out to the top. That is what the guides and the climbers knew. They sensed, too, that Sedlmayer and Mehringer, the first two to attempt the North Face, also knew it all too well and were struggling forward simply because one mustn’t give in.
The two men climbed on, towards the arête of the “Flatiron “.
The curtain of the mists closed down again, to hide the last act of the first tragedy of the Eiger’s North Face from the eyes of men.
A gale, whipping the snow-flakes horizontally against the rocks, the thunder of avalanches, the plash of waterfalls, in which the staccato rattle of falling stones mingled shrilly—these were the melody of the Eiger’s Face, the funeral organ-voluntary for Max Sedlmayer and Karl Mehringer.
On Tuesday the 27th, friends of the two men reached the mountain from Munich, among them Sedlmayer’s brother and that Gramminger who was later to achieve world renown in the field of mountain rescue. They tried everything to effect a rescue, but there was nothing left to save. There was nothing to be seen or heard from the summit, from the towers of the West Ridge, or from below. No human sound interrupted the grim voice of the mountain. It was impossible to climb up on to the Face from below. To bring aid from above was out of the question.
Sedlmayer’s brother and his friends—tried and tested climbers all—stood powerless before the fury of unbridled nature.
Swiss military planes tried to fly along the Face during the following days. They discovered no sign of the missing men. Weeks later, on September 19th, when the weather at last improved, came Ernst Udet, Germany’s ace airman. This was an extraordinary twist of fate. In 1928 Dr. Arnold Fanck had introduced Udet to mountain flying during the filming of the “White Hell of Piz Palü”. Then it had been make-believe; Udet had to fly close to an ice-slope to try to locate a party which had lost its way, and to lead the rescue operation. This time it was tragic actuality. Only now there was no question of rescuing anyone only of finding some bodies.
The outstanding Grindelwald guide and ski-runner Fritz Steuri accompanied Udet on his daring venture. Flying to within sixty feet of the cliff, they located one of the missing men—which of them was it?—knee deep in the snow, still upright, frozen to death at the last bivouac at the point of the “Flatiron”, at the upper rim of the Third Ice-field, ever since known as the “Death Bivouac”.
Two men had perished on the Face.
But courage had not been quenched, nor the eternal yearning for adventure, nor the longing to press forward into the unknown. It was decided to search for the bodies next year and, if possible, to bring them down.
All the same, it was possible to recognise the mistakes—avoidable mistakes—the first pair had been bound to make just because they were the first. And if the youth of the climbing world, itself brimming over with life, felt they were fulfilling their duty towards the dead men by trying to bring down their mortal remains, their enthusiasm and imagination were at the same time fired by their thoughts of the menacing Face and the way up it.
Youth didn’t bother its head about the sharp tongues of the wordy warfare which flared up after the first tragedy on the Eiger’s face. It only heard in the mountain’s threats a siren call, a challenge to its own courage. It even invented the pious untruth that it was its duty to fulfil the bequest of the men who had died. Perhaps it even believed it. But the real spur was that inexplicable longing for the eternal adventure.
1936 was to be the year marked by the shattering death of the last survivor of two parties; of the man who tried to come back from the beyond into the world of living men—the year of the tragedy of Toni Kurz.
1Kurt Maix, “Im Banne der Dachstein Südwand,” Publishers, Das Bergland Buch, Salzburg, 1952.
As is often the case with mountain folk, whose features have been carved by wind and storm so that they look older in their youth, younger in their old age, Albert von Allmen’s face is ageless. He might be in his middle thirties or his middle fifties.
The mountains have been von Allmen’s strict teachers and loyal friends, even if his profession leads him more into than onto the peaks. For Albert is a Sector-Guard on the Jungfrau Railway. He is responsible for everything along the line inside the Eiger, and sees to it that nothing goes wrong in that long tunnelled section; but he is equally interested in everything that goes on outside. True, he doesn’t quite understand the young people who are trying to climb the terrific Eiger precipice, but, even if he thinks them a little deranged, he has a soft spot for them. Von Allmen’s eyes are kindly eyes. They are surrounded by many little creases which record not only cares and the hard life of the mountains, but also the joy of laughter.
At noon on July 21st 1936 Albert was standing outside the gallery entrance at Kilometre 3-8, after opening the heavy wooden door.
It was a Tuesday. Ever since Saturday the 18th there had been four climbers on the Face; two Austrians, Edi Rainer and Willy Angerer, and two Bavarians, Anderl Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz. Everyone had fallen for the fresh-faced, clean-limbed Toni Kurz, not only because he was himself a professional guide, but because of his laugh. When Toni laughed, it was as if life itself were laughing. All young men, these; Angerer, the eldest, was twenty-seven, Kurz and Hinterstoisser just twenty-three. They had already climbed almost as high on the Face as Sedlmayer and Mehringer the year before, on their ill-fated attempt from which they did not return. But these four would come back safely; what had been seen of them during the last few days gave solid grounds for hope that this time there would be no disaster.
None of those present had seen such magnificent climbing. True, one of the climbers, apparently Angerer, seemed to have been struck by a stone. That was why the party had been moving so slowly for the last two days, and that was probably why they had decided to turn back. The descent over ice-fields and rock cliffs swept by falling stones and avalanches looked ghastly enough; but the four men were moving steadily, if very slowly, downwards towards the safety of the easier ground below, in obvious good heart and without a moment’s hesitation The three fit ones were continually attending to the one who had clearly been hurt. They couldn’t be bad, these lads who looked after each other so well. They must be fine fellows, even if a bit crack-pot.
Albert von Allmen thought of the Sunday tourists and excursionists, the blasé men and the ladies in high heels who went to the tunnel-window at Eigerwand Station and uttered their “ah’s” and “oh’s” as they gazed at what seemed to them the terrifying gulfs and immeasurable heights of the Eiger’s precipice. It was people like those, hungering for sensation, who were now crowding round the telescopes at Grindelwald and Kleine Scheidegg. And then too there were the pronunciamentos of the know-it-all’s, busy weighing up the chances of another catastrophe or of the safe return