We’re not exultant; but delighted, joyful; soberly astonished … Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves.5
Just before the outbreak of the First World War he met and married the love of his life, Ruth Turner, the daughter of Hugh Thackeray Turner, a wealthy architect who had worked closely with William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement. Their letters reveal that Ruth, although not the clearest of writers, was a wonderful soul-mate, with an unerring ability to get to the nub of things.
In 1910 George had taken a position as a teacher at Charterhouse School in Godalming, Surrey, and attempted to settle down into married life with Ruth. With the outbreak of war, however, he became restless and guilty, feeling that he ought to join up, and obtained a commission as an artillery officer. He was off to war. This was the beginning of many absences from his beloved Ruth, but they wrote to each other nearly every day for the rest of his life.
Mallory survived the war, unlike so many of his climbing peers. Artillery officers had a better chance of survival than ‘the poor bloody infantry’ as they spent less time on the front line, although they were hardly safe. On Mallory’s very first day with his battery, a bullet passed between him and a man walking a yard ahead. On another occasion two men walking with him were killed feet away from him as they laid out a telephone wire.
Of course, if that bullet had swerved a fraction of a degree, the history of Mount Everest would have been different. My father had a torpedo pass right under his ship during the liberation of the Netherlands in the Second World War, and he and his future family were thus inches away from oblivion. Such is the contingency of life, and during dangerous climbing one is well aware that possibilities such as this are multiplying before your eyes. That stone melting out of the ice a thousand feet above you might have your name on it.
Geoffrey Winthrop Young also survived the First World War, although he lost a leg. When he and Mallory organised another of the Pen-y-Pass parties, it was noted that out of 60 climbers mentioned in the diaries from before the war, 23 had died and 14 had been injured.
The more I studied that little band of men in the black and white photographs of the 1921 expedition to Mount Everest, the more I saw the ghosts of the First World War.
Today it is hard to imagine the degree of disconnection between the general public and the soldiers engaged in the slaughter. Now we have live television feeds from journalists embedded on the battlefields, and the death of even one soldier in Afghanistan is headline news. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, however, when Somervell was operating at his field hospital, 19,000 of the British forces were killed: 20 per cent of their total fighting strength. That is over six times the number killed during the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001, and yet General Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander, felt able to write in his diary the next day: ‘This cannot be considered severe in view of the numbers engaged, and the length of front attacked.’
During the First World War heavy guns were heard in Kent, but successful propaganda duped the British public into believing that all was going well, with the press reporting only light casualties. And the fact that the conflict was so localised and so immovable meant that life could go on in Berlin or London without non-combatants realising what horrors were being perpetrated in their name. One result was that the participants felt disconnected from life at home, even when they returned, and in some cases effectively became walking ghosts.
One such was Mallory’s pupil Robert Graves, who was badly injured by shellfire at the Somme on 20 July while leading his men through the churchyard cemetery of Bazentin-le-Petit. His injuries were so severe that it was reported to his family that he was dead. On his return to London he suffered 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